New Beginnings!

March started by me traveling back to Norway with Finorio. On the way we picked up a Fjord called Alvar, and we have now moved into a small farm just about an hour north of Oslo. The horses instantly hit it off, and became best buds in no-time. I was quite surprised about it. For now we “only” have a pasture with a shed, but we have planned for boxes in the barn. We just need to wait for the weather to turn warmer so one of the walls can be rebuilt.

I want to try to get some life back into this blog, especially to keep track on the development of Alvar and Finorio.

Here is a couple of fotos from this past week. Hopefully we will get back into training quite soon.

Rossfechten 2019

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A normal training day

I thought I’d show how a regular training day is for me and Finorio. These past few months we have worked on getting a better reaction to the outside leg. The past two days I’ve finally felt some really nice improvements and today i taped the whole session.

We always keep the sessions with our horses short and rather intense, so the video below is approximately 10 minutes, the entire session was about 16 minutes. I’ve cut out the boring parts where the horse is out of angle, walk breaks and so on, but most of the session is in there.

New Bridle!

The first weekend of May we arranged the Rossfechten Symposium on our little yard in Lauchröden. I will probably post an other post about that, when the pictures arrive. First, if you are interested, here is a short video from the event, catching the feel of the event.

But what this post is really supposed to be about is my new bridle!

The weeks leading up to the symposium I wanted to make a new bridle so that I had it ready for the symposium. But as we all know, time flies. So on the Thursday before the symposium I started. Many of the guests had already arrived, and more to come, but I thought I’d try to finish it.

Isak, the Swede who lives and works at the house wanted to help me with metall fittings, since he said that would make it look so much better.

So after I cut the parts of the bridle, spent all evening burnishing the edges (which is whats most time consuming). So with lots of help from Isak, doing the pretty parts of the metall fittings, I managed to get the bridle finished on the friday before the event.

The whole brilde, with reins

Merry Christmas!

Not much updates as we don’t train as much as we want to. The arena, roads and everywhere we can ride is still frozen solid. So we only ride out once in a while and use the arena a couple of times a week. It is fairly hard on the legs so try not to push it. Here are few of the christmas photos we captured on the 23rd of December. Christmas horsie!

Finorio is wondering if he needs to follow me

Ooops, I did it again.

Forgot all about following up on this blog. So what has happened since last time? Quite a lot!

First of all, Finorio has moved! We are not staying at a very nice little stable in Lier, it’s a little bit further for me to drive, but Finorio seems happy and that’s the most important part.

We have been attending trainings in working equitation, skill at arms and other fun things. Finorio keep building strength, and I have been to Germany and really got to test my riding abilities and came back with a completely changed feel for my seat. I have always thought that riding well trained horses is extremely educational, but this year I was able to feel how much. It completely changed my feel for riding, new level!

Hacking and stuff…

The weeks after the clinic we have taken things slow. Mostly because Finorio has had a good 5-6 weeks off any kind of work, and it all started with him being locked up for a week and a half and having surgery.

This means we have been out hacking, mostly walking, but also some trot and canter. There has been a period now that he has been warm in his hoofs, and he got some bumps in his skin on different parts of his body. Thinking this had something to do with the amountI removed all the hard feed, except the “Betfiber” he gets in the evening, which is mostly just fibre and something to blend out vitamins, minerals and salt. 

Who needs shoes?

I woke up this morning to discover that spring had arrived! The sun was shining and the temperature was around +5.

Once I got to the stable I thought that I would try to ride first as the wind was going to pick up as the day went on.  Finorio was just by the gate of the pasture and once I got him into the stable I quickly realised that he was missing a shoe on his left front leg. That meant no riding today, but I thought that I could use the time to do some ground work and long reining.

Gravel roads and other obstacles

The horses live at a yard that has all the basic necesities for them. Huge pastures where they can run around all day, steep hills, a lake and forrest to walk through. They have boxes to stay in at night, and a good life.

What we lack is an arena and hacking possibilities. There is a small area just outside the stable that we use for an arena as long as the fields are as wet as they are now. We fenced in a small part of one of the pastures which is quite flat, so that we could use that as an arena when the weather was dry. As the autumn is upon us I don’t expect this area to be usable until it freezes and we get some snow to cover the grass.

Spring is here!

And with spring comes more fun times with the horsies! Haven’t had much time to write anything, but here are some pictures of the last few weeks.

Cantering Sigi in the fields