Keeping with the new plan of just having fun with Jack and hacking him out, today was a lovely day to do so. I got him tacked up and ready and ready on time for my friend Amy to pop round and get her pony Tilly ready too. Of course Jack didn’t seem impressed at being ridden however he was a lot easier to mount today which was an improvement, although my mount was pretty rocky!

When we were on and ready to go we headed out to the woods, it was a simple hack enough where we mostly walked but it gave Jack a chance to relax and to warm up his muscles. He mostly spent the time not listening to me as he would want to walk in the way of Tilly and Amy by going from one side of the track to the other. He also wasn’t very forward until we entered the wood itself, I was a little cautious of him being irritated by flies as they were often pretty bad in there but today he just had a march on as he knew which way was home.

We had a nice safe little trot in one field, however as soon as we got to the next Jack was desperate to canter and it felt as though he was doing these small half-canter strides underneath me as he was so desperate to go. I thought to be nice and let him have a small canter however this was a pretty bad idea, Jack bucked with every canter stride we did and it took a while for me to get him back under control and to a fast trot. I felt so silly by letting something like this get the best of me, but I knew that if I had let him go to canter he would have bucked even higher and probably had me off. I felt pretty bad for Amy as I knew she did want to canter, but given Jack I just knew it wasn’t safe for us and didn’t want anything major happening, as frankly I have never fallen off on a hack before and I don’t want to be doing anything to deliberately cause that.

By the time we got home Jack had worked himself up into a sweat to say we were mostly walking. We did manage a little trot on the way home and he was a lot calmer which was a relief, it might have been the excitement of the big open fields which got him so excited to canter, at least we were both safe and sound. I think what we learned today was maybe not to go out with company or canter anywhere whilst hacking, and hopefully we can still stay on!