A Good Weekend Ride

Despite being sick, this weekend ended up being a good weekend for horses. I hate having to take it easy, but I did enjoy a nice (forced) relaxing (kinda boring) Saturday morning before going out to the barn.

I've been basically washing TC's tail a LOT lately. It's just a lot of damn tail. Every time I think I've got it totally clean, I brush it and find more dirt hiding in it. Wtf TC. It is looking whiter though! I don't think I'm ever going to have the guts to bleach it, but I've been pouring whitening shampoo on it and it's looking better! I think the best thing for it is maybe uh TC not rolling in the dirt all the fucking time.

What I'll do is start editing his tail in pictures...

I actually managed to do all of our canter work after we warmed up. I haven't been able to actually ride for long enough to canter (or trot) enough in the last week due to me being unable to breathe properly. The canter felt great though. We started with some smaller circles, which actually seemed to help the quality of the canter for the first time.

From there I schooled the counter canter in easy patterns given the arena size- the loop from 1-3 to start, then going to the other quarterline, then going all the way to create the serpentine from 2-3. I really like that progression for him, I'm for sure going to be doing that in the court soon (footing is in and court will hopefully be up soon!). The counter canter felt really good- there's just one moment tracking the harder way (right lead to the left for now) where he felt like he needed a little help at the turn back the original direction.

After our counter canter work, we rode a ten meter circle and I got a really good downward transition, which reminded me of an exercise I had told Kate about for simple changes (that's literally the exercise- ten meter circles to school the downwards). I haven't really schooled the simple changes very much with TC. But I figured it was high time to start at least playing with them.

Starting to want to show again!

So after a walk break where he got told how wonderful his counter canter is, I picked up the walk and worked to get him stepping further under in preparation for the canter.

I started him on half steps a few rides ago. I'm not looking for very much with them, just asking him to sit into a small trot when I bring both legs back and then stopping when I tell him to stop. Mostly I just want to make sure that he doesn't get tense and that he thinks doing that is fun.

The walk to canter is coming along, though he still unloads his hind end while doing it. It's really common for horses in the beginning. They sort of learn to push themselves into canter and end up picking up something a little less collected than they should. As time goes on, he'll learn to sit into the transition, and eventually have one or two steps of very collected canter before I push him forward into the regular collected canter.

But he's at the stage now where I'm blocking him from cantering when he goes to come off the bit into it, so he's figuring out staying round in the transition. So that's super cool! Sometimes he shuffles into it, sometimes he can't figure out the lead, but they're generally coming along well. Especially for a movement that I haven't really schooled very much. We had some really good ones in both directions, with the left of course being harder than the right. He was more likely to skip out sideways or go to pick up the wrong lead in that direction. It miiight have been something to do with me not being willing to sit on my right seatbone though... maybe.

The downwards were okay too. I haven't been schooling them much because they've been a bit bad, but I really took it upon myself on Saturday to set them up better with a small circle. They were hit or miss in terms of trot steps, but every transition was balanced, and that was huge. He got lots of pets for each one and gave me at least one in each direction where it was clean and balanced. Good pony! I always try to make him feel like a complete genius even when he sort of kind of gets it. Try to get the pony to think that the hard stuff is more fun than the easy stuff.

I love him so much, such a good pony

We had some really great trot work after that. The canter gets him a bit more up and through at the trot, which is super awesome. I kept the trot really easy for him, just schooled the shoulder-in and the lengthenings.

Since the Jeremy clinic a month ago, the shoulder-in is AWESOME. I mean the right shoulder-in has been awesome for a while. But the left shoulder-in at the clinic felt hollow and crooked. Now it feels the same as the right, sometimes better. He likes to toss his haunches to the right in general, so I'm able to keep my outside leg on him better tracking left than right in the shoulder-in, which gets me a better quality of bend. Instead of the bend coming from me poking his inside hind leg under, it's coming from me truly bringing his shoulders in front of his inside hind leg and wrapping the haunches around my inside leg. You know, like it should be. It was so hard for him in the beginning, I kind of had to fudge the shoulder-in to put it on.

The lengthenings were so good on Saturday too. Like so good. There's no way I'm ever going to sit them. But so good.

He's still a little baroque in them, not really reaching forward with his front legs as much as he should and getting slightly out behind, but one thing I can really say is that he is NOT quickening his hind legs. At all. He really slows the tempo in it and that's so cool. We rode just a few of them, the first one taking note of a couple of things I wanted to address, then the next couple of them being better uphill and a bit more together. Still have a little bit before they start feeling like true mediums, but the last one made me stop him and tell him he was the best pony.

Because he is the best pony

After that I basically couldn't breathe at all, so I coughed for a long while and then wandered around the ranch a bit, talking to some barn people. Afterward, I washed his tail again with blue shampoo and bathed the rest of him while I waited for that to soak in.

As an aside, if anyone has any good products to try in his tail to get it whiter, let me know. I don't think I'm quite ready to go the bleach route, or anything that could potentially ruin his tail if someone incompetent (me) did it, but I'm open to ideas!

All in all, a really great day at the barn!