It seems that we have reached a crossroad. We have stopped (at least temporarily) our natural horsemanship lessons and are focusing entirely on endurance. Sue and I agreed that there’s not much more we can do with NH until I am confident enough to improve our ground work, which involves me braving and working through his intimidation tactics (including rearing, bardging and running over, which he only does when we do ground work or lunge, not otherwise). Also, if I’m going to focus entirely on endurance I need to put time in to get him fitter rather than just better schooled. I will continue to school him and I will continue improving the NH methods we’ve already learned, but the focus will be on hacking out. I know NH can make us better endurance riders but for now it’s a case of trying to put everything we know into practice and just practice and practice and practice to get better before learning new stuff.
Thanks to Sue we can now hack out much better on our own and we’ve reached our first two goals on the way towards doing proper endurance:
- Being able to cross the main road at the top of our lane, safely, on our own – leading to longer rides.
- Do a training ride to get a feel for how long endurance rides are, to see how fit Shah really is, and what he thinks about it.
Both goals were ticked off during the last week or so. The weather here has been glorious and I’ve taken the opportunity to ride more. Crossing the main road has been less scary than I imagined (normally the way) as he’s pretty good with traffic and knows he needs to stop. It’s just that when we get across the road and onto the next lane he has a tendency to nap. But so far so good, we’ve worked through all napping attempts!
We achieved the second goal this weekend. We did a 20km training ride at Plumpton, run by the EGB (endurance GB society) and had a real blast! Everyone at the yard went, all four of us, the weather was glorious and the horses loved the long uphill gallops! Even Shah got tired at the top of one of them – nearly unheard of so far! But he was still bouncing and jogging all the way down to the finish line when the other three horses were tired and just wanted to walk. That’s a good sign, he enjoyed himself and he was rearing to go again!
After our training ride he’s been pretty chilled out. He got a day off, just eating spring grass in the field and today we’ve been for a short walk up and down the lane. He was full of pickles as usual while out riding but he must have been tired as he was yawning like mad when we got back 
After achieving my first two goals on the list, I’ve now had to set some new ones, here’s the list, let’s see how we do with these ones:
- Do a long hack out on our own, including a good gallop across local fields.
- Travel in lorry on our own to friend’s place for a hack out.
- Do a non competitive ride, including trot up for the vet to prepare him for future vettings.
- Feel fit enough to do our first competitive ride – novice level.
Hopefully, they are all achievable within the next 2-3 months time. In the meantime, back to work.
