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Candid Equitation & Trail Riding, Odemira (2025)

24/11/2025

🍂Khalif🍂

Khalif's started arena work and I'm letting one of my long term riders Vesna do this job with my guidance. She's very patient with a super relaxed seat that all horses find really easy to move under; this makes her perfect for sticky horses that have previous bad associations with going forward under a rider or young horses that need you to clearly apply and remove pressure then stay out of the way. Not to mention she's much younger than me and horses in the future will be very grateful for her having this experience!

Back to Khalif and green horses, if you have a newly started horse and want to make it develop a bucking or bolting habit, first make sure you keep hold of both reins in a firm contact. Like really lock those elbows straight down, preferably just in front of your hips and obsess about what your horses head is doing. It especially helps if you never look where you're going and stare at the back of the horses ears instead. Don't want the horse to figure out we're actually supposed to be going somewhere!

With your seat, I find it's really effective to focus on keeping your heels down and your back perfectly straight so you're extremely stiff- this insures that your horses back can't move under you and also guarantees that if they spook, you cling on nice and tight and make it scarier than it is so they make a nice big old mountain out of a mole hill next time they get scared.

Another real cool thing you can try is to apply all the above then meander aimlessly around the arena with no real goal in mind other than obsessing about what might happen in the scary corner. The idea is to be as restrictive but indecisive as possible, you know?

The golden rule though is never EVER let them canter, especially on a long rein. Make it the forbidden fruit so that when your horse canters without you having asked, it's as unprepared and adrenaline fuelled as possible. Hang on nice and tight, then when you've done this a few times and fallen off/scared yourselves s**tless, call the vet and have thousands of euros of diagnostics done hunting for the latest buzzword condition that's doing the rounds on social media. When nothing physical is found, it's compulsory to then contact a trainer who lives on beans on toast and ask them to take the horse off your hands for free☺️ It's super generous of you to give us horses that need months of retraining because we can regroup the costs with the sale of the horse, right? There's a huge market for horses with a record of dumping riders and they don't cost a dime to keep during the many months we're undoing all your mistakes❤️

That turned into a bit of a rant, but f**k it. Here's Vesna and Khalif demonstrating how we create a horse with a bright future!

20/11/2025

💫Jamie💫

This is what adequate saddling preparation looks like 🙌

I've been steadily increasing the amount of noise and movement and Jamie's back and the amount of time he spends dealing with it. He also learned that whatever was happening on his back,he should just go forward. The difference between back and buck is one letter, so if I get a 'cold backed' one, I remove 'back' from our language altogether until we need it. This is actually even more important than desensitising as they don't tend to fight what they think they can escape. The easiest way out of anything for a horse is to move, so I really hammer home that this is definitely an option if they're not comfortable.

Jamie went out on the trail yesterday in the flappy English treeless and had no bother with branches and what have you hitting the saddle, so I decided today was the day we'd try the western saddle again (I tried when he arrived as I'd been told he'd been saddled before, but before I could even swing it over his back his head shot up and he did a massive pull back. I was then told that actually he was always tense whenever he was saddled and has bucked previously- apparently I had more to work with than first anticipated)! I kept him on the rope in case I needed to redirect him at all should he become reactive at any point, but as you can see, ain't no thing 😊

16/11/2025

⛈️Sunshine after rain🌞

Bad weather doesn't last forever, and not just in a metaphorical sense with the scan results being positive! We've been rocked by violent storms all week but yesterday Vesna, Elisa and I saw a window of evening sunshine and were able to get the mares Hope, Spring and Tali out for a blast before the dark set in.

Spring (me on board), Hope (Elisa riding) and Tali are generally horses people whine about being too slow. It really gets on my fake t**s to be honest and I will always jump to their defense at lightening speed. They're not slow at all, they're just smart enough to not waste energy and laid back enough to be content at a leisurely pace unless you, you know, actually use your words and legs and communicate what you want like an adult! I don't entertain guessing games and neither do my horses🤷‍♀️

After days being cooped up (both horses and people) out of the rain, it was just what everyone needed to have an impromptu race a few kms along the newly damped down dirt roads! The weather is supposed to improve next week and I'll be very glad to get back to training the new ones, but it's always fun to t**t about with the old faithful schoolies every so often❤️

13/11/2025

🥳4 years cancer free!🥳

Fourth full body scan complete and I am not only NED, but in even better nick than I was last year 😊 My ovarian cysts have disappeared and a minor suspicious area on my left breast area from last year has also disappeared! The only area of concern is some thickening of scar tissue in my lungs due to radiation damage- this is actually reassuring as I did notice myself coughing on and off this year despite not being sick; it's nice to have it confirmed that it's nothing ominous!

And so my lease on life extends for another year, providing I don't do anything stupid 🙃 Let's get back to normal and not waking up with a stomach like a washing machine and feeling like there's a rock in my chest.

Old picture from July because remember when this was taken and thinking "there's no way I can have cancer this year feeling this well"❤️

09/11/2025

🧬Scanxiety🧬

It's that wholesome time of year again: my yearly full body scan, to reveal if I am healthy or if this is the year I'm gonna get merked by cancer again due to Li Fraumeni Syndrome❤️😑

It's not my only scan. I have a bunch peppered throughout the year checking on various body parts for anything suspicious. But this is the big one, the one that finds problems at a cellular level- therefore, this is the one where things are most likely to be found. It's the one I'm always most worried about.

Having the LFS guillotine hanging over my head does indeed, at times, drive me nuts. My weapons of choice against the worry are being fit enough to rival any Marine, taking more supplements than I'll ever need and surrounding myself with pragmatic and fun people who keep me grounded.

I finally feel like I've recovered from chemo, radio and immunotherapy, I've hit my stride and I don't want to be any other way. I'm enjoying working 4 horses a day, 5 days a week and having enough energy to work out at the end of it all! Unfortunately this means I've gone a bit fruit the loop about trying to keep it that way; obsessive tendencies have led to numerous mishaps... I've injured myself lifting too heavy, ended up with B6 toxicity and stomach ulcers from over supplementing and frequently knackered from staying up too late distracting myself. I have a cancer survivor specialist therapist on board but even she acknowledges that I'll be wrestling this for the rest of my life and that there will be phases where I don't deal with it well.

It comforts me that through it all, despite the dire prognosis for LFS patients, despite my questionable shenanigans, despite the uncertainty- I am still a horse trainer. I always have been and I always will be. Even when I couldn't see for light sensitivity, even when I couldn't trot because it'd gave me diarrhea, even when I couldn't roundpen horses because it would make me nauseous; I still found a way to work with the horses and in doing so I still found a way back to me. It'll be alright; so long as the horses are around, it'll be fine.

08/11/2025

💫Jamie💫

I'm still steadily plugging away with Jamie and I feel like we've reached an understanding at this point🙌 So long as everything is sliced down to the millimeter, he does everything I ask in the classroom without arguing or blowing up. He's not complicated to work with, he just doesn't generalize- kind of like a mule, actually!

By this I mean that with the majority of horses, I can toss a rope over their back a few times and this is adequate preparation for a saddle pad, any old saddle, then eventually my leg. Most horses go "Aaah I see, so if I feel something on my back the result is the same regardless of what the something is. Got it!"

With Jamie, a rope being tossed over his back is adequate preparation for a rope being tossed over his back! Moving from a rope to a felt pad was too big of a jump and made him reactive, even though the rope toss wasn't a problem. Horses like this are the ones that blow up on the first saddling; some trainers don't mind that and will let them buck it out, but I like to avoid this if possible so prefer to take a little longer and log a positive experience in the horses 'journal'. Last time I had one blow up on the first saddling was around 7 years ago and I'd like to keep that record going!

I started with my hand patting all over his back, then a rope, then a towel, then a very thin English saddle pad, then a treeless saddle with the stirrups off and the flaps tied down (to prevent flapping), then finally the treeless saddle with the flaps loose. He is now cantering with the saddle flaps being pretty noisy in the wind and not reactive, so next steps will just be building up to a felt pad and western saddle.

All in all, Jamie is hitting all his milestones and feeling good in the process. His only real quirk is he always gives us the run around in the forest, every time shooting to the front and leading us on many a high speed merry chase through overgrown bushes no horse was ever meant to traverse😅 Apparently he has career aspirations of being the lead horse of my 'fast' trail group!

05/11/2025

🏇The three horsewomen of bad communication🏇🏇

Vesna mumbles, I'm deaf as a post and Elis' English needs serious work- together, we have joined forces to have a fun, giggly time, while having absolutely no idea what each other is on about 😊

Somehow, we rub along nicely and made light work clearing the trails this morning after a decent storm. We took our three most sensible ladies (Hope, Spring and Tali) to assist as there is a lot of stopping and starting involved, which can really razz up our more sporty types. This was followed by a mad dash for home when the storm decided it wasn't done yet and we cantered the last few kilometers back while wringing our shirts out😅

I love riding the faster, more keyed up horses generally, but for nonsense like this it's always way more fun to take the steady Eddie's and Rev them up❤️

04/11/2025

A WILD TITUS APPEARED!

The temperature is (finally!) going down, the wind is getting up and the further reaches of the pastures are shut off for hay to be planted; it's fair to say that the usually ultimate professional horses of Sundance Ranch are all feeling a bit froggy!

When the weather turns and the horses have less space to get rid of any p**s and vinegar in their own time, we stick to lunging where necessary. None of them do anything terrible, they all behave themselves but it's just nice for them to let off some steam at the beginning of the week. They concentrate better and feel less tension in their bodies. Rather lunge today and have a good ride tomorrow than have a tense, non productive ride today and residual bad feeling tomorrow🤷‍♀️

This actually works out really well, because through guest season the horses are either packing people about or recovering from packing people about. It's also hot, so they don't move themselves about in the pasture any more than they need to. Therefore, the last chance I really had to see any of them move without a rider was back in spring time. It's a chance to see if anyone is slightly off, has new posture changes, has lost muscle or, like Titus, who is feeling better than ever!

31/10/2025

🍂Khalif🍂

WHAT a boy!
Khalif has been progressing faster than I can process our sessions in order to write about them 🤯 It's been what, 4 days since the last update? Yeah, apparently we blast around the forest in a rope halter now 🤷‍♀️

Khalif is a trainers dream- responds quickly, retains everything, is always in a good mood and never says no. He's also a good size and he's pretty- I'll take 10 please! He'd only had a handful of rides in walk previously, so the speed he's got comfortable with his new 'job' is pretty remarkable.

Regular followers will know that I'm not usually fast, but if the horse isn't telling me to slow down at any point, then I will go ahead and crack on. My training system is basically "get your s**t together. Got it? OK, now run around the forest with your mates for s**ts and giggles and I'll hang on for the ride."; some horses really like the simplicity and get on board extremely fast- Khalif being one of them apparently!

He's proven to be more than safe, so now it will be a case of keeping him ticking over. Focus will be on building fitness and getting some arena work into him, mainly so that I can work his body in a way that'll keep him sound, but also so that I can rely on something besides his endless generosity when I wanna slow down😅

30/10/2025

🦄Branco🦄

How is my little foal, Branco, 5 and a half years old now?!😱

I left him a stallion right up until last year as I love both the body development and self confidence that late cut geldings tend to retain. Branco is much smaller than people imagine (14.3hh on a dragon day) but having spent over four years flying around the countryside behind the big boys, he has muscle on top of muscle and there's not much that phases him. He was 18 months when he did his first cow sorting experience (ponied from adopted dad of the year, Bruno) and is the strongest swimmer we have!

Branco only has one flaw that even a perfect upbringing and excellent health and morphology couldn't overcome: he's extremely short sighted... seriously, this horse can't see s**t! He's fine if things are where they were yesterday, but if you change a fence or gate, he marches straight into them without hesitation and is absolutely perplexed. Fortunately he has great friends that make good choices for him to copy and when I'm riding him, we have a set of cues that mean I can tell him something is coming so he doesn't get suprised.

I started taking him on short rides in company last autumn and over 2025, we've progressed to riding out alone and basic walk trot dressage in the arena with a handful of lessons. We don't go much further than 5km (unless I get lost!) once or twice a week, but he's confident at all gaits and if he's unsure about something, he stops and looks over his shoulder at me and if I say it's OK, he believes me and stomps past. His fifth year is a lot of fun for us both and raising him continues to be one of the few decisions I look back on and think I would do every single bit of it all over again.

He really did grow into my dream horse❤️

29/10/2025

🍒Cherry🍒

This morning we said au revoir to sweet little cherry pie. She has further to go than most of our training horses, as she's going all the way home to France! 🇫🇷

She was sent here in February due to having no brakes yet being p**sy when asked to go forward when it wasn't her idea. Usual health checks came up negative, so Nic sent her here to see if she just needed a tune up and a few wet saddle pads; that turned out to be exactly what she needed, as she was willing to stop from day 1!

She was indeed grumpy and resistent off the leg, but I got her traveling straight, taught her a bit of lateral work and she soon moved off the leg sweet as a nut. I also noticed she was pulling her tongue back in a normal bit so, after extensive dental work, we switched to a leather one for a while. She's super soft in both a leather bit and a normal snaffle now (well, an expensive Sprenger normal snaffle, but still🤣)!

It was all just tiny little niggles that added up to make an overall uncomplicated little pony into an irritable ball of stress. Thankfully we got to the bottom of it all in her 6 months here and she became a proper old reliable for beginners and children; I actually didn't use her much in my advanced rider weeks because she was too laid back! We will miss her a lot but her owners picked her up personally and will no doubt keep up the work we did here- if not, I heard threats of making me come to France to fix it😈 Good luck Cherry Berry 🍒

Here's her owner Nic, on their first ride back together, apparently not struggling with brakes anymore 🤣

27/10/2025

💫Jamie💫

This one time in chemo, I was doom scrolling and someone commented on my s**t saying "you must be so scared right now😫". I remember sitting there, 5 hours deep, full of paclitaxel, herceptin and antihistamines and thinking "actually right now, I'm just bored s**tless😑". And so as I sat there, bald and bored and had a revelation: you can't be bored and scared at the same time.
It's a sound theory I have lived by ever since and is indeed something I apply in my horsemanship. Jamie is the latest benefactor of this theory!

Unlike the vast majority of horses that come to me, Jamie doesn't need to be kept moving regularly in order to stay interested. Rather, because everything is new to him, boredom just doesn't hit! Instead he's constantly being confronted with new things, new equals uncertainty, uncertainty equals worry.

So for the last few days, I've just repeated everything. Every answer he got right, I asked him to say it 5 times in a row and then at random times throughout the session- which is what he was doing before, except he was just screaming the only word he knew! He started recognizing patterns and predicting what I was going to ask and badda bing badda boom, we turned a massive corner. He stopped looking for a fight and instead had an almost smug "bet I know what you're gonna say next 😉" sort of attitude. Bit by bit, Jamie learned there were 10 possible answers and he knew them all by heart. Now we're getting to the point where he appears bored by my predictable questioning, bored by things that were scary 4 days ago. When something has become boring, that's when you know it's time to move up a level.

Hopefully as the weather allows, Jamie will come out of the roundpen and I will start ponying him off another horse; then he will see yet more new things to become bored and not afraid of!

Candid Equitation & Trail Riding

24/11/2025

20/11/2025

16/11/2025

13/11/2025

09/11/2025

08/11/2025

05/11/2025

04/11/2025

31/10/2025

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27/10/2025

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