Trail Rides as Prescribed

Rico and I hauled out for our first lesson since the show. Everyone was super sweet at the barn, even people I don't really know (basically everyone since it's hard to make friends when you just haul in and out) were congratulating me. But we aren't done yet!

This happened today!

We worked the two tempis, pirouettes, and piaffe today.

The twos are decent, I got a seven on them, but when we really work on the straightness in the twos, the ones get better. I like it when we work on them at Heidi's, since I can ride straight into the mirror and really see the straightness. It's bad. It's worse in the left to right change than the right to left, but both are bad. Heidi said to really focus on my new outside rein to straighten him, but doing this within the twos without schooling it in the single flying changes was uh... challenging. So I'm going to be doing that at home in the single flying changes and then work my way up to twos.

We didn't school ones, I'm going to do those during my next ride and I'm loading up on sugar. For every set of ones he does, he gets sugar. He's quite food oriented (remember when I put passage on in a DAY because I gave him sugar?) so I'm really hoping this last resort works. We have plenty of time before the next show (six weeks or so) so if I mess it up, we have time to fix it.

Food = Love

The pirouettes were much better thanks to a hula hoop. Heidi said she once had a client who threw a fit because she was told that she pushed the haunches in too much in the pirouettes (like I do). Heidi later was at the store and saw a hula hoop, bought it, threw it in the arena and told the lady to pirouette around it. Several broken hula hoops later, the lady believed her. I didn't break any hula hoops, but it did show me how much inside leg and outside rein the pirouettes take.

During the actual pirouette, the mechanic was better, but we talked about another problem: Rico hates being round.

He is probably one of the few Grand Prix horses out there who could do the entire test off the bit. Roundness has always been an issue- he wants to generally look and act like a llama at all times. Heidi said it was ridiculous that he made it to Grand Prix without actually needing to be on the bit.

Old pirouette picture! He doesn't lean like this anymore :)

We're going to break out the draw reins and the snaffle and school the pirouettes like that. I know draw reins are controversial, but I don't really give any shits about addressing all the pros and cons of it and giving reasons for why I would use them. I actually haven't used them on Rico in five years. Anyway, what we're after is that Rico tends to get more hollow as I ask him to collect, and in order to get him to come rounder, I have to use my reins which then shuts him down energy-wise. We're hoping the draw reins will do the roundness work for me and I can focus on keeping him energetic.

The piaffe was good! But it was because Heidi was chasing us. She gave us an exercise to play with- trot to piaffe to trot transitions. THIS IS SO HARD. I would be trotting then we'd halt, then I'd tap him, then he'd hop, then piaffe, then boing out into a passage-y trot, then trot. Uh piaffe is trot on the spot with no moment of suspension. It's TROT. So my homework (which I came up with actually based on an exercise I use when creating a collected trot in a horse that really has no business having a collected trot) is to make the trot slower and slower until he gets behind me, then go out of it and come back into it.

Old piaffe picture! He sits so much better now

Finally we talked about Rico's condition. He's still out of condition, how annoying given how hard I work at this shit. We want to at least maintain him, but we're concerned that with more and more work, we risk his soundness. So Rico has been prescribed a trail ride in leu of work one day per week. So we're taking him down to four days per week of hard dressage work (4x8m sets of work in addition to 5m of warm up- so 38 minutes total work not including rest breaks), one hour long trail ride on the bit and marching, and two days off.

We'll be out here soon, but it's a lot less green

From his first trail ride after his long rehab- he was so happy

Lucky animal.