"The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think." (Edwin Schlossberg) Immersion is about creating a context in which riders can think. The property includes swimming pool, conference room, guest house and of course, all the necessary equestrian facilities. People will be able to bring their horse and Manchester will be used as a school horse.

The program includes lodging, (guest house), training session, video analysis, technical discussions in the conference room. With access to video documents, a horse's skeleton and all scientific documents related to the training session or the discussion.

At tea time, casual conversations around the pool and later during dinner will add anecdotes and references furthering your ability to create as a rider, a context in which the horse can think. 

The program is a full board for both, the horse and the rider. We will start with two riders and horses at the time for two days. With experience we will see if four and six days are realistic.

We also plan a special program for massage therapists which, with the help of the work in hand, will offer the unique opportunity to set the therapies into motion. 

Jean Luc and Helyn

Quolibet was an ordinary jumper who, due to his mind and his heart, achieved out of the ordinary performances. Quolibet was comfortable over four foot jumps but he was athletically challenged when the jumps were higher than five feet. Quolibet's greatness was his courage; he always tried. Sometimes he took off and improvised once he was flying over the jump. His faculty of improvisation allowed him to pull us out of some difficult situations. At Punchestown for instance, it was a jump that was basically impossible to rationalize. It was a shallow ditch followed by a round shaped bank, another shallow ditch followed by a similar bank, and third shallow ditch, a third bank and a large oxer over a fourth shallow ditch. The problem was that the distance between the top of one bank to the top of the other bank was too long to allow a jump. One solution was trotting up and down the banks and the ditches. The other was jumping the ditch then landing halfway up on the side of the bank. Then descend halfway through the middle of the other side, jump the ditch landing uphill on the other bank and so on. The trot solution was safe but the horse needed to have a lot of power to propel himself over the large oxer since the forelegs would be lower than the hind legs for the take off. Quolibet did not have the power to do it this way. I opted for the canter solution. He took off over the oxer the best he could but realizing that his hind legs would not make it, he twisted his vertebral column placing his hind legs excessively sideways.  

The Irish flavor of the story is that while all the riders from other countries were scratching their heads trying to figure out how to negotiate the "question," the Irish team was telling us that they were jumping this type of combination all the time while fox hunting. Ironically, one after the other, the Irish riders all had trouble on this specific combination and as a result, they were forced to change the music. They were now telling us that the cross country course was extremely difficult because the course designer worked on the course in the afternoon and he is always drunk after lunch.

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Coatesville, PA  19320

610 486 0708

JoAnne@PlumShadeFarm.com

Contact: JoAnne