king of the mountain

Or princess of the hill. In all my blah-ness, I often can't see the big picture. But thanks to the uplifting comments and suggestions from Carrot Top, Martine, 4RRanch , Camryn, Dreaming, and Danielle, I pulled myself out of my self-pity funk and put Shyloh to work.

I dragged some poles out the the round pen. I set a single pole up and a set of three up on the opposite side. What an hilarious disaster to start with! Here is my drawing of the initial path Shy took. She acted like she had never seen a pole before and refused to go over them!

Can you follow this? Try this pattern times 3!

But once she got over herself, she was great! I had Shy do a ton of trotting in each direction and I could see her working her rear end. Being able to see makes a huge difference to me.

Work it!

Work it real good!

After that, a light bulb popped over my head. Dreaming had mentioned using the manure pile as a hill,  but it is not high right now and it is so yucky. But we do have asphalt hills!

I am still not sure what they are for, but hey, we were gonna try them out. Shy did go up them once with a tire half attached to her!

Shy surprised me by actually going up the hills without much problem. I could tell she was really working herself to get up the hills so we did not spend much time on those. These options were much more fun than being in the arena!

Climbing up! We can do it!

At the top! Made it! Tallest Haffie in all the land!

In between hills, she wants to take the short route.

At the top of the tallest hill!

We did the hills again another day and Shy is getting more and more comfortable with them. We can go over all three hills without having to stop at the top and survey all they land around us. The first time we did the hills, we did a there and back, there and back. I counted that as two sets. The next time we did three sets. I plan to keep increasing our sets to work those muscles! And bonus. . .it is a workout for me too!

Princess of the hill! She can keep an eye on all she owns from here

Gotta go down down down down. . . 

Shy went to the other side of the mountain to see what she could see. . .dirt bikers.