As the academic year is coming to a close, today marked our final competition of the year. Unlike the others, this was just a friendly competition hosted by Lincoln University. When I signed up I thought it would be pretty simple and small, maybe just two teams. However when we got there we realised that we were against three other teams, University of Lincoln, Sheffield Hallam, and University of Sheffield, each with 5 members, meaning there were a lot of people to beat!

However, seeing as this was a friendly, we decided to keep things cool and just take everything as we could and made sure to try our best! It was actually pretty strange being at a competition that wasn’t ran like BUCS, and so it made the warming up and choice of horses pretty confusing. For the dressage I was placed on a coloured who thought it was a giraffe, and had the biggest stomach from spring grass it genuinely looked pregnant. Putting that aside though, if I ignored her head which was trying to reach for the sky she was a very nice horse and pretty responsive. The test went well too, although I did get confused and thought we had to walk in a certain spot when we didn’t, I was so close to turning around and saying I had forgotten the test but decided to carry on through anyway, and I’m so glad I did as we ended up doing it right. The judge I found was also pretty generous, as I got an even higher score than last week of 72.2%. It seemed unreal to get a score that high, but it was nice regardless.

Then for the jumping all the available horses were very cobby, I was put on one called Tom and he looked pretty slow. Thankfully we did get to decide who rode that horse first, so I decided to go on Tom first so that he had the most energy. This ended up working in my favour as I had to hit Tom with the stick a fair few times around the course to keep him going, and then there was one super tight turn that I went into the corner a little too deep for, I managed to keep the approach nice though but we lost all energy going up to that fence and he practically launched himself over it! How he didn’t knock that down I was very surprised and shattered, but it was another lovely clear round.

When it came to the results team Derby smashed it! We came team first with placings of 6th, 4th, 3rd and 2nd. I came 4th myself and was very happy with this result as it redeemed me from last week’s terrible outcome. Plus seeing as there were 20 of us competing, to come 4th overall I was super happy with too. We then took some celebratory photos and headed home.