Night Riding and Liberty in the Forest | Boxing Day Training Ride | Endurance
Channel: Arabella Adventures
Date: 31/12/2020

Riding out on boxing day with Bella, Theo and Apollo. 
During summer the horses are being slowly legged up for the coming 2021 endurance season. This means lots of slow afternoon/night rides as it's still 30 degrees Celsius here up until 8pm. Bells has had one case of swollen tendons so going back to just walking with more frequent shorter rides is needed (much to her annoyance!). We did a touch of trotting as you will see in the video, with probably 5 seconds of canter over some logs, but minimising or not allowing her to transition up from a walk is integral if we are going to hit our goals in 2021. In this video you will see our Australian Brumby hand walked, he is still overcoming his fear of being touched on the hind whilst a rider is mounted. We have worked hard to reduce his shutdown behaviour and are still in the process of teaching him how to control his emotions, rather than not thinking and processing things and either shutting down, or activating a very extreme flight response. We think he learnt to shut down and activate his flight response from a 'Brumby Safari' which asks the horses to be 'broken' and mounted by a rider in only 10 days. So much for adopting a clean slate! Please enjoy the video, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to leave a comment. 

 I will have another video out of our ride at Beachmere this time next week, and we have another ride planned to go on tomorrow (fingers crossed for some cloudy and foggy weather). 

Instagram: @arabellaandapollo

I hope you enjoy!