PONY CLUB CAMP - Day 6

Mounted Games Practice. Ooooooh yeah.

I volunteered to teach Mounted Games from horseback, using Willow as "Demonstration Pony". I had no idea if she knew how to do games at all, but I do so I figured I could at least ride the patterns and show the kids a couple of tricks.

We started with the barrel race. I went first to show the pattern. Trotted to the first barrel and Willow turned so tight around it I nearly hit my knee on the barrel! Cantered to the next one, another tight turn. Cantered to the last one, turned tight and raced for the finish. We ran it through 3 times, and the last time we clocked 19 seconds from a standing start. That's pretty damn fast! Watch out for clips of it on YouTube :)

We moved on to the Bending race, and again Willow proved that she knew exactly what she was doing, and ditto the Flag race. I was well pleased!

We moved on to do some jumping. I asked Moneka to jump her first, as I'm not very brave at jumping and I wanted to see what she would do before I asked her to do it. So Mon jumped on her and took her over a few jumps. Jumping technique needs some work! She is quite keen and honest, but has no idea when to take off over a jump, so she rushes right up to it and jumps really late, kind of heaving herself over. To her credit I jumped her up to about 80cm and she didn't stop at all, she's got quite good spring in her hocks, but she needs to learn to see a take-off spot. I suspect no-one has ever taught her to jump, they just rode her at fences and expected her to do it. So I have a bit of work to do in that department. :)