charmmysoul

Dear Tanya, I am writing this morning to inform you of how proud me and your father are of your progress with Storm – we never dreamed that you would come so far in such a short space of time. As such, we are pleased to inform you that a new horse will be arriving with you at midday. The institute are aware of this and everything has been arranged. I hope you will find her to your liking. With love, Mum It wasn’t quite what she had expected to wake up to, and in her half-asleep state she had to read the short message several times for it to sink in. A new horse? For her? Today? She looked at the clock at the bottom of her screen and smiled...

If someone were to ask Tanya how proud she was of Storm, she'd likely gush to them about just how wonderful he was. Not only did he have an amazing temperament, but he had proven his various talents in contests and reached heights she wouldn't have dreamed when she had started out on this incredible journey. He had flourished from a green colt into a fine stallion that anybody would be pleased to be associated with. But, of course, no one did ask the girl. Quite possibly because they could see how much he meant to her. As she prepared for another day she sighed happily, tying her hair back into a simple pony tail and smoothing down her jo...

Tanya was pleased with how things were progressing with Storm's training. Their first dressage test, while not perfect, had gone pretty well and they could only improve from here on. But, while she would continue to work on dressage with the colt, she also felt that he was ready to start training for the next of the three disciplines in three day eventing. Show jumping. Of course, she wasn't certain how the colt would adapt but if he did not enjoy it they could always take a step back and focus solely on dressage. In truth, the reason she had started with dressage is that it gave them a lot of the foundations for the other disciplines. Th...

There was little more that Tanya could do to prepare now, but that didn't stop her being nervous about how her and Storm would perform in the show. She'd spent hours the previous night cleaning the colt's tack, had taken great care over grooming the colt that morning and in braiding his mane ready for the event. She had made sure her own things were spick and span, and now they were warming up – but what if everything went wrong? What if she couldn't show the institute just how much potential the colt had, and what they might achieve as their training continued? The very idea sent a shiver down her spine and the colt's head suddenly lifted...

It took years to train a dressage horse, to build on the different levels of the training pyramid until the horse was ready to perform the most difficult of manoeuvrers and while Tanya longed to be among the elite, the young rider knew that pushing a horse too quickly was foolish. Still, with the institute's show quickly approaching she was determined to show him at his best and that meant making the correct decisions now so that he would be ready for his first test and that meant being honest about his – and her – current abilities. As such, she had decided to enter him in a training level test as she felt that his leg yield and lengtheni...