Extreme Trail is the answer!

The biggest obstacle with Cheyenne and myself, much like any relationship, is trust. Most of the time, I don't really trust her to not send me sailing out of the saddle. And whether she trusts me or not is up against her natural, obstinate personality. Flip a coin.

So, as I've reported on, we're doing all the really hard stuff that challenges us separately and together. We've been doing this alone in our private riding time, often when nobody else is at the barn, which makes it hard for me to be confident enough to work through it. Lucky for us, there's an extreme trail competition this weekend and the indoor arena is a little playground of fun obstacles!


Extreme trail should really have more of a presence in schooling. It may have something of a reputation for being useful only for pleasure trail riding, skewed also in favor of being more of a Western tradition.   Yes, it is a fabulous conditioning exercise for the bizarre things you might run into on the trail, but it is hugely beneficial to the basic trust of horse and rider, and brings out the best, physically, of a horse. This is highly important for disciplines like dressage. In my training, I often forget about simply setting up a square to turn in or a pipe to sidepass over. I focus too hard on the tests themselves, not the elements that make a test go well.

The results are so much better if they are broken down into minuscule pieces.

Cheyenne is not the most confident or brave of horses. But practicing with a group in the confines of the indoor arena boosts my confidence, and hers. It really does feel like a learning playground; I watch Cheyenne observe other horses, and I see her realize her capabilities and understand that she is safe.

It didn't take long for her to get over some of her fears. A curtain of pool noodles was confusing on the ground, but after a few passes through she moved them aside and went on like it was no big deal. She followed up on a tarp covered in grass ( though the water-covered tarp remained challenging, up until the end when she walked straight over it.) One of the most astonishing was her willingness to go over a tipping bridge, and indeed, nearly all the horses there were more than happy to do it.

When we ran through the obstacle course on our own, I was especially surprised to find that the sidepass-pipe was the easiest for her, and grabbing a grain bag to place elsewhere didn't faze her at all. I didn't attempt dragging a haybale, and I couldn't get her to calmly line up beside a spool for me to dismount, lead her around, and then re-mount. She didn't understand turning around in the square and nipped at my boot a few times in frustration. I also couldn't get her to back up through a Figure 8, but now we know what to work on.

Cheyenne barely even snorted at an obstacle, even if she found it scary or unappealing. For the most part, she did the work. It fell on miscommunication when things didn't work out.

This is an incredible change in her, in us, and I'm so happy that we'll have the course up all week. Every day, I'd like to bring her through it.

After the lesson, she was calm, interested and-- dare I say it?--happy! I hope this experience serves as a reminder to myself that ignoring training lessons like obstacles is detrimental. Utilizing objects other than just us two and the tack can be extremely gratifying and wonderfully educational.