Test Riding 2-1

Sunday after riding Rico on the trail, I still had TC to ride. Saturday's ride had been fine, though not the best ride we'd had. He was still kinda crusty feeling. I ended the day giving him a bath with this oatmeal thing that was supposed to help sooth his skin and also attacked his yellowish tail.

I didn't get to the barn until later on Sunday, so no one was around. I decided to ride in the dressage court and probably test ride. I'm starting to a little bit freak out about the idea of moving him up to First level this fall. I think the problem is just me not test riding enough. Those tests are EASY for him. All of the tests. But I needed convincing.

Hi mom! When will you realize that First level (and a lot of
Second) is easy for me?

We warmed up well, though I struggled a bit with the geometry again. About half of the way through the ride when I started sitting the trot I had a lightbulb moment... I can ride the geometry really well... in sitting trot. Oh. Even going into canter after sitting led me to be more accurate. I dunno what it is, but it's like I take it more seriously! Weird. So I'll be sitting the trot more often I think.

After working a bit on the canter, I decided to look up a test to ride. I probably should have ridden 1-1 or 1-2 because that's what I'm thinking of riding, but I opted to ride 2-1. The reasoning was that before I rode in a show at Training, the first couple of First level tests were pretty doable. Not show ready, but doable. I figured that if I could put in a decent 2-1 test, I'd feel better about doing 1-1 at a show.

So I picked up the sitting trot and headed up centerline.

Wandering

It was SHOCKINGLY good. I mean really, I've never sat his medium trot and the first time I tried it was in this test. He started doing it out of the corner, then slowed down and put his ears back on me like "erm are you not... uh... okay" and then shot forward again. The shoulder-in is pretty good, but you know what is a bit drunk? The turn across the middle. Super weird since that rides fine in 1-3, but the shoulder-in threw us off. Oh well.

The halt and rein back was good, I've been working on his halt lately so that was nice. I sort of forgot the test (I hadn't ridden this version of 2-1 in a while) so I used the walk work to look it up again.

The canter transitions in the serpentine were ALL CLEAN, no trot steps and relatively uphill. I've never ridden simple changes on him (just the transitions) so that was a new challenge and he did want to get a bit wiggly right after the downward transition (but not in the upward).

He is... not a majestic looking horse

I rode the first medium canter rather conservative, but it was good with clear transitions. The ten meter canter circle is doable but a bit tricky for him. I really had to ride him around it vs just turning him. He's a pro at counter canter, though we have done exactly zero canter to walk transitions out of it, so that one had trot steps, which is fine. The transition directly in front of the judge was so good though, good pony!

Bad pony though, since in the next medium canter I pushed for a bit more and he was like HELL YES I AM SO GOOD AT GOING FAST and downshifted and took off with me. Okay. So we circled, I put him back on the line and made him do it again under control. But after that the canter felt super good, I really need to use more medium canter to improve his gaits! The ten meter circle felt great, and we're super good at counter canter to trot.

The next medium trot was much better than the first one, since he was an old pro at having his rider bounce around slightly behind the motion (horse has a TROT). And of course, centerline went well too since we've been working on that.

That mane needs to stop

Overall I was STOKED that we were able to do that test. At the end I looked up 2-2 and decided against it because I wanted to school the counter canter pattern and the simple changes out of counter canter before actually riding it. But other than that, it seemed super doable. Not perfect, but certainly not out of our realm.

So instead of another test, we worked on the canter-walk and walk-canter transitions on a spiral in and out to help him with the level of collection. Then we did a bunch of walk-trot transitions because you can never do too many walk-trot transitions.

It feels so good to have him schooling all this fun stuff. We do our basics every day in warm up and some days we never leave that place (like Saturday), but on the days we're pushing the envelope, he's really stepping up. Jeremy said that this is still the levels a horse like TC will find easy, but I just feel like he steps up into hard work so well. Hopefully that continues as we move up, and hopefully he continues to be willing to work hard!