Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

This weekend, my arena footing became a bit unrideable. Certainly unusable for a horse with the plethora of injuries that Rico has. So on Monday I spent 5 hours spreading out sand, including a solid hour of shoveling sand into the tractor. I then ran 3.5 miles and came back to ride my horse.

Truckload of sand came in today...

Done!

Tuesday morning I woke up in pain (no shit, Sherlock) and actually ended up taping my back to hope that it would alleviate some of the pain. After riding two tricky horses and then walking around the horse park to school over the show jumps, I came home to hook up the trailer and go to my lesson. I wasn't expecting much. I came into the lesson warning Tracey that I may need to stop the lesson early to go home if my SI joint went out, which it had threatened to do earlier that day.

Luckily for me, Rico was in a great mood and really wanted to work. That coupled with the tape and an extra tight back brace allowed me to get through the lesson. And it was a great lesson!


I told Tracey I wanted to do the pirouettes first because I was worried about my back and they were the most important. We started with walk pirouettes to examine the biomechanics. Rico had good right pirouettes but wanted to step his inside leg to the inside in the left pirouette, which I will go into more later. Next we worked the transitions between the collected and pirouette canter, which I've been drilling for the last two weeks. Tracey saw a big difference in Rico's ability to sit down AND stay active in his canter so that was a great confidence boost for us coming into the show this weekend.

We then worked on the turn. We started on a 10m circle in pirouette canter and then rode in travers. She noted that the issues I was having with the turns were primarily in the quality of the connection and how much control I had over his shoulders. To the left, the main problem is that Rico wants to step inward with his left hind leg as I mentioned above. This causes a multitude of problems including a loss of bend in the body and my loss of control over my right hand and left leg. To fix this, I need to come into the pirouette in a strong shoulder-fore and my left leg needs to be very active. To the right, the main problem is that Rico doesn't stay on my left rein so falls to the right. To fix it this direction, I needed to keep my right hip on the saddle (as I tended to fall to the right with him) and keep my left leg active.

After the 10m circle work, we rode the pirouettes themselves. After a couple of quick changes following the pirouettes, I was instructed to put my lead change at various places, including some at C to practice for PSG. I started riding the PSG pattern a bit and we were quickly disciplined  for our crappy counter canter, so I have something else to add to our canter bootcamp!

In the pirouettes themselves, the biggest thing that I took away is to leave the pirouette the moment it gets bad. Diagonal isn't perfect? Don't do it. Start the collection and he sucks back? Don't do it. Start the turn and he swings around? Don't do it. Half way through the turn and something goes wrong? Don't do it. Tracey was adamant about this and it reminded me of something a previous trainer told me: practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. If I keep allowing the pirouettes to be bad, I'm going to get really good at doing bad pirouettes.

I was feeling great physically by this point so we decided to do some trot work. Rico was a bit tired, so when we started trotting Tracey said "kick him, that's not even a good working trot." I thought that was pretty amusing. Once we got a good collected trot, we started the shoulder-in. I was having serious left rein problems but once we fixed those, Tracey was very complementary of our shoulder-in in both directions. The half pass was a HUGE improvement, Tracey told me I was getting really good at it.


At the end of my lesson I had a treat! Tracey has two shadbellies that she isn't using anymore. They're old, but I have them here at home now to see if they fit me! One of them does, which means that the only thing stopping me from showing this donkey PSG is some crappy counter canter and the ever improving pirouettes.

Provided the show goes alright this weekend, I'm aiming for Rico's first PSG to be at the August 3rd/4th Yarra Yarra show. That gives us about 6 weeks! We'll also do the East Bay Chapter show two weeks later so I should have two PSG's done before I go into my MA program.