Back on the Favorite

Now that we're down to the last two months of TC's rehab and my vacation from riding challenging horses, I'm really eager to get in shape for his return.

I joined a gym on Tuesday and immediately suffered. I was running late so missed a class and just decided to take it easy on the rower. My plan had been to do some back squats afterward but the weights were being used. And honestly, after 2x 500m, I was toast. Like my back was burning, shoulders were aching, I felt like death. I used to be able to row a 5k and then do a second workout and go riding later that day. 500 meters was the warm up of my warm up in crossfit.

I went again on Wednesday and Thursday, and have plans to go tonight. Death, I feel like death. 

But the gym is only one piece of it, I need to be riding fit too. You know who else poops out after twenty minutes of work? This guy.

I gave him a haircut and he looks so much younger!

In addition to me needing to get in shape, I want to get Rico going a little bit more. I have a student showing Fourth who wants to move up to PSG this year (I will have an FEI student yay) who needs some practice with her tempi changes. I also want to get my SIL riding him more and have a few people I've offered rides to and I feel bad pulling them off of him after 15 minutes. 

Luckily Rico has been moving waddling around, he and Riot go out every day to the pasture and they trot/canter both in and out. So it's not like he's been sitting around like I have. My main goal is to get a bit of muscle on him and ask him to work for longer periods of time so that I can actually teach a lesson on him. I feel bad charging for a lesson if the horse I'm providing isn't fit enough! And I don't want to put Rico at risk. 

Hi animal

I've ridden him a couple times since I last talked about him. The rides tend to be the same but I'll describe one of them (the day that I'm writing this post).

At first, I worked primarily on the quality of the gaits. Rico has lost a bit of his trot because he hasn't had his joints (hocks/coffins) injected in a year and a half. We've talked about doing the coffins (I want his hocks to fuse) for my mom so that Rico is more comfortable on the trails, but that hasn't come up yet. Maybe this summer sometime.

But with a little passage injected into the trot, I got some really great steps. His default canter is also not as collected as it used to be, so we worked on that as well. I forgot how freakishly sensitive this horse is to my seat. You can collect him just off the seat (in fact, if you try to use your reins other than for the connection, he splats into the ground, fun!) and he turns exceptionally well off the outside thigh. It sounds weird, but sometimes even FEI horses can be tricky to steer, BFF sometimes takes a good tug and crowding him with the outside leg. 

I took that feeling into the trot and did a bunch of figure-8s. Rico wasn't as willing to track right (and afterward I saw that my girth had rubbed him- sorry about your fat armpits, pony!) as he was to track left. He really wants to dump onto the right rein, tipping his wither right, so I did some spiraling out to connect him better on the left side. It helped, but you know, he isn't super even (and honestly never has been). 

Diving for grass

We did get to the tempis, I want to make sure that the threes and fours are solid, and they are not. I think being in the hackamore was probably a bad idea since I struggled to keep the straightness.

The first line was a clusterfuck of changes. Some were clean, some were shockingly not. For a horse who basically anyone can get clean change out of, well, woops. Part of the problem was that the day I'm writing about, I forgot spurs. Never forget your weapons when going into battle with the laziest animal.

I straightened up and rode the hell out of the next line of threes and they were good. We then played with the fours, which I've always been kind of terrible at. The twos have a great rhythm, as do the threes. There's just too much time to fuck up in the fours. Accurate representation of what goes through my head during tempi changes:

Ones; OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD
Twos: one-change-one-change
Threes: one-two-change-one-two-change
Fours: one-what is life anyway is there any real point to it other than ponies?-OH NO THREE- CHANGE CHANGE CHANGE DO IT NOW DO IT NOW

Sorry horse, you may get the perks of retirement, but you still have
to work! (before the mane pull)

I did manage to do a solid line of fours by the end. Once as the tempis are fairly automatic, I'm planning on hauling over to the covered ring across the road to school more of them. Unfortunately the arena at the ranch is only a short court, so I can only fit three changes across the diagonal. I'd like to be able to let my student school five (and not have to squeeze them in), since I think for some riders, having to plan for five changes can be challenging.

It will also let me school a bit of the zig zag too! We did get to do some lateral work in the short court though. He's definitely not as supple as he used to be, although I was pleasantly surprised that everything seems to be surviving his retirement fairly well. 

His shoulder-in is still fairly awesome. It's really great to the right, he basically just plops right into it and stays there with minimal input from me. To the left he does the same, though tends to weight the right shoulder too much, which makes the shoulder-in feel downhill. The outside front leg needs to really reach and take a big step forward, he feels a bit like I'm trying to put the movement on a low level horse.

The haunches-in was okay, I really just never got a good haunches-in on this horse. He still gets stuffed into the inside rein and doesn't step into the outside rein. I definitely want to school more haunches-in on other horses. For some reason, Rico just brings out the refusal to use the inside leg in me. Ugh. I had the same issues in the half pass, though the canter was much better than the trot, as per usual.

From last weekend

I didn't do a lot of piaffe/passage. I'm thinking that if I want to ride him more, I should cool it with the pi/pa work all the time. So I'll be limiting that to once a week or so. I just really don't want him to break down too much faster than he already has been.

I'm also not schooling pirouettes for a long while, if not ever again. I just don't like doing them on him, they feel difficult and labored, as they always have, but there's no reason for him to do them anymore. He's not great at them, like he is at pi/pa and the 2s/3s/4s, and he still negatively affects my riding in them, making me anticipate, lean forward, and pull. So it's best for both of us if I get my pirouette work in on other horses and he can preserve his hocks a bit longer. I feel the same way about the ones.

He is so cute

Overall I've had some really fabulous couple rides on him. I'm super stoked to have my horse back at a reasonable weight. As we were cantering along and he was super light in the bridle, collected, and turning completely off my upper leg... it just felt like home. Hopefully more rides will happen this weekend!