PART 14 - MY JOURNEY WITH MJ

If somebody had asked me at the end of 2022 how I felt about the future, I think I would have said hopeful.

After everything MJ and I had been through together, that wasn't a feeling I'd experienced very often.

For years it had felt as though every time we made progress, something happened to knock us backwards again. There had been injuries, rehabilitation programmes, ulcers, confidence issues, travelling disasters and countless moments where I wondered whether we'd ever get any consistency.

Then suddenly, in 2022, everything seemed to come together.

We'd returned to eventing after years away, moved back up through the levels and somehow ended up at Blair. Not only that, but we'd actually held our own there.

I don't think either Mum or I really expected that season to unfold the way it did.

As we headed into 2023, for the first time in a long time, I genuinely felt excited about what might lie ahead.

I did briefly consider dropping back to BE90 for our first event of the season. After all, MJ hadn't seen a cross-country fence since Blair and there was a sensible argument for easing ourselves back in.

The problem was that MJ had never really been interested in sensible.

And if I'm honest, neither had I.

So we stuck with BE100.

Thankfully, it seemed MJ agreed with the decision.

Our first event of the season was Kirriemuir, where we finished 8th. A few weeks later we headed to Forgandenny and came 5th.

Just like that, we'd qualified for Blair again.

I remember laughing about it because a couple of years earlier, qualifying for Blair had seemed like something that happened to other people. Suddenly we'd done it two years running.

What stands out most when I think back to that period isn't actually the results though.

It's how much fun we were having.

MJ felt fantastic.

She was fit, healthy and full of herself.

I felt confident.

For somebody who had spent years worrying about jumping bigger fences, I suddenly found myself jumping tracks that would once have terrified me without giving them much thought at all.

That wasn't because I'd become a brave rider overnight.

It was because I trusted my horse.

MJ had this incredible ability to make things feel possible.

She wasn't always straightforward. In fact, quite often she was convinced she knew best and generally felt that any jumping course would be improved by travelling slightly faster than her rider intended!

But by that point we'd developed our own language.

The less I interfered with her mouth and the more I rode from my body, the better things tended to go.

Somewhere along the line we'd worked each other out.

Alongside the eventing, we were also doing a bit of British Showjumping.

Again, this was something that would have seemed completely ridiculous to me a few years earlier.

We were regularly jumping 1.05m tracks, picking up placings and double clears, and gradually building confidence together.

I still remember entering our first 1.10m.

It felt like another little milestone.

The sort of thing I would never have imagined doing when I first brought home a recently retired racehorse that had barely seen a coloured pole.

Unfortunately, that day didn't quite go to plan.

The first thing I noticed was in the warm-up.

As MJ came round a corner to a fence, she suddenly napped sideways away from it.

It was subtle.

Not dramatic.

Just odd.

I remember thinking that perhaps I'd ridden badly to it.

Then it happened again.

In the 1.05m class she did something similar once more, although we still managed to finish on four faults.

When she repeated the behaviour in the warm-up for the 1.10m, I made the decision to withdraw.

Something wasn't right.

At the time, I couldn't explain exactly what I was feeling.

She wasn't obviously lame.

She wasn't refusing.

She wasn't behaving badly.

She just didn't feel like herself.

One thing I'd learned over the years with MJ was that when she changed her behaviour, there was usually a reason.

Looking back now, I wish I'd trusted that instinct even sooner.

But at the time I still believed we were probably dealing with something relatively minor.

Perhaps she was sore somewhere.

Perhaps she had tweaked something.

Perhaps she simply needed a bit of treatment and some time off.

What followed was a seven-month search for answers involving physios, vets, scans, hope, disappointment and more questions than answers.

And eventually, a diagnosis that changed everything.

Then photo attached to this blog was of her last BS competition before it all went wrong.