Using the trail.......

Using the trail is a phrase I don't here very often, but it is very important if you want your Equine Athlete to do the best they can do.  You as the rider pretty much dictate the speed but you must teach your horse to use the trail. It is a pretty easy concept, but it does take practice and keeping your horse focused and on task.  You can start to get the rhythm during training but you need some longer rides on a variable terrain trail to get good at it. A excellent trail for that is portions of the Tevis trail.  Any training ride is what you make of it, hard, easy, fast, training or conditioning.  

Using the trail is exactly that:  Get your horse used to changing gates easily and quickly.  You try and go as fast as you can safely go, asking the horse to use the gaits necessary to do that.  Don't trot where you should be in a canter etc. etc..  Sounds easy, but you must practice this at race pace.  

Race pace is generally a pace probably just a little faster or same pace that you would be racing at, because you don't go the whole distance you can practice a little faster.  Using the trail takes some practice for your horse to know what you want him to do, some horses will do this pretty naturally, some take more time to become efficient.

Never go any faster in a race then what you have practiced for.  For the most part it will be much slower, you will probably never do a real fast hill climb in a race but for sure will do it while conditioning..

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