Full Day at Bit of Honey

Today was really full!  I started out helping Phoenix and Cosmo do a bareback ride, while riding Beauty myself.  She is a blue roan quarter horse mare that is living here in training.  I showed Beauty's owner what Beauty and I have been working on, and how fit the girl is looking.  She can pretty much trot and canter as much as we like without getting tired.  Her haunches are developing some nice muscling from all of the conditioning gallops and lot trotting afternoons all over the hills in the back pastures.  Then Beauty's owner got on and did a riding lesson, we worked on walk/halt transitions so that the owner could experience how sensitive Beauty has become to breathing and weight shifts.  When they went into some trot work Beauty was great too, she really lengthened out her stride and slowed her pace so that her trot became much more rhythmic.  Even some simple pattern work went well, with the owner easily able to turn Beauty by merely rotating her own torso in the direction she wanted to turn.

During Beauty's ride I had two new clients arrive so that they could audit the lesson to get a feel for my teaching style to see whether they wanted to pursue horsemanship instruction.  They were able to see how my focus is mostly on getting the rider to use her body effectively to influence the horse's motion.  There is a lot of nuance to this type of riding, and Beauty was good at illustrating how different types of breathing (shallow and quick versus deep and slow) can make the horse speed up or slow down.  The new folks enjoyed auditing and will be back soon to start some lessons themselves with Cole.

As we wrapped up Beauty's ride, three of my other clients arrived to ride their own horses, and then two more clients arrived for their 11am training session with their young five year old half mustangs.  We let the girls play in the round pen so they could get used to the place, since this was their first big field trip away from their home stable.  Once they had gotten their jollies out we brought them back to the trailer and got their saddles on, and then returned to the round pen for some groundwork.  This was my first opportunity to work with the husband, and it was great to meet him for the first time and get a feel for how he and the horses communicate.

As we were finishing with the mustangs two more clients came, bringing in their two horses who arrived for boarding.  They joined the other two new horses in the front pasture.  We're up to twelve horses on the place now, and I have another arriving for training tomorrow.  It's wonderful to have the space to tell people, "Let's put you on the schedule!" instead of "I have a six month waiting list, can you call again in two months?" like I had to do for so long at the old place.  There were several times today when I walked through the parking area and thought about how I never could have fit this many horse trailers and trucks and client vehicles at the old place.  Also, today it was no big deal to have six people riding in various places!  This new facility is amazing, and I'm excited to see how Bit of Honey Training continues to grow.