Dreams, Goals & Learning to Read Maps

As a teenager, I would go out for 2-3 hour rides from a local stables over the local Ashdown Forest most Saturdays. Although I usually rode the same horse – a beautiful palomino gelding called Whisky – it wasn’t quite the same as having my own horse. As exciting as it was, being part of an organized ride effectively meant that I was pretty much a passenger for most of the time – the horses knew exactly where they were going, where the gallops were, where they ended (phew!) and when they were on their way back home again.

My dream was to have my own horse, pack up a saddle bag and ride out for hours on our own. So the horse I ended up buying, Sol, was bought with that exactly in mind – she’d been a trail horse at a Parelli-friendly trekking centre on Dartmoor, one of the UK’s national parks. Of course, once I got her I realized how much I didn’t know about horses… The reality didn’t quite match the dream – so there was some work to be done.

As I progressed through the Parelli Levels program, I very quickly realized that one of the things I wanted to do was share the incredible things I was learning with other people, so I set my sights on becoming a Licensed Parelli instructor. My progress in some areas has been pretty good – I completed the Fast Track course last year, and I now have my Level 4 in Liberty and Level 3 On Line… but if you’ve read any of my previous blogs, you may know that my biggest challenge has been with riding.

All the while though, I’ve had this voice in my head saying “but you have to get your Level 3 Freestyle to become an instructor…” And soon, it became all about the Level. The pressure was on, and despite learning as much as I could theoretically about riding, and making some okay but slow progress in practice (I passed my Level 2 Freestyle a couple of years ago), I couldn’t see as much in fun in riding as I did with On Line and Liberty… which of course was counter-productive when it came to increasing my confidence and making progress. Not to mention that I’d lost sight of my original dream…

Sol and me as we head down the trail.

So the question I began to ask myself last year was: how can I find the FUN in riding again so that I want to ride? To cut a long thought-process short, the answer was to go back to where I’d started and just get back out riding on trails for fun. That shift in focus and attitude really started to change things for the better, and I now regularly get the urge to go and ride – yippee!

But even better than that, I found that a group of my local Parelli friends also share one of my dreams: to ride the South Downs Way. This national trail runs for 100 miles (160km) from Eastbourne in East Sussex to Winchester in Hampshire, taking in 13,600 feet (4150m) of ascent and descent along the way. It offers a mixture of chalk downland (which is ironically the ‘high’ part), rolling farm and woodland, with stunning views across the south of England on one side, and to the sea on the other. It is one of only two of our national trails here in the UK that you can ride from end to end (the other being the 200 mile long Pennine Bridleway). Many people walk and cycle the South Downs Way, and while there are plenty of people who ride parts of it, there are only a few stories I’ve found of people riding the entire trail on horseback.

It’s a big goal, but as a group we are happy to take the time it takes and prepare, prepare, prepare! We recently had our first informal get-together with horses and tried out a local trail together. It was only a short ride, but it was a fun and successful first step. We have our first proper planning meeting in a couple of weeks – there’s a lot to think about when it comes to planning such a long journey, map reading being a key aspect – and I’ve been avidly watching the new Hit the Trail DVD. We’re all taking part in an Advanced Trail Riding workshop with 3-star Parelli instructor Terri Martinus and 2-star instructor Ruth Carlyle later this spring which will also help us prepare and take us out ‘up on the Downs’ as a herd.

So that’s my goal. I’m not sure how long it will take, that doesn’t really matter. The fun will be preparing for it with like-minded savvy friends. We’ll do chunks of the trail as practice and just get out there. And I know that all while I’m doing this, I’ll be clocking up hours in the saddle and moving towards being able to achieve my Level 3 Freestyle (minus my direct line attitude towards it). As Pat says, take care of your horsemanship, and it will take care of you.

So I hope to bring you updates on our progress over the coming weeks and months. I’m inspired by other Parelli friends who ride out lots, and particularly those in the UK who’ve done the 78-mile ride with Medina and Karen from Brandy House Farm on the Shropshire borders to the west coast of Wales – you can read all about that on page 20 of the May 2011 issue of Savvy Times (you can download this from the magazines archive on Parelli Connect) and there are some great photos on Tumblr too, here and here. Maybe Sol and I will ride that one day too!

The view from the South Downs Way near Ditchling Beacon.

Tagged as: Beth Barling, Parelli Media