Real Pirouettes

I had a lesson with Heidi today which went swimmingly! Enjoy some more Big Sur pictures while I go on about it.

Long exposure on the river

At first, Rico wasn't on board with taking a lesson. He wanted to explore. The horse is on a serious trail binge right now- I let him explore in my neighbor's pasture yesterday and he was pretty convinced that if he walked fast enough, I wouldn't notice that we were rapidly increasing elevation. Sorry horse, no steep hills for you for at least a month!

View from the top of our hike

Today we were sent to go get Heidi's assistant in the outdoor so Rico got to do his favorite thing- leaving an arena. Only to enter another one, drat. But then leave it again, yay! But then enter the first one again, ugh.

He started out rickety. He was kinda uneven behind and not really connecting and spooking at this one place on the rail where a huge amount of nothing was happening. I finally just cantered him around in some lopsided circles and then walked. Heidi was like "uhh he doesn't look so good" and I assured her that he'd most likely work out of it. I hoped.

Sure enough, Rico resigned himself to working and we started.

At first I wanted to work on the canter to the left. The connection has been questionable. I told Heidi the problem and she was like "poke his ribcage away from your left leg." And then all of our problems were solved. Basically Rico was crooked in his ribcage and therefore able to pop his right shoulder without connecting to the right rein. Ugh. One of my clients' horses does that and I never let her get away with it. I wish I had mirrors!

Love the burned trees (well not love) with the little sprigs
coming up underneath

River!

After that, we worked on tempis. Heidi said that she trusted us now that I could for sure get the required number of two tempis in the show ring. I'm not too concerned myself. What she wants is for him to be a little rounder and a little straighter, so we worked on starting the twos really round and straight, then when he got a hollow and/or crooked, I'd fix it before doing the twos again. They were much better after that, yay!

We then played with the ones. Ugh the dreaded ones. After getting to four and failing (again), Heidi and I talked about my theory that Rico has a limited amount of changes that he wants to do per day. I said I didn't think it was mental, probably physical, but that he simply stops doing them after a certain number. We talked about quickly making our way up (normally we stay at three for a while until they're good, then four for a while... by the time we get to five, he's done).

The good news was that Heidi said, slowly but surely, I'm getting better with my timing. She says that hopefully with the new way of schooling them and my new ability to ride them, we'll have five in a row soon.

River! Stream?

Next we did the trot work. Now, I've been sick for the last week, and the week before that I had a minor shoulder injury. Both of those means that I haven't been to crossfit in two weeks (UGH). Evidently, crossfit is HIGHLY NECESSARY to be able to sit Rico's trot. So I had to keep stopping the whole time.

Heidi was like "well I don't go to the gym." Yes Heidi, but I ride one horse and then sit at a desk all day, you ride A MILLION horses and then teach lessons. I didn't need the gym when I was riding horses all the time, but I sure as hell need it now! So funny, I love my trainer.

Despite wheezing the whole time and needing lots of breaks, the trot work was great! Until the mediums... I still shoot him across the arena without paying attention to the hind legs. I need to trust that he has a lot of power, despite being lazy, and balance him rather than just run him into the ground.

Good thing we didn't climb that mountain...

The trails we hiked were all just smushed into the mountain

We then played with the piaffe and passage and it was SO MUCH BETTER! Not once did he try to stop in the piaffe, NOT ONCE! This is insanity. Who is this horse?!

Heidi gave me a new exercise since he now makes her nervous that he's going to stop coming out of the piaffe. We are to do seven steps of piaffe, then do a medium trot, back to passage, seven steps, medium trot, etc. We want Rico to think that he has to medium trot out of the piaffe all the time so whenever he piaffes, he's thinking oh shit I might need to really move it soon.

It was muggy and we were above the clouds but that's the
Pacific Ocean!

Last, we looked at the canter pirouettes. Heidi had given us an exercise- school the pirouette canter in draw reins to teach Rico that when I half halt and bring him back, he needs to stay round. He tends to hollow as I bring him back, which then means that as I'm asking him to go rounder and stay collected, he stalls out. I was only able to do this exercise once since I only have my crappy short draw reins rather than my nice ones (getting those back soon from a client), but once seems to have done us some good!

First we just schooled it the canter on a circle and collected him. He was MUCH better both in that he didn't try to get as hollow initially and he was much easier to get round without shutting him down. After fixing my straightness problem (I need to bring my left shoulder back in the left pirouette more), we did the actual pirouettes.

The right one was a locally grown, farm raised, GMO-free, organic pirouette. Heidi said it actually looked like a real pirouette rather than a -waving hand gesture- which was whatever I was doing before. The left one was really good too! We ended on those and I was very pleased.

Top of the mountain!

My favorite picture so far

Nothing like a good lesson to get me back on the right path. I've got some good exercises (piaffe-medium, draw reins for pirouettes, fixing the two tempis, getting more ones) to do over the next week and I'm super stoked for our next show in FOUR (and a bit) WEEKS!

Tomorrow Rico gets a glorious day off and this weekend he gets another trail ride. Hopefully I can get out to a new facility on foot to see how steep one of the trails is. My mom said that one of the trails starts out kind of steep but then is very mellow the rest of the way. If it isn't too bad, Rico gets to go this weekend. If it is... well, we'll do it in a month!

I climbed up on this rock!