On Beach Riding

An abrdged version of this blog has already been posted on Parelli Central Blogs, but this is the original!

When I first got into horses I used to go to the local riding school where I learned to just saddle a horse and get on, kick them to go, and pull the reins to stop. Worse than that, I was taught to smack them when they didn’t do what you wanted because they were being “lazy” or “naughty.”

After I had been going for half hour lessons for about six weeks, that’s a total of just three hours in the saddle, I was told that I was “experienced” enough to go on the “Beach Ride.” This was a ride of just under two hours with half an hour of road work to and from the beach.

When the ride arrived on the beach the horses walked until there was an area of beach that was relatively clear of rocks, the lead rider would ask if everybody was ready and the horses would leap into a gallop and race each other until the lead rider pulled up or the horses just got tired. What I was doing on my hired horse could not have been described as riding, it was more like hanging on for dear life and surviving! On almost every occasion someone would fall off. Most were able to get back on and continue the ride but, on a few occasions, riders left the beach in an ambulance.

You might ask “What was I thinking?” Looking back, I’m not sure why I kept doing it. It was sort of exhilarating, but in a “thank goodness I’m still alive” kind of way. I wanted to ride on the beach and I thought that was what riding on the beach was all about. In those days I had never heard of Parelli.

Fast forward about six years. I now own one of those riding school horses. I am older and, as a result of a couple of nasty, horse related, accidents I lost a lot of confidence and have a lot more respect for the fragility of my body. But I’ve found Parelli and have also found lots of very savvy friends.

Now read about a very different experience of beach riding.

It’s another unseasonably mild October day in West Sussex, on the south coast, here in the UK. Six horses, all different shapes, sizes and ages, walk down a short stony path to the beach led by their owners who are also all different sizes, shapes and ages!

The tide is on its way out leaving a clean sandy beach. Some of the horses have never seen the sea before. Some of the riders have never ridden on the beach before and are about to fulfil a lifelong dream. All of us are there to support each other. By the end of the day all the horses will have been ridden.

We all pause at the top of the high shingle bank while the new horses take in the sight and smell of the constantly moving monster that is the sea. The more experienced beach horses, and the left brain introverts, take the opportunity to eat a little of the salty grass growing there.

Gradually the horses test out the shifting shingles beneath their feet as they part walk, part slide down the bank to the sand.

Everybody starts playing on the ground with their horses online. Some people are not even thinking about getting on their horses today, they are prepared to take the time it takes and they play the friendly game with the waves, the rockpools and the breakwaters.

I am the first to mount my horse, Liquorice. He is a beach veteran but as an ex-riding school hack I have had to spend some time teaching him to walk calmly and not to do what he had been expected to do in his previous life and take off with me as a helpless passenger. As we are lucky enough to live fairly close to the sea, being able to ride safely on the beach was one of my early goals and we only really began to achieve it last summer. I’ve never ridden him on the beach with this many other horses though, and my confidence as a rider is still easily shaken.

Linda is the next to mount up. Her horse, Tizzy, is twenty years old and has been on the beach once before at the beginning of the summer when Linda prepared her for today by playing with her on-line.

We start to walk about on the beach encouraging our horses to get further and further into the sea water which will do their legs a power of good. There is a brisk wind and it’s making the waves quite choppy, giving the horses plenty to be curious about. I ask Linda if she would like to ride a little way up the beach and she agrees. There are plenty of other horses so two of us leaving for a while shouldn’t upset the rest. We don’t go too far and, as we turn round, Linda asks if I fancy having a trot back. Liquorice is a bit keen to get back to the rest of the herd so does a quick trot that almost breaks into a canter but I still feel completely safe and in control.

Liz, who didn’t bring her saddle down to the beach today, has got up on her horse, Merlina, bareback. A year ago Liz, although an experienced rider, didn’t feel confident about getting on this complex mare without having the support of a Parelli Professional there with her. Since then, Merlina has been restarted by James Roberts, Parelli Professional, and Liz has continued to follow the programme. The relationship she now has with Merlina is enabling her to achieve the horsemanship goals she had all but given up on a year ago.

All the horses now have a rider, even the two year old horse has his owner’s young daughter kneeling on his back – a testament to the foundation that has been put on this young horse.

We all move off together down the beach. My horse is more relaxed now that the whole herd is with him and it’s teaching me that I need to work harder on our relationship so that he is as happy to be with just me as he is with other horses. As I ride alongside Liz I ask her if, this time last year, she would ever have believed that she would be riding Merlina on the beach bareback. She said that she wouldn’t have believed it 6 months ago!

Jo’s horse, Bella, gets tense and then throws in a couple of bucks. Jo, to preserve her confidence, gets off and continues leading from the ground. By the time we get some way along the beach, she feels her horse is ready for her to get back on and she completes the ride mounted.

As we turn to head back the way we came I feel my horse remember his past. The last time he was on the beach with this many horses was when he was a riding school hack and turning for home was a green light to just GO!

But now I know how to do the Parelli “emergency stop” and I quickly disengaged his hind quarters and hold him there until he stops turning. I have to do this three times until I can feel that he will not take off. He walks quickly and I let him get to the front where I know he will happier and he calms down.

And so we arrive back at the field where we have parked our trailers and horseboxes. Everybody is smiling and the horses are relaxed. We put the relationship first. Nobody fell off, no horses got out of control, or got kicked or bitten by other horses, there were no dramas and nobody went home in an ambulance. Nobody cried – except perhaps a few private tears of happiness at an ambition fulfilled.

We have all set up our next beach ride for success and we’re already making plans about what we’ll do next time – maybe Linda and I will try for a canter. Jo will see if taking more notice of Bella’s bubble around other horses will help Bella to be more relaxed and less likely to buck. Liz will take a saddle next time and find out what more Merlina is able to offer to their partnership.

Now, isn’t that just how it should be?

Photos by Gill Langridge. http://www.gmlimages.co.uk

We are Parelli because ........

I have just entered the competition to win a day with Pat and Linda Parelli! I've joined sixty-three other hopefuls to demonstrate, in three minutes, why "We are Parelli."

I knew exactly what I wanted my video to show from the start - just didn't realise just how short a time three minutes is! Filming the bits I needed took a fraction of the time the actual editing took - it's true what they say about your" best bits ending up on the cutting room floor!"

By the time the video was submitted, lets say I was very familiar with it and, just like audition video submissions, you always think of it as a bit flawed,- "I could have done that bit better" or "I wish I had included something else."

What I wasn't prepared for was other people's reactions to it. I had seen it so many times that it seemed a bit ordinary to me. I knew my Parelli friends would be supportive because Parelli people are the most emotionally fit, encouraging, and warm and cuddly people in the world! And they didn't let me down. Their immediate reaction was to repost on their own page and ask their friends to vote fo me too. The amazing friendship gained from a shared interest in Parelli was one of the things I had wanted to include in the video but I ran out of minutes!. What was really surprising were the comments of non-Parelli people.

For a long time I have been the lone Parelli student at our yard, affably tolerated as the "orange stick waving, rope wiggling mad woman." I usually get an arena to myself as other peoples horses are scared of my stick! and, if I accidentally leave ropes or carrots sticks around the yard they always get returned to me because nobody else either knows what to do with them or would want to be seen dead using them anyway!

If this is a ten level programme, we're only one fifth of the way through so I'm always looking ahead to all those very clever things that other students can do that we can't do yet. I'm also the sort of person who thinks that if I can do something then it can't be that difficult or clever. So when I started getting comments like "...amazing ... speechless" and "brought a tear to my eye ... love the loading" I had to remind myself that most people can't load their horse from the front of the lorry, not everybody can have their horse catch them without a bucket of feed, and some people can't stop their horses dragging them to the grass without roping their horse's nose! As Pat says "It's simple, but it's just not always easy!" I have been taking for granted some of the amazing things Liquorice and I have achieved together.

So, whoever wins, what I'm most proud of about the video is that some non-Parelli people have seen a litttle of what Parellli is really about at the individual level. This wasn't a well rehearsed top level demonstration. An ordinary five foot nothing grandma, who came late in life into horses, showed that it is possible do what many people think of as, some extraodinary things with her horse.

Level 2 Online Audition At Last!

Study Group Task # 2

We've got two tasks this month. the one I picked out of my envelope this time was to go ride sideways without something in front of us, - more of that in the next post. the second task for this month was to think about what we have achieved over the past year.
The best way I can think of it is by describing where we were this time last year.

So this time last year we had not even submitted our level one audition and now we are ready to film our level two audition. Looking back at this video and thinking about what we can do better now I am most struck by the changes in me. My confidence when playing with Liquorice has increased and, with that, his confidence in me. One of the feedback comments the audition team made was that they "noticed your horses expression and ears were cranky. Improving this now will excel your relationship and growth for the future." and I have struggled with this for a long time. I think I have come to realise that I don't have to work at asking him for less but to ask him for more. He seems to look at me more often with ears forward if I have been more of a leader and more assertive.
One of the big achievements of the last year was to actually take him off the yard. This was achieved when we booked on a level two clinic at Wisborough Green in early December. This was a huge breakthrough in MY emotional fitness and led to us buying our own lorry. This, in turn, has helped me begin to realise another dream which is to ride Liquorice safely on the beach. We have taken him to the beach several times now to just walk about in hand, have a bit a of a paddle in the sea, and generally hang out. About three weeks ago he was calm enough for Kevin to get on him and walk about.

Parelli Study Group Task #1

The lovely Jo has got us all organised! As part of our study group she has encouraged us to set ourselves 12 challenges (one per month) to complete by the end of the year .... That way if nothing else we can all say we can do 12 more things than we could do before! Each month we pick one out of our own envelopes and have to do that - it's quite exciting now because, two months on, I have forgotten what challenges I put in my envelope!
So, this video shows my first challenge which was to load Liquorice from outside the lorry. He had been very good at loading ME up to this point! since we had the new van we have been getting him used to it by feeding him his tea in there (LBI highly motivated by food) and taking him on short trips. He then had a very long trip to Wiltshire (see previous posts) and this made him much more relaxed about being in there. However I had a little bit of difficulty getting him on on my own because he would get on if I was already in there but then, of course, I had to get past him to get to the partition to close it.
Anyway, on the day of our study group meeting I asked a friend to video me attempting the task and he was on the lorry in less then a minute! I think that says something about the power of focus!

J R Foundation Station Epilogue

This is what I'm taking away from my week here at JRFS - in no particular order -

• "doing Parelli" is a means to an end, not an end in itself. My goal is to have a horse that I can ride anywhere safely - a good riding horse. Isn't that what most people want?
• do simple things well.
• have a plan.
• rate the success of your actions from minus ten to ten and don't go on to the next thing until you've got to at least zero.
• focus - no. I mean really focus
• everything you do with your horse matters
• either you think you can, or you think you can't - either way you're right.
• look where you want to go, not where you are going.
• don't stop doing something that bothers your horse until your horse stops being bothered .
• watch the Level Four DVDs so you know what you are heading towards.
• take another look at the patterns - I think I get them now.

Lynne and Liquorice arrive home safely from the JR Foundation Station

So it's goodbye to all the folks at JRFS. It was another beautiful frosty morning and I mustered an army of two helpers to help me get the lorry out of the field. I soon discovered that we should have bought a scraper for the front windscreen of the lorry as a credit card doesn't reach far enough when you are only five feet nothing, standing on a sloping field and I can only reach the very edges of the windscreen even when you are standing in the cab and trying to lean out. Fortunately the hot air blower was very efficient and that, with the help of the friction of the windscreen wipers on XXX fast speed the window was clear enough to at least get out of the field. Except, the ground was so frosty the wheels kept slipping and I kept stalling and I was beginning to wish I hadn't asked for helpers so that I didn't have to do all this with an audience!

I fully expected Liquorice to not want to get on the lorry as he was dead keen to get back out in the field with his new chums but I remembered that James said "either you think you can. or you think you can't and either way you're right," so I thought I could and he loaded just fine, and I did it all by myself (my helpers had melted away after the fiasco with frosted up windscreen, the slippery field and the stalling and everything).

The damn TomTom's battery had discharged itself - as I predicted, but thanks to Victoria's excellent directions I found my way back to the M3. Who says women don't know their left from their right! Well I don't apparently. I must have taken a left, instead of a right at the end of the A303 and I eventually ran out of M3 and found myself avec half a ton of horse, heading straight for central London!

I noted, with interest, that I was entering a low emission zone and, funnily enough, I had been having a conversation with a woman this very morning about how her horse box was too old to drive on the M25 because it did not conform to low emission zone regulations, and I remember thinking (rather smugly as it happens) that my swanky new lorry would be able to drive anywhere in London, and here I was - how lucky was that!

Anyway I didn't cry, I just did a U turn, got back on the M3 going the opposite way and rang Kevin to ask him where I was! I should have known better. I told him that the sun was on my left so was I going in the right direction, but he just said that it depended on where I was coming from! Men are such useless individuals when it comes to finding things. Anyway, just then I saw a sign for Southampton so, as usual, If you want a job done, do it yourself! The extra bit added about a hour to the journey but as James says "the longer a horse is on a horse box, the more time he has to get relaxed and will be less worried the next time he gets on." So that all worked out all right then.