Always Learning

Lesson day, again! This time, some dressage.

Guys, my pony...she's an absolute star. We started on a 20m circle (because guess who got dinged last weekend for not riding accurate 20m circles? Yep, me!) Name of the game was 20m circles everywhere, no markers to help...and when I finally got that nailed down, onwards to spiralling in to 15m and back out to 20. We also worked in collecting and extending, with pony working into the bridle and taking me. More than a few moments of amazing there!

Sparkly star pony is a little weird

Onwards to canter, focusing on a quality transition, and further refining the canter so I can ask her to extend and compress there too. It's a work in progress, but seriously, a lot of good moments. 

Finished with walk to canter transitions, on a small circle with haunches in, essentially forcing the pony to use that hind end in the transition. Body building for horses, we 're to do 4-5 reps each direction per ride for now to help her build strength for the grown up canter transitions we're looking for. We got an "8" this weekend on a movement involving medium walk to working trot transition and I'm told there are no excuses not to get those scores in all our transitions...that EC, she's just never satisfied! ;)

B felt soft and bendy and amazing. I could feel she was tired from our weekend adventures, so showing up to happily go to work was much appreciated and will be rewarded with a day off and an extra big breakfast delivered to her.  I couldn't be more happy with how she's progressing, both mentally and physically. Baby horses are super fun, but we're now at that fantastic place where potential is still there, but there is a bit more of a work ethic installed and also plenty of "fun" buttons starting to become fairly reliable.

Pictures are throwback to that time I downloaded a fun photo app and it somehow revamped all the pictures on my phone, maxing out my storage. Still, I do like some of the results, like the 'painting' above

Finally, the reason she gets a triple gold star - we had some adult lesson mates who are wonderful and fun and just starting out. For the trot work on the 20m circles, their instructions were to follow Bridget's lead, try to keep the same pace and path as us, try to keep the same distance away from us. That's a lot to do as a rider when you're first learning, so B's softness and focus was extra amazing considering we had horses up our butt and cutting us off and generally being everywhere but following us in a line at a reasonable distance. Our collected work was causing quite a pile up behind us and quite a bit of hilarity. We also had a random person riding who I think maybe thought they should follow along too? So we had a train of assorted horses and riders trying to follow us everywhere with varying levels of success :) So happy with B for keeping her focus on me. She actually seemed a bit proud to lead the parade, and I feel like it was probably a super fun lesson for all the horses and riders. 

 I pretty much grab a lesson spot wherever I can after work, so somethimes that means I end up alone, sometimes it means EC is lowering jumps for us while I tag along with the kids going prelim. My favorite is actually riding with the more beginner students - the enthusiasm and excitement is contagious :)