Alfredo Hernandez && Equitation show.

Tuesday, August 23rd: Duellsa and I headed down to Inish Beg Farm with Gail McCormack to the Alfredo Hernandez Clinic. He specializes in Piaffe and Passage work. He does a lot of work on the ground with horses with/ or without riders. Duelli and I obviously are not ready for Piaffe and Passage quite yet. We worked on getting Duelli to accept contact, and getting her through back to front. For the ground work part, he had me stand in place and leg yield her till she started to come through and then I'd start walking towards her and pushing her away from me while keeping her going forward too. It's hard for me to explain. So for the riding part I got on and he saw a little bit of what she is all about. (wanting to curl instead of stretching down, normal green horse stuff) So he had Gail do the same thing that I did on the ground while I was riding. Once she would come through and round he'd have Gail unhook the lead and I would continue the exercise while pushing Duelli out on a 20 meter circle. By the end she felt 110% better. She was actually stretching down into the contact while still keeping weight in my rein. It's so different training a Warmblood type horse verses your normal day to day horse. One thing he said was, that I can get Duelli to stretch by doing this exercise but you never want her nose lower then her chest for our day to day work. His reasoning for not letting her stretch that far is because she'd get on her forehand and let her hindend just be there. It is like a Teeter totter. If their head goes too far down, then that causes their hindquarters to come up, but if their head is a little above (And supple) then their hindquarters can come under. It was good to see that when we were done she had sweat on her belly, so that was a good sign that she was using her "core" too. Duelli was great she loaded right up on the way home and got some much needed bute for a 2 hour trailer ride there and back, and the hard lesson :)


This past weekend was the FPC Equitation show! It was tons of fun to go to a show and just have some fun. I took Dixie. We did everything, English, Road Hack, Bareback, Western, Costume, Parade, Trail, Jumping...and some more. She such a handy/versatile pony <3. We got Reserve Champion for our age division, and Champion for the Open classes! It was also nice to see the little PCer's on their very cute ponies going around the equitation ring like Champions!

Sunday was supposed to be Claybrook HTS, but thanks to hurricane Irene that changes some plans. It was postponed for next sunday! :)




-Ashley