Penhill Celtic - Fair Hill - Aug ‘22

This is a video intended for Roger, Lauren and Bec. We finally got Penhill Celtic, the mighty Donald, back out competing this weekend at Fairhill Horse Trials. Fairhill's just down the road from us, so it wasn't that far of a trip. It's been a good, good bit of time since he's been eventing and it was great fun competing him again. I decided to play it safe. I put him in the open training, which was very, very easy for him. It was pathetically easy. But I wanted to do his sort of first event back over smaller jumps and not very fast, just to double check that everything's in good order with his legs. And it was a roaring success. What you're seeing here is the dressage on Saturday morning and the training dressage test on Donald is a walk in the park. I actually felt a bit sorry for some of the competitors that were on genuine training horses, but screw them, we smashed him in the dressage. I think he's got a score of 20, 26 or 27, which was a great result. Great result. And then he show jumping again. The jumps were small, the course was easy. I've got the show jumping on the video today. He roared around easily, jump beautifully. And then the cross country is fantastic. I went a little bit slow on him cross country. The ground was a little bit hard and like I said before, we haven't done a cross country course in some time. So the main objective this, this competition was to just get him out and about again and not to put too much pressure on his legs and his body. And he was happy to be out competing again. It was great. I've taken him to a couple of jumping shows, same sort of idea. We took him up to New Jersey to the Princeton jumping Show and jumped him around some meter tens. I think he's a big boy. We still got to get a little bit more weight off him. He really bulked up a bit on his vacation, trimmed him up a bit. We've got him on a treadmill horse walker three or four times a week. He's on the track a lot, galloping. So we've got to, you know, slowly shed some pounds off him, but just slowly but surely not any sort of sudden increase in his work or change in his diet. So, guys, my main goal is to get him back to four star. My main goal this year would be to aim him to the try on four Star short, and that's in November. So at the moment he's, he's vetting really well. His legs look good. He looks good and healthy and his injuries are all healed up. So we've got to get him back to full fitness, which, you know, he's a bigger horse so we've got to put some miles into him, get him galloping him a little bit faster and get him a little bit stronger. And then, you know, I think we did one or two advance on him last year. He'd still be very, very green and inexperienced at this four star level. But he pretty brave horse, you know, I don't think it's going to take that much training. So our next event I think will be the week after I get back from the world championship. So there'll be just another maybe intermediate in Virginia somewhere again, another nice slow, easy run. I'll try and get a couple of slow into intermediates into him and then at the end of the year if all's looking good, we'll sort of go for it a little bit more at the four star short at Tryon. He's been training really, really well at home. He's obviously a great jumper. He was quite excited. He knew that he was at a competition that had cross country. When I warmed him up for the show jumping here, he was up on his toes in the warm up, he was throwing in a bit of a buck and a jump around. And to his credit though, he came in and jumped a very, very good round. Now like the dressage, this is pathetically easy for him. Which was the, the name of the game at the, the jumping shows that I had him at Princeton. It was substantially bigger but you know, it's a, you know, good, good round just to sort of zip him around, make it quite easy and not very hard on his body. So we'll just ever so gently just keep chipping away at his fitness. The next couple weeks I think we'll start galloping him up the hills. Now that we've got this first event under our belt, we've got him in the water treadmill and the dry treadmill. I mean if we can get him back to the top. I'm still really, really excited about the quality of him. He's strong in all three phases, Very, very competitive and he's still young. So I think obviously this last year has been a bit of a nightmare just because we've had to slow down a bit and put a pause on everything until he got strong and healthy again. But I feel like we're in a good place again to push on and I really think that if we could just see out the rest of this year unscathed, then, you know, next year we could. Could really have a crack at it. So thank you for being so patient with him. It's. It's been a little bit frustrating, but unfortunately, that's horses. But I'd have to say we're nearly back.