Lyric went out on a training trail ride for conditioning and balance work, along with some de-spooking too. I trailered him to Fair Hill to ride on the Blue Diamond trail, as we had just been hit with a deluge of rain and any other (closer) trail would have been pure mud. Slippery, dangerous, and destructive of the trail too.
He tied at the trailer quiet for tacking up. He had lots of traffic going in and out behind him, bikes, hikers, dogs etc and he was alert but fine. He did really focus on people, though. After getting up on him, if he saw people a distance away, he would plant 4 feet, crane his head up in the air and STARE at them, snorting. He got over it and focused. At no time did he feel like he was going to run, bolt etc.
He spent the ride working on STRAIGHT, keeping off my right leg, left rein. He spent a lot of his time with his hindquarters drifting off to the right and getting heavy on the left rein. He had to stay in frame for the whole ride and BALANCE uphill and down. The slopes were not extreme, but overall he did well on the hills. Sitting up, half-halting, raising the forehand and "setting" him on his hinquarters downhill helped to keep him from pacing. You do have to keep both legs on steady during that downhill, though, to keep him from duckwalking in the back. He loves to SWAY that hindend back and forth (essentially disengaging it) as he's walking downhill instead of supporting the weight on his hindquarters. I'd like to see more dropping of the croup and true engagement. That will simply take time and lots of repitition/conditioning. Most importantly, if he felt like he was really evading with his hindquarters and getting too extreme of a swing/duckwalk, I simply stopped him on the downhill, collected him up and asked him to walk again.
We went over bridges and even a covered bridge! He dealt with traffic going by him fine. He was scared of guardrails, but I walked him up to them and had him sniff them and he was better. Still suspicious of them, but better :-) He really has issues with people on the ground that he doesn't understand. There was a group of kids hanging by a bridge entrance and I asked them to step away from the bridge. They didn't really move very far (and they also had cameras on very large/tall poles they were swinging around too) and I had to ask them again to move, since he was PLANTED to the ground, alert and not ABOUT to take a step forward without them moving further away. Dolly walked first (she didn't care) and he followed, nervous but ok. Later, when we approached the Covered Bridge, I had Lyric go first and he was braver and went ok. 2nd time we went past the group of kids with cameras on sticks, he was alert but better. By the 3rd time, he didn't care.
We did some great trotwork, conditioning up and down hills, and just "getting out" in general. Had a couple nice accidental canter transitions. Overall, he did excellent and was a very reliable trail horse. He walked through a 30-40 foot long deep puddle of water with no problem. Sniffed it and walked right in, stayed in it down an entire road.
I will likely take him out again this weekend for another conditioning/training run to see how he does, hopefully for longer this time!
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