Bliss

My motto - "It's the very difficult horses that have the most to give you." - Lendon Gray 
I actually have this quote framed with a collage of pictures of Jetta.

Had such a nice ride on Jetta tonight! Not perfect of course, but it just felt so good.

I lunged her beforehand which I've been making a habit of lately, she just seems spunkier than usual which I'm currently attributing to the below freezing weather.

I hopped on and worked on our free walk as a warm up. I haven't been doing as much of a long and low warm up because Jetta's gotten to expect it so she'll try to yank the reins out of my hands so that she can stretch. Naughty... now she does that and she gets a kick! She's mostly stopped.

Everything seemed to flow today. Her trot has continued it's niceness - I don't know how to explain how good it feels. It's elastic and round and swingy. Feels like perfection to me! She was a little sticky in her canter transitions to the left but to the right they were really good.

This is 100% Jetta's motto

For some reason leg yields have suddenly clicked in her brain and tonight, even without a whip we got some awesome leg yields: straight and at the perfect 45 degree angle. We even switched it up and leg yielded off the wall to X and then back the other direction to the wall. Even in the canter it feels nice and she hasn't even gotten sassy with me about it!

Lengthening in the trot is more expressive now that we've started asking for more and after she got in trouble with running. I no longer feel like we're a freight train when she gets going that fast. Both the leg yields and adjusting the stride length in the canter has made her canter more uphill, round and balanced.

It just felt like everything was coming together, that we could go out and do a respectable first level test. And keep in mind that this was all while the BO drove the truck into the rather small arena to unload hay that was covered in a tarp and grain all the other horses. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about - my horse was awesomeness.

I hope this feeling lasts a while because training Jetta has been such a roller coaster ride from you-know-where! We are constantly making one step forward, then four steps back, sideways, up, down, you name it and that's probably happened. At this moment in time I feel like we're on a linear, progressive and upward trend in our training. (Please universe, do not take that as an invitation to set us back a year in training!)

She's going to turn 7 here soon (for reals, not just the universal TB birthday) and I feel like at this age the "she's young" excuse is no longer applicable. She's becoming an adult. When I look back I can see that we have come so, so far. But I still see a long road ahead us and I'm looking forward to conquering it!