Nike DAY 6: The Plastic Bag and Other Adventures!

DAY 6 – PIONEER PARK: Since the day appeared to be clear we took advantage of it and head to a local arena not far from home. They have a nice warm up arena and a LARGE regular arena. The footing will be sloppy at best but you gotta do what you gotta do. Today we hit the expected “Sass Wall.”  This has been a FULL week for Nike. Probably the most concentrated training she has had in a while. She may have been mentally full and physically a little tired. Today she needed some motivation to get to work so we broke out the horse eating plastic bag on a stick. Motivation to move her feet was achieved! We reviewed the skills we have been working on and added two new Backing exercises. Then we worked on desensitizing to the horse eating plastic bag. It went better than expected. She worked up a good sweat today and really had to engage her mind and body. She got to rest for a bit as we worked Ronan and Argent. Then she got to experience being ponied around the arena. Rona is an awesome horse and Nike likes him so we channeled our inner cowboy and tooled around together. We would rest a bit and she got desensitized to the rope coming at her from a different point of view. It was a good session…a longer than expected one due to the Sass Wall but a good one. She is going to get a couple of days off. Just food and TLC. Whew!