JustBeingCP

I have a long history with dressage because I was involved in equestrian for a number of years from the age of 18 months old. 

The sport started out as physiotherapy for me and then as the years went by it turned competitive which was something that I loved. 

I won a number of national titles for the riding for the disabled association in dressage which is the discipline that I finished my riding career doing. 

The Riding for the disabled association’s national championships take place each July at Hartpury College in Gloucestershire. 

This venue is only a forty five minute drive from my home in Herefordshire meaning that I was able to attend and compete at the championships in a single day. 

The one thing that I loved about Dressage was the fact that I was able to be at one with the horse that I was riding. 

There were three competitions that my season evolved around and they were a local and then regional competition that would then be followed by the championships mentioned above. 

I trained for a number of months to ensure that I was ready to put my all into the regional and then national championships if I qualified.

The RDA changed the dressage test that I was given every couple of years so that it became a challenge for me at the major competitions.

My favourite move of the final test I was given was the figure of eight as I saw this as a challenge to execute. 

I first attended the national championships back in 2005 and came home with a fifth place rosette that was for countryside challenge. 

The aim of the Countryside Challenge discipline is to test how you ride the horse through a number of different obstacles. 

It only took me a couple of years to triumph in the countryside challenge at the RDA national championships and this was an achievement that I was very proud of. 

A couple of years after this success I was profiled at a centre in Warwickshire and the purpose of the profiling is to ensure that you are competing against those with the same or a similar disabilities.  

I was over the moon that I had been profiled as this meant that I was going to be completing at an equal level to the other competitors in my class. 

I was profiled at grade 1a which means walk only and this was determined from the outcome of my grading assessment in Warwickshire. 

I found that walk only was a slow and steady discipline of RDA dressage competitions and that is what I loved about it. 

In 2016 I finally realised that I had gone as far as I could when it came to my dressage career so I made the very difficult decision to hang up my saddle for the final time. 

As I have just said this was not an easy decision and I thought long and hard about whether or not I should hang up my saddle for the last time. 

I am so glad that I made this decision and I haven’t looked back since because I know that I am not interested in going back to my riding career. 

I will remember the riding experiences that I had as a young person for the rest of my life as it was a massive part of it for the first twenty one years.