A-Hunting We Have Went

Several months after the fact, I’m finally getting around to sharing this little factoid:  Young Master Spike can now add foxhunting to his resume of experiences.

Hunting and eventing are a fairly easy fit together.  An event horse is usually already a) fit enough to cope with being out with the hunt for three to five hours, b) accustomed to galloping over open ground and uneven footing, c) trained to jump pretty much anything in his path, and d) won’t lose his marbles over the prospect of being (gasp) outdoors in nasty weather.  The traditional approach is that hunting teaches all these things which later translate well to eventing competition, but with Spike, I needed to take the opposite approach.  Only when he was eventing fairly successfully did I start to feel like perhaps he was capable of going out in the hunt field and not getting us both killed.

See, in his youth Spike was a bit of a space cadet.  Not in a bad way, exactly.  He just tended to be a smidge inattentive.  Didn’t always register where he was putting his feet.  Blundered in, cheerfully oblivious, where angels feared to tread.  It’s taken him ages to hone his attention span, but lots of hacking, some actual eventing, and a dash of endurance riding last summer (that’s a tale for another blog post) finally convinced me that he was ready to cope with riding to hounds.  And that’s rather a nice thing, because I hadn’t been hunting since, oh, sometime in the early 1990s, and while it’s never been the main focus of my riding (cough) career, such as it is, I do enjoy hunting’s unique set of challenges:  riding in company (a test of your horse’s manners, and, I suppose, your own), handling whatever sort of terrain is thrown at you, potentially getting the adrenaline rush of actually galloping after quarry.  Even observing all of hunting’s rather quaint and arcane rules:  it’s fun to wallow in that tradition, as generations of riders around the world before me have done.

Also, the pageantry of the whole thing is honest-to-gawd stirring.  In my humble opinion, there are few things as gorgeous in this world as a field of bays and grays and chestnuts, the hunt staff in their scarlet, and sleek foxhounds spreading out over a fall landscape.  Seriously, it’s just a stunning thing to witness (which is probably why every fake English pub in North America is adorned with fake Victorian hunting prints), and even more so when you’re playing your part in the panto.

I guess here is where the paragraph defending the barbarism of foxhunting needs to go.  Or maybe we could take it as read, gentle readers??  Here’s my take on the moral turpitude, unspeakable-in-pursuit-of-uneatable, argument (short version):  the Canadian brand of foxhunting is either drag-hunting (as in, only the fake scent of a fox’s urine was harmed in the making of this sport), or, if it’s “live”, the intent is to have a merry chase and then call the hounds off so we can chase the critter — whether fox or coyote — again the following week.  We’re not so well supplied with foxes, in particular, in Ontario that we can afford to do them in on a regular basis, and the business is more about sport these days here than about exterminating vermin on behalf of the local landowners.  Not that I don’t agree that said vermin probably has the flaming christ on a cracker scared out of itself while fleeing a pack of baying foxhounds, but unless it’s terminally stupid and gets itself cornered, it’s going to live to see dinner, and thus my conscience is fairly clear, cruelty-wise.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Should you disagree, please feel free to tell me I’m morally and ethically bankrupt, utterly revolting, and probably in favour of poisoning the earth with GMO crops and chemtrails, in the comments below. Because, you know, she with the most comments wins.

Besides, she added not at all defensively, many a time when foxhunting, you encounter no quarry at all.  It ends up being several hours of trotting from cornfield to cornfield, standing around a while in each while the hounds are cast and then reeled in by the huntsman, with a certain amount of passing the flask around.  Followed by a big potluck meal.  And really, what’s to complain about there?

The last horse I hunted was my big chestnut gelding, Sweeney Todd, who had been a reasonably successful racehorse yonks ago, before I introduced him to eventing.  He had more gallop and jump in him than I ever knew what to do with, thought the coops in the hunt field were childsplay (to be fair, Canadian foxhunters rarely encounter anything bigger than a metre tall; it’s not the death-defying version of hunting they have in Ireland, with those five-foot blind hedges and stone walls all over the damn place), and never quite understood the concept of guests staying conservatively and politely at the back of the field.  One of the cardinal sins of foxhunting is to pass the Master of Foxhounds (MFH), He or She Who Controls the Field (the “field” being the average schmoes following the hounds for a fee, as opposed to those employed to do so).  Passing the Master is simply Not Done.  And Toddy and I never did it … but only by virtue of my cramming Toddy`s firebreathing nostrils up the Master’s horse’s ass on a number of occasions.  The bit has not yet been designed that would have made a difference once the field got galloping.  As far as Toddy was concerned, the whole experience was a track flashback, avec canines … but in his defence, he was otherwise wonderful out there.  He was one of the most intelligent critters I’ve ever had the privilege of sitting on, and remarkably focused on self-preservation.  That, combined with extraordinary balance and nimbleness for his size, made him sure-footed and safe out there and I trusted him with my life.

I knew built-for-comfort-not-for-speed Spike would be a horse of a different colour.  He is a Thoroughbred, all appearances to the contrary, but never having gone to the track, he has no competitive instinct to speak of.  Getting to the front of the field is not something that would ever cross his mind, and he’s never needed anything stronger than a Dr. Bristol snaffle on cross-country. Spike is probably not Toddy’s intellectual equal, but he’s also not the obstreperous bastard that Toddy could be, and his congeniality, I figured, would be an asset when it came to standing around in cornfields with a bunch of other horses he’d never met before.  He’s reasonably good at handling his feet now, is pretty unflappable, and he’s solid as a brick shithouse, which is a useful quality for a hunt horse (horses with matchsticks for legs aren’t typically the best choice in questionable, mucky terrain, which it’s very likely you will encounter in late fall in Ontario).

The biggest question, really, was how Spike would react to the sight and sound of hounds.  This isn’t really something you can prepare a horse for ahead of time.  Sure, you can ask your neighbour to let her Schnauzerdoodle loose, I guess, but 12 couple of foxhounds is another matter entirely.  (Um, for the uninitiated, one always describes the hounds as “hounds”, never never never as dogs, and they are always counted in pairs.  Twelve couple is 24 hounds; some hunts use more, some less, depending on the day — it’s the huntsman’s call.  Not sure why the couple thing; it is Written, as they say.)  Anyway, when hound music (um, that’s when they all start baying and howling at the same time, as when they find a scent) starts up, it can be unnerving for some horses, as can the sudden appearance of a working hound from out of the brush and right under their legs, which happens regularly.  And if there’s one Cardinal Sin worse than passing the Master, it’s your horse kicking or stepping on a hound.  That, my friend, will force you to hang your head in utter disgrace forevermore.

So I’m pleased to report that while Young Master Spike did, indeed, find hounds darting under his nose and his heels rather unnerving at first — and at one point raised a front foot as if he were considering teaching the cheeky buggers a lesson — he was very obedient about putting down said hoof when I growled at him, and subsequently earned himself a gold star for rookie hound manners.  He stood politely at the checks (okay, I had to circle him a bit at first), pulled my arms out of their sockets only occasionally (and stopped when I reminded him of his balance and his manners by asking for a few steps of shoulder-in), and dutifully put his head down and kept trotting when we were hit by periodic bouts of (ugh) sleet.  At one point, we were even encouraged by the hunt secretary to keep up with the field a little more closely!  Now that’s something that never would have happened with Toddy …

Alas, the territory we were hunting that day in November was a new one for the hunt club, and there was not a single coop to jump.  So I can’t really report on Spike’s manners in that situation (past experience tells me that you often have to line up, single file, to jump such obstacles in the hunt field, which can lead to a certain amount of hysteria with some horses).  He did, however, comport himself with honour when we found ourselves booking it across an open field in pursuit of a lone coyote and a lone hound (not sure where the rest of the pack had buggered off to!).  Viewing the quarry is considered something of a rare bit of luck, and we indeed had a lovely view as we plunged across a hayfield, more or less keeping up with the field, though to be honest I was more concerned with scanning the ground for groundhog holes (of which there were several) than admiring the critter’s retreating fur.

The coyote gave us the slip, the sleet got heavier (though hunting does at least convince you that wearing a black wool riding jacket isn’t always utterly impractical), and when the majority of the field said, “Want. Hot. Beverage.”, Spike and I concurred and headed back for my trailer, while the hunt staff turned the other direction to gather up the scattered hounds.  

We didn’t stay for the hunt breakfast, as I wasn’t confident about leaving Spike alone in the trailer in a parking lot … that’s something that we’ll have to practice, aided considerably by the fact that I managed over the winter to acquire a larger trailer with a box stall arrangement in front for his comfort and convenience.  Next year, we’ll partake. But overall, we didn’t disgrace ourselves.  Spike didn’t set the world on fire, but he was Mr. Congeniality and that, in my humble opinion, makes him worth his weight in gold.

Many thanks to the Toronto and North York Hunt (the second-oldest hunt in North America, by the by) for the invitation to hunt as a guest; I look forward to joining you again.  Now that I have a bonafide hunt horse.

Ten Habits of Highly Effective Riders, for Dummies

Over at this blog (the subtitle for which rather confusingly defines it as being about “politics, men, Detroit, horses, and prayer” — um, okay), author Nancy Kotting has written a post defining the “Ten Habits of Highly Effective Dressage Riders”.  Being an inveterate Facebook-link-follower, I read through it.  It’s a pretty good list.  There’s a lot I like about it.  But in the usual manner of those devoted to dress-AHHHGGE (soft g, please, peasants), it’s … well, a little stuffy.  An eensy bit wordy and idealistic and brimming with the supposed nobility of the Classical Art of Dressage Which Is Always Capitalized.  All of which can get a smidge tiresome when you are a no-bullshit, “Give It Some Wellie” A-type eventer who’s aware that the vast majority of people calling themselves dress-AHHHGGE riders are total wannabes on an unending Quest For the Perfect Twenty Metre Circle.

(Is that harsh?  It’s probably harsh.  But then again this is a snarky blog.  Here be dragons.  Sorry.)

Because I’m forever and ever an editor at heart, regardless of my current shortage of employment in this area, I decided to re-write the post for the real world (and all riders as opposed to just those OCD and flatwork-obsessed), make it all a little more succinct and practical and easy to remember.  So without further ado, here’s the For Dummies version:

10.  There are no failures, only Teachable Moments.  AKA:  Every horse will teach you something.

9.  Leave your baggage in the car.  Your job blows?  Your boyfriend is bumping uglies with your yoga instructor?  Your parents won the lottery and absconded for Argentina, leaving you a diabetic Himalayan cat and 43 Murder, She Wrote VHS tapes?  Your horse is supposed to be your escape from all things wretched.  Don’t take it out on him.  Nothing productive is going to come of broadcasting your frustration, your rage, or your fear while in the saddle.  Admittedly, it’s a tall order, but one of the most valuable skills a rider can learn is the ability to let it go (or at least stuff it all into a remote broom-closet in a back corner of your medulla oblongata and slam the door).  When you put a foot in a stirrup, you have to Live in the Now, at least until you dismount.  (Or as an instructor of mine once told me, “The Pope has just come by in his Popemobile?  Doesn’t matter; carry on.”)  Essentially:  leave the tension in your skull and don’t let it reach your muscles.

8.  Be the boss mare.  Horses like a nice, clear hierarchical structure.  They like having a calm, confident leader to follow.  Be that leader, be firm but kind and not a pyschopath, and your horse will trust you to the ends of the earth.

7.  Corollary:  Don’t be a pussy.  It’s oft observed that the trouble with parents today is that they want to be a friend to their kids instead of a leader and a role model.  Similarly, an animal who outweighs you by 1100 lbs or so can easily lean towards taking advantage of that little disparity if you prove to have the constitution of last week’s Yorkshire pudding.  I do not confuse horse ownership with parenting, and I hate the “fur kids” mindset, but the Boss Mare job description is accurate.  It means that you don’t let your horse use you as his personal scratching post, you don’t let him run all over you because he doesn’t like those horrid, restricting cross-ties, and you don’t let him abuse your farrier or your vet, either.  By all means, spoil your beastie within reason (I do not subscribe, for example, to the notion that hand-feeding treats is an appalling breach of discipline — horses are enormously food-motivated and I, for one, am not going to give up that powerful a training tool), but set firm boundaries on safe behaviour and be consistent about those rules.  As my own critters hear repeatedly, well-mannered horses live long and happy lives.  Nasty, dangerous ones, not so much.

6.  End each ride on a positive note.  Some days, that might mean you settle for a half-way obedient halt.  It’s good to have a plan for every ride — otherwise many people tend to just putter aimlessly around the arena for 15 minutes and then give up when ennui sets in — but when you’re dealing with horses, you can’t be rigid about said plan.  Maybe you began your ride hoping to work on your canter transitions, but your horse is being such a space cadet that you realize you’re going to be lucky just to keep the shiny side up.  So throttle back, adjust your expectations, accept what your horse is able to offer mentally and physically on that day, and finish up with something you know he can do well, no matter how basic that might be.  Horses are short on rational thought, but aches and pains, opinions, and emotions, they have in abundance, and any of those plus whatever’s going on in the environment can influence your ride.  It’s okay.  Tomorrow is another day.

5.  There are no short-cuts.  It takes work to produce a horse properly, regardless of discipline.  Skimp on the basics and it will come back to bite you in the ass somewhere down the line.  Try not to get ahead of yourself and expect things from your horse that he has neither the strength nor the understanding to offer you yet.  Stop bitching and get your tender tush out the door every single day and do the work.  It’s amazing how horses respond to consistency.

4.  There’s more than one way to skin a cat.  It’s true that the basic principles of riding are the basic principles of riding because, by and large, they work.  They’ve done so for hundreds of years.  But horses are individuals, and not every critter responds to the old Training Pyramid exactly according to the equitation manuals of old.  Avoid the cliched definition of insanity, and be prepared to change it up if something’s not working.  Horse just isn’t getting it when you ask for leg-yield down the long side of the arena?  Try asking on a circle instead.  Be flexible enough to approach some problems by the back door. If it’s true that the brilliant horses are always a little quirky, then why do we expect them all to be conformists?  You just have to keep your eyes on the prize (in other words, the end result has to be somewhere in the vicinity of correct).

3.  Don’t be your horse’s biggest handicap.  Be fit enough to do the work.  Gawd knows I’m nobody’s poster child for fitness, but I make an effort, on the theory that you really can’t ask your horse to give his athletic best if you are his biggest impediment.  See #5, No Short-Cuts.  If you can’t sit a trot, if your energy level fizzles before you ride that good downward transition, if your hands aren’t steady enough to allow your horse to trust that he’s not going to get whacked in the molars — in short, if you don’t spend enough time in the saddle to be solid and confident and have a truly independent seat, you really can’t expect Trigger to pick up the slack.  And the reality is, riding one horse once a day doesn’t cut it for most people.  Either find more horses to ride, or do some cross-training of your choice, both cardio and strength work.  (Oh, and it’s “No Stirrups November” — remember all that stuff you used to do in Pony Club, and don’t make yourself do anymore?)

2.  The cure for everything is forward.  I subscribe to this to the point where it’s on my business cards (the riding instructor ones, not the editing/writing ones).  When in doubt, close your leg and kick on!  If your horse is truly, truly working from your leg into your hand then his options for being naughty are minimized and productive things will likely start to happen.

1.  The horse comes first.  I was taught this from an early age:  feed your horse before you feed yourself, ensure his well-being before your own.  It’s not enough to be a competent rider.  You need to be a knowledgeable horseperson too.  Understand that your horse’s welfare trumps all other considerations — like, say, ribbons, convenience, expense, and having a life.  If you didn’t sign up for that, I hear ATVs are sorta fun.

Well.  That really wasn’t any more succinct than the original post.  Thanks for the inspiration anyway, Nancy.  

 

 

Project Mojo

Been trying to get my mojo back.

Turning 50 is one of those things that messes with your head.  It’s not that the body is actually significantly more decrepit than it was at 49.  But that number, man.  It feels like a 16 tonne weight.

Truth be told, my mojo has been a bit elusive for a few years now.  In my case, what I mean is that I’ve become something of a chickenshit in the saddle.  Oh, I still break and ride silly young horses, and I still go out hacking, and I don’t need a fence around me to feel secure when I’m schooling, and I frequently ride by myself (cel phone in pocket) because if I always waited for someone else to turn up I’d never bloody ride at all ….

And I still feel like I’ve got a secure galloping position, and I still jump.  But when you’ve been out of the competitive world for a few years, and decrepitude is creeping up on you, and you mostly ride on your own, and there’s often no-one around to move the jumps around for you (and you get seriously fed up with mounting and dismounting and mounting and dismounting to do it yourself) … well, both the frequency and the quality of the schooling over fences begins to suffer a bit.

Consequently, jumps that used to look pretty do-able to you, start to look positively formidable.  You ‘lose your eye’, so to speak.

I’m not claiming I was ever a hero out there on a cross-country course.  I have friends who are utterly fearless … year after year, they’re competing at the highest levels and no fence seems to be too massive.  I admire and envy that, but recognize that my mojo, even at its shiniest and most splendid, has limitations, and more importantly, so does my athleticism.  (I like to think that my common sense, on the other hand, runs pretty deep…. which is perhaps why Preliminary level, which is just a weensie bit death-defying, as opposed to utterly and insanely death-defying Advanced level, is as far as I’ve gotten in the sport.)

Eventing, after all, is a little more extreme than some of the other equestrian disciplines.  Not gonna claim it’s as mind-bogglingly extreme as, say, steeplechase racing (I’ve always maintained that the advantage of my sport over that one is there’s relatively little risk that you’ll collide with another 500 kg animal hurtling around at the same time you are), but still, on the hard-core side, and it tends to attract Type A adrenaline junkies who lean towards the ‘live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse’ philosophy of life.  Many before me have pointed out that it’s practically the only sport where you’re required to have your medical information strapped to your arm at all times.

If the corpse thing doesn’t come to pass, though, it’s generally acknowledged that, at some point, most eventers start to become dimly aware of their own mortality, and become DQs (dressage queens) or take up some other (ahem) gentler art, like (cough) combined driving.  Though lately, riders like Mark Todd (age 57) and Andrew Nicholson (age 52) are bucking that trend … something in the water in New Zealand, perhaps?

I’m not ready to become a DQ.  Much as I enjoy dressage (and seriously, I do — no, really), if it were the only thing I did on a horse, I would eventually go postal and take out a Wal-Mart with a semi-automatic something-or-other.  And so would my beasties.  (I can easily picture Parker with an Uzi.)  One of the nicest things about eventing is that horses rarely get sour, because they always have something different to work on.  Flatwork one day, jump the next, gallop sets the third, go out on a hack the fourth, have a cross-country school the fifth, lather, rinse, repeat, not necessarily in that order.  It’s good for the brain.

So … not ready to give it up, but feeling the athletic equivalent of my biological clock ticking this spring (oddly, I never felt one when it came to my uterus, but that’s another tale), I cast my gaze upon Young Master Spike, grazing in radiant obliviousness (obliviosity?) in his field this spring, and declared, “Enough is enough.”

Spike, who is 11, hasn’t been to a show since he was five, and probably hasn’t missed it, helpfully raised his head and said, “Huh?”

For the past half-decade, one stupid thing or another has kept us from competing.  Injury to him, injury to me, work conflicts, and general destitution chief among them.  (The destitution hasn’t changed, but let’s face it, I’ve really never let that stop me before.)  But I’m sound at the moment (and have even lost some weight chasing around after clients and their ponies, so feeling slightly less lumpy and ungraceful than the last few springs — plus my show clothes actually fit again, or are even slightly loose, which is a bonus), Spike is sound but getting no younger, and I figured if I paid up all my memberships, I would feel a sense of obligation to actually compete.

Time to kick my mojo in the ass.

Honestly, I hadn’t jumped a cross-country fence in almost five years.  Even my knock-down fences at home had rarely inched above the 2’6″ level.  So the first order of business was to arrange a schooling session at a nearby farm.  A friend and fellow coach indulged me and my confession that I was feeling, ahem, rusty and ancient, and pointed me at some nicely inconsequential logs and ditches and things on a June afternoon, saying encouraging things, and pretty soon the muscle memory started to kick in.  Just a little.

It helps that Spike is a Steady Eddie sort of character.  Nowhere near as athletic or dynamic as my previous partner, Toddy, but at the same time not nearly the obstreperous bastard Toddy could be, either.  Despite his lack of mileage, Spike is dead honest … if you point him at an obstacle and halfway have your shit together, he will jump.  It might not be pretty, but he will go, bless his little cotton socks.  I was counting on that.

I set my sights on competing at Entry level (max height 2’9″), to begin with.  Which, yes, is mildly embarrassing for someone who’s been at it as long as I have.  But while Spike is getting to the point where he’s pretty broke on the flat, thanks to my reluctant-dragon-ness he was a little behind on his jumping skills and I didn’t want to overface him right off the top and damage that honesty of his … and also, he might be a Thoroughbred but he doesn’t have that baseline of fitness that a TB who has actually raced, always seems to maintain.  (This is my subtle way of saying he is built like a Sherman tank and is likely the most difficult TB in the world to get fit.)

So, Entry level.  Not because I was still feeling like a chickenshit.  No sir.

Our first attempt, I’m sad to report, was a non-starter.  I selected a horse trials at Wit’s End, a farm a mere two concessions over from mine, thinking that would be a lovely place to start.  Spike disagreed.  I came home from teaching on Friday evening, ready to ride and then bathe and braid and hook up the trailer and do all that show-prep stuff that was as natural as breathing, once upon a time … and Spike was a gimp.

He hadn’t been bothered by his sticky left stifle in more than four years, but having developed an unerring instinct for detecting when a $200 entry fee has been mailed, he just couldn’t resist, I guess.  I ended up spending the day at Wit’s End helping with the timing in the stadium ring.  And Spike was sound by Monday.

Mercifully, he has held together just fine since then.  We re-routed to a ‘short course’ at nearby Equus 3D Farm the following week.  A short course is sort of a hybrid competition, more casual than a proper horse trials, and a nice way to ease in.  You ride a dressage test, as per usual, and then jump a few stadium fences, leave the ring, and jump a few cross-country fences.  Spike was nervous, a bit neurotic, screamed his head off throughout his dressage test and was momentarily startled at the transition between coloured poles and solid logs out in the hayfield … but his honesty kicked in and he improved as he went ’round.  We took home a sixth-place ribbon.  Yay us.

Mojo:  still a work in progress.

Since then we’ve done two more horse trials, two cross-country clinics, and a dressage lesson for good measure, and it’s starting to come together.  At Will O’Wind in July, I felt Spike looking for the next fence and taking me to it for the first time, instead of landing and going, “Now are we done?  No?  There’s another one?”, all stutters and starts.  That’s what a good event horse should do, what Toddy always did.  Woe betide you if you pointed Toddy at the wrong fence, because he would lock on the line like an electromagnet and it would take a herculean effort to pull him away.

It’s an amazing feeling when a green horse starts to understand the job and love it.  (Even if the green horse in question is 11.)

I got some pictures back from the first few competitions, and it convinced me of something:  them fences ain’t so intimidating after all.  Spike’s just stepping over them.  They’re …. little.

Why, mojo, that’s where you’ve been hiding, you slippery little bastard.

So it’s time to upgrade.  All the way from Entry level to Pre-Training (gasp).  Where the fences are max three foot.  But I had planned, if all went well, to do one event a month this summer (that being all my budget can withstand) and upgrade by the end of the season — so Spike and I are on target.  Next year, we can start out at Pre-Training and finish up going Training level, at which point perhaps I will no longer be mortified.

There have been a number of little things to be proud of, thus far in Project Mojo.  Spike is becoming a horse show veteran.  A couple of months ago he was screaming and freaking out … now he gets off the trailer and says, “Where’s my hay net?” and is learning not to get his panties in a bunch.  My student-slash-groom, Sarah, is much relieved.

Our dressage scores are steadily improving — not that an Entry level test gives him anything much to do, but mentally, Spike has not been ready to show off his fancier moves in front of an audience just yet.  At the beginning of the summer it was all I could do just to keep him in the ring.  Now he’s over that and I’m starting to be able to really ride him through.

And I think that I’m more relaxed, and subsequently riding better, than I sometimes did in the past.  Being one of those A type personalities, I used to produce enough adrenaline at an event to light a small city, and that tended to make my legs creep up the saddle flaps and my lower back go rigid … and though admittedly, that was when I was showing at the Prelim level and there might have legitimately been a fence or two to be worried about at the time, now I’m finding that the absurdity of starting over at Entry level is allowing me to just laugh about it all.  I’m not getting nearly as wound up as I used to about the whole showing thing, and it feels good.

(I could have tossed the Rocky theme in here or something, i suppose, but I’d rather have some more Austin Powers.)

Focus on Brainbuckets: International Helmet Awareness Day

This is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart.  I’m exceedingly fond of my thus-far-intact skull, and as an eventer and a coach, I’m something of a helmet Nazi.  So I’m happy to spread this message to my stalwart, happy handful of readers.  Though I know I’m preaching to the choir, cuz you’re all smart like that, right?

RIDERS4HELMETS ANNOUNCES INTERNATIONAL HELMET AWARENESS DAY 2012

Helmet Manufacturers to offer discounts globally through participating retailers

Lexington, KY — Riders4Helmets.com has teamed up with leading helmet manufacturers to host International Helmet Awareness Day 2012 on Saturday June 9th.

Building on the success of National Helmet Awareness Day 2010 (USA) and International Helmet Awareness Day 2011, participating retailers all over the world will be offering discounts on helmets to equestrians on this day.

“We are delighted to be in our third year of hosting and organizing International Helmet Awareness Day,” said Lyndsey White, Riders4Helmets. “The campaign was founded two years ago as a direct result of Olympian Courtney King-Dye’s accident with the aim of educating equestrians on the benefits of wearing a properly fitting, secured and certified helmet. We are proud to dedicate this years’ event to Courtney.”

International Helmet Awareness Day is not just an opportunity for equestrians to purchase a helmet at a special one-time discount, more importantly it is an opportunity for equestrians to be educated. “Riders4Helmets will therefore be live-streaming ‘Get Educated’ webinars via Riders4Helmets.com on Saturday June 9th, in which equestrians will be able to ask a variety of experts real-time” questions.

The webinars will feature experts in fields such as:  traumatic brain injury and concussion; psychology (why equestrians choose not to wear a helmet); neurophysiotherapy; helmet manufacturers; traumatic brain injury survivors; leading equestrians (including Olympians); and helmet testing agencies. Riders4Helmets will announce the confirmed line-up of participants at Riders4Helmets.com prior to June 9th.

The educational aspect of International Helmet Awareness Day will be supported by participating retailers, many of whom have already made plans to offer educational events in their stores on June 9th.

Helmet brands that have committed involvement in International Helmet Awareness Day 2012 to date include: Samshield, Troxel, Charles Owen, GPA, Aegis (Devon-Aire), Pegasus, Tipperary, Ovation, IRH, One K and KEP Italia in the USA & Canada. In the UK, Charles Owen, Champion Hats, Gatehouse and LAS have all signed up.

“We are grateful to the helmet manufacturers for their continued support of this important event,” said Chad Mendell, Riders4Helmets. “The Riders4Helmets campaign has continued to grow on a global level, as we hope will International Helmet Awareness Day.”

Retailers who wish to participate in the event may register by visiting www.riders4helmets.com/ihad/retailer-information/. Retailers are encouraged to register prior to May 28th, 2012 in order to ensure that they receive educational materials in time for the event. Late registrations will however, still be accepted through June 8th.

Equestrians may visit www.riders4helmets.com/ihad/ to learn more about International Helmet Awareness Day and to search for participating retailers by name or geographic location. Equestrians are encouraged to visit www.riders4helmets.com/ihad/ the morning of June 9th, 2012, to view the most current update, as participating retailers continue to be added.

Individuals or organizations wishing to hold an event to recognize International Helmet Awareness Day may email admin@riders4helmets.com for helmet awareness graphics and educational brochures. “You can participate and show your support just by wearing a helmet on June 9th, no matter whether you are trail riding, showing or competing” said White.

For more information on the Riders4Helmets campaign, visit www.riders4helmets.com. You can also follow the campaign at www.facebook.com/riders4helmets and http://twitter.com/riders4helmets.

Riders4Helmets was founded in early 2010 after Olympic dressage rider Courtney King Dye was seriously injured in a riding accident. King Dye, who remained in a coma for a month following her accident, was not wearing a helmet at the time of the accident, and is still undergoing rehabilitation.

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