Bali has settled well at the farm and is progressing through conditioning: walking, 30-40 minute hacks, trotting on an uphill mile track, and flat work. Vets approved gradual fitness increases. He's a calm rock-star with strong dressage but occasionally spooks around other horses. The plan is to build muscle through December, then travel to Aiken in mid-January for show preparation.
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This is a video for all the connections of Cooling Nutcracker, especially the owners, Robin, Chris Ticino, Liz Halliday, Debbie Halliday and Renee Lane. Well, guys, Bally's settled in well at the farm. He's an absolute legend, this horse. He's such a cool character. He's like a rock star at our place. So basically I sort of spent the first couple weeks just hacking. I think he'd sort of just come back into work. So for the first week or so he just did a lot of walking and after that I started doing a bit of trot work on our gallop track. And after talking to Liz's crew of vets and stuff, of just gently increasing his fitness levels up by each day by a couple minutes. And we got him up to sort of trotting on the track for 20 minutes and usually hacking for 30 or 40 minutes before or after. Once that is complete, we started doing a bit of flat work. The flat work I've been doing is very basic. This is one of our early rides together and he is beautiful to ride. Obviously. He's got amazing paces. He is. I will say, Liz did a great job of. He can be a little bit spooky and nervous of other horses and I never realized this, watching Liz compete him at all the competitions and whatnot, but he can be a little bit quirky with, you know, spooking at bits and pieces here and there, or he gets a bit nervous of horses coming straight at him, but sort of got the heads up that this was his personality. But he's obviously brilliant in the dressage. It's been very, very simple, simple training so far, like, I've hardly gone into sitting trot. It's more just getting a bit of a feel, building a bit of a partnership with him and getting used to how he goes. Obviously he's probably one of the best horses in the world. So I think the first month or two here is just working away at building a partnership. But he's. He looks very healthy. His weight's good, his feet look good, he's in great condition and yeah, just working away, getting to know each other. So we've basically been doing every day he goes for about a 30 or 40 minute trot, 30 or 40 minute hack and then about 20 minutes of flat work or 20 minutes of trotting on the track. Our track sort of got a bit of a hill on it, so it's a good footing and I feel like we're just slowly increasing his fitness and building up a bit of muscle on him because I think he's basically been on vacation since his fantastic run at the Olympics. I think as he gets further on in his program coming into December, I'll start sort of working him harder on the flat. But at the moment it's just easy work and very laid back. Of course, Stephanie's fallen in love with him and like I said, he's, he's in good shape, he looks healthy, his coat's good and he's a bit of a celebrity at the barn when people come visit. So this is our sort of trots, trot sort of circuit. We've got a. I think it's a mile long track and there's a quite a long uphill and he loves going out there. He goes around in sort of an extended trot the whole way. I think my big goal over the next weeks is to try and get him a little bit rounder in his work. I remember just watching Liz train away before Paris as she worked him with quite a round frame and a round neck. But we're sort of in this embryonic stages of getting to know each other so I haven't put too much pressure on him. So we've got a treadmill there and he sort of got the hang of it pretty quick actually. I'm pretty sure he's been on a treadmill before but with all Liz's horses we've just taken a week or so to do a bit of training on the treadmill and I think once he looks really, really safe on there, he'll probably go on there on this hill Circuit for 30 minutes every morning. And then he loves the pond. We've got an exercise pond. A few of the horses have been a bit nervous of getting in there, but Bali flew in there. Anyway, guys, things are going great with him. Obviously it's a huge honour and privilege having him here and, and feel really honoured to help out while Liz is coming back. We'll probably head to Aiken mid January and then I'll probably get together with Peter and Eric and start formulating a bit of a plan, taking him to a few shows. But at the moment things couldn't be going better with Bali. It.
