Putting in the Miles

Saturday morning I dragged TC back to the ranch again. I'm eventually hoping to add some trail rides, some more fun clinics, and some off property lessons to the mix, but for now we're kind of stuck with hauling to the ranch between the schooling shows. I'm totally good with that, it's not like he's GOOD at the ranch yet. Until he can get off the trailer and be a nice quiet horse, I think going to the ranch every weekend is great for him, and cheap/easy for me.

Not used to seeing these ears with that backdrop

He unloads better and better every time we go there. He still wants to dance in the cross ties, which includes pawing, wiggling, bowing down like a dog, striking the air, and sometimes rearing. If I have more time next weekend, I'm going to leave him in the cross ties for a couple of hours, but this last weekend I was on a schedule, so we tacked up and off we went.

It was temping to get on him at the barn, but he's still afraid of the automatic gate so I took him down to the arena in hand. We're doing less and less ground work before I get on, I mostly just check the brakes and off we go.

He's quite tense starting out, and it's up to me to be really chill. Which is hard, but I'm getting better at it. If I stay relaxed and put him to work, he starts using his brain properly rather than spiraling into more tension.

I started out with some spiraling in and out. I really want to get used to doing a routine when we go off the property so that I can do it at horse shows too. Pick up a trot, spiral in and out, change directions, spiral in and out, canter lots of circles in each direction. By the end of that work, I had a rideable horse!

How did he grow up so fast?!

So relaxed

The rest of the ride was just... normal. Working on getting him to step more into the bridle. Forcing myself to sit the trot more. Fixing the throughness in the trot to canter transitions. Just normal dressage stuff.

I managed to get some video of the second half of my ride (we didn't do much). It shows a bit of all of that stuff, including me struggling to sit the trot and botching a canter transition. Oops. Oh well. I'm focusing on the fun and that means not giving a shit when stuff goes wrong. For the most part, I'm super pleased with how well he's going these days. I love this horse. He's so fun.

We have one more weekend in between now and our next schooling show. The plan is to take him to the ranch again. That trip plus the schooling show will mean seven trips in eight weeks. Good. I'm ready for my totally chill traveler please.