GREETINGS FROM RHEDE!

Finally I'm able to login to my blog. The internet at the hotel won't let me post a message, just view. The academy has wireless in the lecture room, so that is where I am now. So many neat things have happened since I arrived. Some not so neat-like the train ride from Dusseldorf to Bocholt-what I call "the hell train". Whoever said you should take the train from the airport to the hotel wasn't by themselves and lugging around 80 lbs of luggage. Once you get out the city, the countryside is just awesome. That is really where I like to be. The country is so green and there are flowers and gardens everywhere. Every house has an incredible garden in the front yard. I took lots of pictures. The hotel is great! It is called Zur Alten Post and is small and quaint. The rooms and everything about it is clean and neat. The food is great. My dinners are included in my room charge and every night they make me some terrific meal-it's differant every night. I don't tell them what I want, they just do it. They know I'm a vegetarian and they took that as a challenge! The academy is 5 minutes away by bicycle which is the primary means of getting around Rhede. The academy is so cool. The staff all speak pretty decent English and they are very nice. Our course started on Monday at 9:00am in the lecture room. Christiana, one of the instructors, had us do the usual paperwork and explain the program. Another staff member gave us a tour of the barns. We each have our own locker and groom box. We have our horses assigned to us and we are responsible for grooming and tacking our horses, and after our ride, untacking and bathing and putting them away. Also, cleaning the tack and putting it up. The horses are great. They are huge! There isn't one under 16 hands in the barn. Each horse I've ridden so far has been a big 16.3-17+ warmblood. They are very well trained and all veryyyy forward. Once I got used to that I was fine. Here it's all about getting your horse forward and into the contact. We work for an hour each ride and by them time we're done, we are all dripping sweat- horse and riders. Another thing I had to get used to was working in an arena with several other horses and riders working at the same time. At home I'm usually with no more than two other riders. Here, you can have as many as 8 riders working at once. It seems very confusing at first, you think you're going to all come crashing together, but amazingly, you just work your horse and don't really think about it . The crash never happens. After our tour on Monday, we were assigned our horses for our lesson. Mine was a big mare named Rosie. The trainers get on them at first to warm them up for us. Here, the trainers don't instruct you the entire time. You get on the horse and you work and they work with you for a couple minutes on one or two issues. They're there if you need them, but they let you try and figure it out. Needless to say my first ride was a disaster. After lunch our next lesson was a lunge line lesson where the rider is on a horse that is attached to a 20 meter line and the instructor controls the horse while the rider works on differant excersises while on the horse. I like to think that jet lag had a lot to do with my riding or lack thereof on Monday. Lets move on.

This morning we met at the lecture room at 9:00am for a - you guessed it-lecture. Christiana talked about the first three parts of the training scale - rhythm, relaxation and contact. She gave us a very detailed explanation of the definition of each, and how each step leads to and interconnects with the next. It was very enlightening. We watched our videos from our first ride and she pointed out where our horses gaits were lacking rhythm and how important it is that we maintain the rhythm in all gaits and in transitions. She went on to explain how relaxation works and why you need it. All relaxation first comes from maintaining rhythm. The horse effectively puts the entire mind and body to work. When this happens, the horse lets the rider drive with the leg and will then come into the contact. One of my problems was not having enough contact. My horse maintained a rhythm, but I didn't come to my horse with the contact so she was just hanging out there in front of me. Christiana explained that we have to build into the contact and sometimes in the beginning it's a lot of contact. She said to put the bit in the jaw in keep it there. Don't let it be loose in the mouth. The more you take up the more you have to drive making sure that when you hold, the hindleg is pushing into the bit. The hind leg should keep the same energy. She said that we need to achieve steps 1 through 3 in the warmup, sometimes it takes 10 minutes and sometimes it takes the whole session. She then went on to explain how to do our warmup and applied each step of the training scale. Once you get a rhythmic gait, how do you get relaxation? Circles, changing of bend, broken lines, transitions from walk to trot and trot to canter. Changing between the gaits makes the horse change the way he uses his muscles. Getting the muscles to relax means that you first have to make the muscles work.

After the lecture I went out there and tore it up! Before we rode we had an exercise class to get us warmed up for our rides. My first ride was on Rosie, it was so much better than the day before. She was forward and round and reaching underneath. She has a huge boundiing canter, but she was still rhythmic and I had good contact. My next ride was on a horse named Chaplin. He's a 16.3 warmblood and was very hard to get round but using the training scale and the suggestions from Christiana, we finally got there. My final ride was a lunge line lesson on another big guy. We worked on cross coordination exercises-kind of like rubbing your tummy and patty your head at the same time but while sitting the trot. By the way, I am sitting the trot almost entirely throughout my rides. So, that was our second day. "We" are myself and Jessica, an 18 year old pony clubber from West Virginia. She is staying at the same hotel and we are having all of our lessons together and are hanging out together. Yeah, it's great here. Tomorrow we have an exercise class, anothe lecture, and a lesson. After lunch we have another lesson and I have another lunge line lesson. Then on Thursday afternoon they are taking us to the Westfalen Stud in Warendorf. First we'll hit some tack shops. Then dinner at an Italian restaurant and one of the assistant trainers here invited us over for drinks. Sounds great. Well, until tomorrow-