Mailbay - it's not the horse's own level that decides the ring to use, it's what level that horse has been trained to in one specific discipline; it has to be trained to level 4 in either reining, racing, barrel racing, saddleseat or trotting in the small pen, then it can move to the medium pen to train to level 5 - which shows as a new level one on the horse's details screen!

However, there's no point in doing that unless you've won all the cups in the junior league for the discipline you've chosen, since the medium pen is only to train horses for the intermediate league and this won't even become available until you have won all the junior cups!

~~~~~~~~~~

Broodmare - are you sure your horse hasn't reached its retirement age? Once it reaches that age it can no longer be trained at all, it can only go to the petting zoo or the breeding pens. Each time you breed a horse and use its breeding badges you increase your 'mastery' of that breed, and the age new foals will go to before retiring increases with each level of mastery - but that increase only shows up in each foal that's born, whatever age a horse will retire is set when it is born and you have to do more breeding, use more badges and increase your mastery again to increase that age in each new foal.

~~~~~~~~~~

I'd strongly advise you to train every horse as far as you can on the low levels - ie get all five level 1s, then all five level 2s and as many of the five level 3s if you can; that gives this horse up to 15 breeding badges to use when breeding him/her - and if you do that a few times your mastery of the breed will go up in leaps and bounds!

Once your horse will stay un-retired long enough to do all the level 3 training (33 years) and still have some years left you can put them to competitions; a super-happy horse with level 3 training in a discipline will win its race every time with no help from friends; to save treats, race him as happy and he'll need one friend cheering to ensure he wins; if he's only level 2 and happy he'll need two friends cheering. (always do the training first, by the way - you *have* to give treats for training to work, and they're cheaper when the horse is young; he can compete without treats if necessary later, when they're more expensive!).

However, as I said, ALL this training (plus level 4) is done in the SMALL ring - you DON'T USE the medium ring until you need level 5, which is an intermediate level, and you can't even get access to the intermediate races until you've won all the cups for the junior league! So forget about the medium ring for the moment - I've only just started using it, and I'm level 30 and and have been for quite a while!

Good luck!