Clinic Recap: Elisa Wallace Day 1

I don’t share a lot of Annie’s derp under saddle because I often don’t have great pictures to capture it… This means that a lot of the time I’m pretty sure people don’t understand just how difficult of a time I have on her sometimes. Green horses aren’t easy and while Annie is seriously a super star she is still an opinionated little ginger. Being an amateur I have plenty of flaws and one of the biggest issues that I have is that I don’t use enough leg to back up any consistent contact. This leads to a very confused baby horse that gets frustrated with me and I don’t blame her! 

Day one with Elisa Wallace was flat work with poles. I didn’t anticipate how complicated it would end up being but it quickly called out all of our various weaknesses. For me this was the above leg to hand ratio and leaning… Always leaning. Eventually Annie and I were clearly not going to break the cycle on our own so Elisa hopped on. Yep that’s right – a 4* Olympic alternate rode my horse! 

It was really educational for me to watch what she was doing and the change was amazing. Obviously a rider of that caliper is going to make my horse look good but I really didn’t anticipate it to go the way it did. When I got back on Annie seemed to have a much better understanding of what I was hoping to accomplish. 

The exercises we worked on on Saturday definitely gave us all a lot of tools to work on at home! Next week I will share some diagrams.

After all of the clinic fun I was able to catch up with K who took the awesome pics of Saturday’s session. Later on I went to an awesome dinner with Lauren and her fiancé. Having blog friends across the country makes for really fun adventures! 

8 comments

  1. Rhiannon says:

    Clinics are so much fun. Sounds like a great learning experience and how awesome that an Olympian rode your horse! 🙂

  2. Olivia says:

    What a cool clinic. I’d love to ride with her some day.
    As a total aside: I don’t know why, but some of your pictures aren’t transferring through to feedly. They all load when I open your actual blog, but I just get the little broken image picture in feedly. It’s happened with a few of your posts, but not all and only to some of the pictures. Email me if you want a screen shot.

  3. Britt says:

    Oh my gosh, so jealous. I’m a huge fangirl of Elisa’s, and would love to ride with her. Can’t wait to hear more of your thoughts and some of the tools you picked up.

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