Linzi's blog

You may recall that Yesterday, I blogged about some unintelligent person shoving a note under my windscreen wiper telling me that I couldn't park in front of a gate that had a distinct lack of no parking signs on it. So tday I parked next to a bit of pavement between their 2 sets of gates that I have been using for almost 3 years now. Parked up, reluctantly switched off radio (Well, it was Key 103!) and got out of car. Person from this company walks over to me and says (no kidding): "Make this your last day of parking there, we go operational tomorrow." What?! Anyway, saw through what he was trying to do fairly quickly. Realised that since I have applied my handbrake and locked the car door, they have no access to remove handbrake in order to move car. So I calmly replied: "If you attempt to move this car from where it's parked, operational or not, I will have you done for theft and send you the bill for any damage that you do to it." Bloke walks off in a bit of a huff realising that this young-looking girl isn't as sweet and innocent as she looks. (yes I am a bit of bitch when I want to be.) So anyway, back to the point I made about them moving my car. There would be a case of criminal damage as they would have to either break the lock on the door of smash one of the windows to gain access to the car. If they were trying to be clever, they could attempt to move the car while the handbrake was still on and damage the tyres. Basically, it's a no-win situation for them. Will keep you posted on developments.

I am sorry if anyone take offence at me getting on my dressage soapbox yet again, but I am truely disgusted with people who are making comments on perfectly good riders and their training methods for the sake of making a comment. Most of these people have no evidence to back up their comments, so they must be taken at face value. Unfortunately, all my evidence of my riding has been taken in the past couple of years and is not in video format, but hopefully that will change in the very near future. The ones that most disgust me are the ones who are tearing strips off Anky Van Grunsven. I know that I have commented on Salinero's seemingly artificial Piaffe and Passage, but I will not take anything away from Anky as a ridier. Salinero is a total hothead, and anyone who has ridden such a horse will know that if they bolt, a sumo wrestler would have trouble stopping them. Gypsy is the closest example of all the horses I currently ride. He is perfectly capable of being cool and calm, but it only takes the surrounding atmosphere to be charged with excitement, for example people doing a lot of canter work, and he becomes much harder to control. My only option when this happens is to remove him from the work that everyone else is doing, bring him back to walk and cricle him in Rollkur for a couple of minutes until he relaxes again. Then I can take him back into the work and he will not get excited again for a good length of time, normally we can get to the end of the lesson before he shows signs of excitement again, and that's only because he's thinking of food. There are people who will try and tell me that Rollkur does not relax the horse in any way. I would challenge them to try and ride Gypsy in a highly charged atmosphere without using it - they would not last 5 seconds, never mind 5 minutes. Another critiscism is the apparant over-use of the curb rein on Salinero. This is not so easy to explein to these people, except that, it may be that Salinero goes better for Anky and relaxes more with greater use of the curb. This does not deaden his mouth, I believe, as it is often easier to ruin a horse's mouth with continued pulling of a snaffle until the horse refuses the bit. What happens then, do we use a bitless bridle? All horses are different and as such, need to be ridden differently. I can normally tell within the first 5 minutes af my warm-up how the horse I am on will need to be ridden in that lesson. I could give you a run-down of every horse I have ever ridden and how they like to be ridden, but there would not be room in this post as there are that many of them. There is also talk of Anky driving Salinero forwards with the hips forcefully in the extended canter. One person said that this was because she was blocking his forwards movement and so had to drive more from the hip to compensate and that she only allowed the legs to extend, not his outline. It has been well-documented that Salinero is not a horse big on self-confidence. This is sometimes seen more in his flying changes when he pushes his backend up higher than his withers. This is not an over-reaction to the leg-aid, but a horse low on confidence saying that he is unsure of whether to go forwards or not. I would explain the driving from the hip as Anky reassuring Salinero to go forwards into the bit. The fact that he only extends through his legs and does not lengthen his outline is a problem of his low self-confidence, even though his rider is reassuring him, he isn't fully confident to go forwards so therefore only stretches his legs forwards, not the rest of his body.
I could go on and on about this all night, but regular readers of my blog are probably sick and tired of my drivel about dressage training by now, so I will leave it there.