Adventures With Horsemanship: At Home & A New Adventure

Playing at Home, Playing Someplace New

AT HOME: This week most of the training has been happening at home. We have been working in the round pen, doing LOTS of ground work and leadership walks and lots of riding up and down hills, around trees and through obstacles. We have gotten into the habit of doing about 45 minutes of ground work and a solid 30-40 minute ride. This is helping Cearra’s fitness level and confidence. We like to introduce the “new” exercises at home when we can. Just makes the learning process easier. We see improvements or refinements almost every day and we catch glimpses of who this horse will be. At this point it is her fitness level that is holding us back. She simply can’t do the “long rides” part of the “long rides, wet saddle pads and concentrated training” formula. What this means is that Cearra is a more long-term project for us. It also means we’ll be able to achieve a bit more and that should make her even more marketable! Of course she is growing on us (this is both good and bad) so who know what the future will hold.

ORANGEVALE PARK: We loaded up Sunday morning to meet some members of the Golden State Horsemanship Club at Orangevale Horse Park in (you guessed it) Orangevale, CA. for a “Spur of the Moment Ride.” This was Cearra’s fort time there. She surprised us by only being a slight spaz now and then even with all the “new to her” horses and surroundings. What made this session different is the facility has a HUGE round pen (we were able to have three horses worked on the ground and under saddle at a time in this pen, that is how big it is) which was awesome. The footing was soft and deep which made the effort for the horses both comfortable (impact wise) and a more intense workout (think running on the beach in deep sand). We also had a planned program for the day. We all worked on improving our round pen skills off the lead line. That was fun! Then we worked on Ground School Circles (readers of this blog should know what those are by now. In short it is an awesome 5 in 1 type exercise. Major thanks to Susan Wirgler for teaching us this one!), followed by lateral flexion, desensitizing and a few other cool things. Then we mounted up and worked on several riding exercises that helped us with handle, bend and teaching the horse to be responsible for her feet without being micromanaged. Walk/trot and walk/trot/lope transitions were also worked on.

At this point Cearra was done. She hit her fitness limit. So we tapped out. She got a nice long drink of water and then got to stand ties to the "tie post of knowledge" while we finished out the day.

I saddled up Ronan and we headed over to the big arena. There (after getting the horses comfortable with the new place and doing some Schooling Circles Under Saddle as a warm up) we began to work on lateral/diagonal motion, working the “bend” with our horses at the walk and trot and even side passing along the fence! Today Ronan was a loping machine. Probably the smoothest and fastest loping he has done since we got him. It was something to ride let me tell you. We wrapped up the day with some more lateral work, some forward/backward transitions and a nice cool down walk! The “Most Improved” award goes to Travis and her mustang mare Impala (such a cutie). They tries new things and took their skills to a new level! Everyone worked hard and had some great wins!

It was a good day! We met some new folks who were curious about what the group was doing and we got to network a little bit. We are going to try our best to get out to that facility at least once a month. It is about an hour drive for Laurie and I but facility offers some unique training and exposure opportunities that we want to continue to utilize! Thanks everyone who came out to make the day so much fun!

Of course we forgot to take pictures of the cool stuff. We just a couple of Cearra being the demo horse for the “Ground School Circles”.

Sigh.

Ground School Circle - at the walk.