Adventures in Ground Driving

By Sunday I was feeling back to normal for the most part with TC. But he had worked hard all week and I wanted to figure out how to get him to do enough on his "day off" to make it less like a day off and more like work. If he gets a day off, then the next day has to be hard because he needs to blow off steam, then the day after that he gets muscle sore. I've found that although I'd rather do 5x/week of dressage and 2x/week of days off or walking around the ranch, it's better to do 6-7x/week of dressage. He stays less muscle sore and much happier that way.

Go pony!

But Sunday I just wanted to play with him. I had acquired long lines at one of my Dover trips and decided before TC came back to work that I wanted to teach him how to long line and ground drive. I need him to be used to in hand work so that I can take him to Alfredo one day and put on piaffe and passage. I also just like to fuck with my animals.

Rico was an excellent teacher for me, since he is extremely tolerant and was a previous driving horse. But I'm still not so good at it.

I threw the surcingle on TC and grabbed my long lines. We wandered around the ranch in hand at first, then ended up in the round pen. He seemed really chill, so I just threw him into the deep end and put the long lines on through the surcingle and attached them to the bit.

Out and about!

TC is really tolerant when it comes to me doing stuff to him. BRH trainer today told me that the horse is very clearly MY horse, which is funny because I still kind of don't feel like he's mine, but he certainly thinks he is (it's weird that I've owned him for a year because he still feels brand new to me just with how much he's changed since rehab). So anything I do to him, TC thinks is the best thing you could do to a horse.

I thwapped on him a bit with the long lines, swinging them over his back, running them behind his butt, er... dropping them several times. He was fine, just stood still and kept his ears on me.

It was awkward getting him going, but then he was so good at ground driving! I really have nothing to say about it. We went in both directions, turning across the middle. He was fine even when I totally dropped a line and had to run to get it. We worked on halt transitions and reining back. He really likes to halt and turn in to face me, but I was behind him, so he got really confused and wiggled a lot. The reining back was so good because I could see his feet a lot better and release the aid in the right timing.

Heading to the dressage court

I transitioned to long lining him and did a bit of trot work. He was really good, though I couldn't really get him on the bit, he kept retracting his neck and even the weight of the long lines was too much of a backwards feeling on the bit I think. So we didn't do too much trotting.

After about fifteen minutes, I was bored, so decided to take him in and do something else with him. I decided to ground drive him back to the cross ties because he always walks that path so quietly. And he was great! Soooo we kept going. We went once all the way around the barn and he spooked maybe once.

Hey TC, can that neck get any fucking shorter?

I've been hand walking him a lot in the dressage court, and he's been pretty good about it, so I decided to ground drive him in there. MAN it's hard to steer sometimes. Like props to the combined driving and driven dressage people because we were real drunk in there.

But he was great! We just went once around and then I took him back and put him away. I think he really liked it. I told him that if I simultaneously won the lottery and injured my back so much that I couldn't ride anymore, I'd put him in driving training. Dressage is for sure his favorite thing to do, but it was fun to force some variety on him a bit.

In the dressage court!