Thank you to Alicia Keen!

 
Thank you to Northamptonshire’s Alicia Keen has kindly written an update on her progress and her new ride!  It is lovely to hear how you are getting on, please feel free to e-mail your stories and updates to ruth.tyler@britishshowjumping.co.uk

My name is Alicia Keen, I am 13 years old and have currently been riding for 3 ½ years. My normal day starts at 5:30 in the morning, when I am up and ready for school I then make my way down to the stables. My daily routine at the yard starts with feeding the ponies, mucking out, filling hay nets and filling up their water buckets. In the mornings I always find that the cold air wakes me up even to the annoyance of my friends as when I get into school I am wide awake. My school day starts at 8:30 in the morning and we only receive 15 minutes for breakfast and 30 minutes for lunch, in this time I normally try to get most of my homework done so that at night I can go straight to the yard.

When I joined the British Showjumping it was one of the best things I have ever done as I gained massive amounts of experience by attending the Northamptonshire junior academy. The academy offers a great learning environment and helps to give myself and other members an insight of the professional side of the sport, whilst learning new skills from everything from caring to competitively riding your horse or pony.

I am currently being trained and mentored my Matthew Lanni who owns Halefield Stud, he is one of the most highly qualified coaches in the UK and I always feel in a very lucky position to train under him. Each week I attend my training with Matthew where we concentrate on different aspects of my riding along with the requirements of the pony I am riding at the time, as different ponies offer such different rides. My two competitive rides at the present are both 138’s, I have a Connemara gelding called Ballinamurra Prancer which is owned by my Dad and a new ride which is an Arab stallion called Spiritt E Lucjan. I currently produce and compete Spiritt on behalf of his owner Mrs S Smith who has had Spiritt since he was a foal. Spiritt is a very brave pony with a wonderful scopey jump when he arrived onto our yard he was very vocal and definitely made my other ponies aware he had arrived! We treat Spiritt just the same as we treat any other pony and don't worry about him being a stallion, I am aware some stallions can be difficult to handle however I have had experience in dealing with them previously when I used to help on a stud farm and my youngster was intact until he was just over a year old. The main things you have to remember is when competing is to ensure his bridal discs are on and that his stallion ribbon is tied to his tail.

Like all our ponies I have a training routine for Spiritt which consists of a lot of flatwork as I find this helps me in the ring, my first weekend competing on him proved very successful as I managed to obtain three double clear rounds one of the rounds was in the newcomers and the other two double clears we're in the British discovery class, this has now allowed me to enter into the second rounds of the British discovery championships.

In the future my aims are to become a successful show jumper and at the same time an equine surgeon. One of my main aims is to represent my country in showjumping one day, which would be a dream come true.