Luke 140 - WEC - Feb ‘23

This is a video intended for the Luke 140 syndicate. Well, guys, we took Luke down to Ocala, Florida on Wednesday to the World Equestrian Centre which is an unbelievable facility. It's a mostly a show jumping and dressage and hunter and jumper facility and it's a great experience. This was our first round of jumping. It was the meter 15 which is very, very easy for Luke. It's actually quite, it's almost too small. But I knew Luke would be an absolute lunatic in the first round so I wanted to put him in a class that was very easy and get a little bit of his nerves and energy and excitement out of him. Parts of the course here I sort of just gently bored him back to back to trot and settled him down a bit. And really these two days of jumping was more about training than competition. Obviously Luke's a fantastic jumper. The hardest thing with him is keeping him chill and quiet. He's a wild man and you know, he sort of had a little bit of a good vacation from last year and he's come back into work well, but he's feeling great so makes it a bit tricky to ride sometime. So that was the meter 15 and then a couple hours later we moved to the biggest stadium and we jumped the meter 20. So this is Thursday around lunchtime and he was much better. He was still energetic and a little bit wild, but he, he was better. After sort of wearing him out a little bit in the smaller class, my jumping coach Peter Wild joined us down there and Peter's awesome. He obviously loves Luke because he's such a good jumper and really, you know, helped me in the course walk and the warm up and then sort of talked to me after each round analyzing what I, or what I did right or you know, a few tips that we tried with Luke. And obviously the big thing with Luke is an unbelievable athlete. He's a jumper and he's fast. It's more just trying to contain him. So we intentionally went a little bit slow and wide and I didn't try and go fast in the jump off. So next competition's next weekend. Next Friday and Saturday we're going to do the open intermediate at Pinetop Horse Trials in Georgia which will be his first cross country round of the year. I'm sure he's going to be fired up. You know, we've got to keep remembering our major goal this year is La Mullen, which is in June. So I sort of intentionally haven't run him too early in the year just because we got to look after his legs and we, we need him peaking, you know, in four or five months time. So this is Friday, so this is the very next day. This is back to the original ring, but It's a meter 20. And Luke gave his best round in this class. You'll see. Actually, we put what we call a standing martingale on, if you have a look. And as Luke goes by there, it's sort of like a martingale that's directly attached to his noseband. So if he really gets fired up and throws his head, it sort of, sort of yanks his head back down and he sort of cuts it out a bit. So we can train in it and we can jump these jumping shows with it up to about a meter 25. But we can't use that piece of equipment in the eventing. But it's more of a training aid. So like I said before, finally after two rounds of jumping in two days, Luke took a breath and gave us a fantastic double clear in this class. And he's jumping very, very well. Obviously he's got springs in his legs again. He's everything you can dream of in a horse. He's feisty and forward and careful and bold and brave and he's a good boy. I think he'll calm down a bit once we get him back to Pennsylvania or we do a couple of events and we start galloping him a bit more. I do think he'll settle right down. He's like this every winter, though. He gets down here and it's fresh, fresh cool air and he's just, he needs more work, but he's, he's not fit enough yet. So we're sort of just gently building him up, making sure that we've really got a horse for this year and next year, most importantly. So that was a clear round and in this particular class we had a jump off. And you can see my jumping coach on the side of the ring here, Pete Peter, just giving me a few directions, telling me to do a different number of strides to some of the other horses just to settle him down and chill him out. And like I said before, the biggest thing is trying to use these experiences just to let Luke know that he doesn't have to give a hundred percent every time he steps into the ring like these shows so much easier if he just coasted around. But that's not in his DNA. He, he loves it so much, he can't contain himself so much. So this is the, the final round. It's a jump off, but I didn't go flat out. I just cruised around and got another clear round. So we got Pinetop next weekend. That'll be his sort of first cross country. And then if he comes through that well, I'll probably the following Friday do the dressage and show jumping. Just the combined test, the Bruce's Field Grand Prix eventing. I think it'd be too much on his leg to do the cross country, considering he did a round of cross country a week before. We've got to look after this guy. He's a champion and, you know, he can really win some big classes here, but we've got a look after him. But at the moment, everything's going well. I've only fallen off him twice this year in dressage, sadly, and I think we're in good shape. Good shape and should be a good season.