My adventures
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Forgetting your past: not standing of the animals you worked with when you were young
This is a very sad story that Yannis might not want me to share with you, but I would love to, and since I was there and this is my blog, I will talk about it. It is really very sad to be offended like that about your horses by people who grew with them and used them for their work and transportation when they were at your age, which means in many cases that they even slept next to them every night! You see, cars are faster and cleaner. So, here’s the story. One night, we were escorting a pair of Australian tourists to the town centre. It is…
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British Para Dressage Winter Championships, Nottinghamshire, UK
On 15 March, I will hopefully go to Vale View Equestrian Centre in Nottingham, to watch my first para dressage show (actually it’s my fist horse show, and I am proud of this as a person with a disability). It is a very inspiring thing to see a disabled person who, starting from a local Riding for the Disabled centre reaches the point of representing their country in a difficult discipline, such as dressage. I am going through my university’s riding club, so I don’t know much of planning stuff, but if you would like to attend, you might want to contact the centre (Click here to visit their website).…
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Are horses more responsive than people think? Helping Zimas help himself
This is just one of the numerous other blogs I want to write to support the view that our equine friends are clever creatures, who don’t just respond to commands they have learned during their schooling. After my first horse riding lesson, I read some general things about horses and I remember a text saying that the equine brain has been found able to perform quite complex processes, even solving crosswords. Some people think it’s hilarious to treat a horse like a human and find the image of me interacting with a horse like that quite funny. But some notable experiences I have had prove that we have to look…
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Instructions for equestrians: How to completely ruin a salsa class!
“If I was a dressage horse I would have tilted you by now”, I joyfully yelled at our salsa teacher in the students’ hall tonight after the first latin song. Today there was a strong mood for fast tempos and continuous spinning, so we suffered a lot of that for about two hours. Everyone was just trying to learn the steps. I was imagining a dressage horse doing horsey dancing stuff, well, while I was trying to learn the steps as well! I was turning, being turned, pushed, held and the like, all that the Cubans do, but today’s session was just a huge disaster for me -and the…
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A week without equestrianism…
As a student, I have quite many balls to catch every single day. Many obligations, including a postgraduate degree. And the equestrian club is far enough. And I can’t always book a place with the Uni’s riding club. If you haven’t grown up with horses or simply equestrianism is not your day job, it’s normal to struggle sometimes to fit the sport in your schedule, amongst the other, not less important activities. So, how does this week pass? Badly. Because: I can’t concentrate. I always think about horses and my missed sessions I am anxious about sticking to the sport I am simply depressed and I groan about everything I get angry when…
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Rising trot tutorials
Who has watched me riding knows it well; my sitting trot needs improvement. Desperately. And I know it well; I go mad every time I think about this. And my instructors both in Crete and England are often frustrated. Why? Why can’t I trot like other beginners who also ride just once a week? So, my instructors have reached the following conclusions: My legs need to get stronger. I think too much when I trot. More thinking than feeling. I rise up to the sky, which means that it takes me ages to return to the saddle (here’s some difference. It took me ages to rise from the saddle in…