Plugging Along

Well, not too much to report. I rode Jetta yesterday and worked her little tushy off. It was a good ride, only two bucks and one rear, lol. Sad that I'm measuring our success in those terms, but oh well. Even with her bad behaviour at the walk, our canter has been amazing. We've been doing a lot of circles for the last couple months and are finally starting to venture out of that. Doing shoulder-fore at the canter has been invaluable in keeping Jetta balanced and light. I'm starting to enjoy the canter again and the transitions have been absolutely lovely!

We did a lot of work in the walk since that is where she gets all nasty. Lots of transitions within the walk - collected to extended to free walk and back again. I knew it would piss her off, which is exactly why I did it. I was very strict with her and any indication that she was going to kick out or pin her ears at me was swiftly reprimanded. By the end she was perfect.

It was quite a trial though trying to work with four other horses in the arena, geez! I'm excited to move to a quieter barn. We had the reiner riding, my dressage friend, a barrel racer and then a random rider. Talk about hard to ride - the barrel racer had two barrels set up in the middle of the arena, the reiner was doing sliding stops all over the place and the other three of us were just trying not to collide!

I went back up to the barn this morning, but didn't have enough time to ride her before I had to head to work, so she just got lunged. I ended up breaking out a cavaletti and also setting the barrels upright for her to jump. She was super good about lunging over the jumps. We haven't done that in a long time. I do notice that she has "on" and "off" days for lunging over jumps. Today was an "on" day because even when I set her up poorly to go over the jump or she had more than ample room to avoid the jump, she still headed straight for it, though by the end she knocked a pole off of the tall jump (I think it's 3'3" though it looks taller than that to me) because she was getting tired.

After I was done lunging, I let her go while I put away the jumps and she actually rolled! I let her go a lot after I'm done riding if no one is around, in hopes that she will roll, but she never does. In the past year, she's rolled once.

I'm going to ride her tomorrow. Also, I'm super excited to ride with one of the veterinarians that I work with, Dr. P tomorrow. She owns three horses and invited me to come ride with her. She also rides dressage and boards with a trainer that I took a lesson with last year. I may have the opportunity to ride some of his horses as well, we'll see! I'm excited though :)