My little sister and I have been riding weekday mornings early before work. It has been so fun to get out there while it’s still relatively cool, the morning fog is out, and I think it helps us both get a good start on the day. Although we both missed it this morning, for the last five weeks, we’ve made it out there almost every weekday.
The first week or two, we used saddles to ride the horses, but since then (to save time, energy, and to work a little more on quality riding skills) we have been riding exclusively bareback. At first, we were a bit unstable, but we’ve both gotten much more stable and I have even gotten up to trotting and cantering bareback, which I thought was going to be hard, but actually isn’t.
Anyway, something I’ve always wanted to do is to learn how to ’swing up’ on a horse. I’ve seen others do it and have been told that virtually anyone can learn with tons of practice, so we thought we’d give it a go. While it isn’t impossible, it is quite challenging and it looks like we may have a fairly long road ahead to being very reliable at making it up on the horse. As a benchmark on how we look starting out this journey, I’ve included a link to a video of some of our first attempts to get up without any help. To get us practicing at least once a week, Fridays were dubbed “Swing-Up Fridays”, then later changed to “Fling-Up Fridays”, the change due to added alliteration value as well as more accurately describing what we look like. As we progress (and I’m pretty sure we will since I’m already better than is seen in the video), I’ll keep you updated.
It's always rewarding to find something and make it a personal challenge. From here on out, I'm going to make sure I'm always working on something either mself or someone else challenged me to do. And I'm not afraid of failing.
THE MOVIE
Couldn't figure out if I can attach video here or not, so it's just a link.