Not As I Intended

Wednesday morning of this week I went out to ride TC. He was in a great mood and I was feeling really eager to push him along. Whenever I have too much time to think about him, I always start thinking about the future. It's nearing the time where we'll be laying the foundation for some of the upper level movements and I've been thinking about how I want to introduce them.

Checking out the sprinklers

I've thrown a flying change in here and there, but his fundamental understanding of the movement is lacking. I need better simple changes and a better collected canter before we really start working on them. So I keep thinking about schooling those. I already wrote about what we're doing for the collected canter, but I could really use some work on the simple changes too.

The other movement I've been thinking about is piaffe. The piaffe should come on well before the passage, especially with a horse who likes to open his pelvis rather than close it. I love passage, so I was wondering when I'd get to play with that. And that's an easy question: when he has a good understanding of what piaffe is.

Putting on piaffe starts with a few things. Half steps, obviously, which TC has in that he'll slow his trot way down but doesn't have in that he isn't yet really sitting in them. And then I also like to teach them to pick up their hind legs when you touch with the whip. TC has started this briefly in the cross ties.

Better canter required for flying changes

So Wednesday I go out and I'm really on it. I want to do simple changes and I want to see what the half steps look like. I also keep meaning to really start working on the half passes and the medium trot.

I got to riding and got myself immediately distracted. TC wasn't reaching evenly into both reins because at any given point, he was glancing at a tractor in a strange location. I focused on getting him into both reins evenly for our warm up.

He was also not quite committed to being IN the bridle, which has been his recent tendency. He seems to have finally figured out what curling is and is really obvious about it. Like you're going along and if he's not totally committed, he randomly flings his nose downward and inward and I'm like... bro... stop. So knowing that was a possibility with the slightly-too-light feeling in the bridle, I sent him into it.

Morning rides are my favorite

After trot warm up, we went to canter. It was feeling pretty good, except a bit behind my leg and not as much coming up and over his back as much as I wanted him to. So for that, I sent him forward and I got a splat rather than a rounder canter. He hasn't quite figured out the whole medium canter thing where he actually takes rounder steps in addition to longer steps.

I spent basically our entire canter workout adding energy to the canter and then telling him he's the best pony for doing it. I got to the end of it and realized that I'd just cantered for like 10 minutes without working on the simple changes... Um, okay. But I'm sure that getting them out of the canter we ended with would have been much better than the canter we started with. Now to get him doing that canter ALL the time.

He's getting so uphill!

I told myself I had to sit the trot for the rest of the ride. Doing stuff while sitting the trot is the ideal situation for me because it distracts me a bit. So I decided to start with shoulder-in and then look at the half pass.

I picked up the trot and he felt great! But my seat was driving rather than organizing, so I spent a few circles and walk-trot transitions fixing that. I started feeling like I had it, so I started the shoulder-in. Because of all the straightness work I've been doing, I'm much more in tune with his lateral balance, and I found that he was losing a bit of throughness on the outside rein in the shoulder-in. One of my favorite exercises to fix that is to slowly turn the shoulder-in into renvers and then go back.

To the left, this wasn't actually all that bad. I think it's because he'd much rather have his left to right forces on anyway, so both shoulder-in and renvers are good to go that way. The renvers slowed down a bit and lost cadence, which reminded me that I need to work on this in his leg yield too. After riding the shoulder-in to renvers that direction, I put him through a few leg yield zig zags and they were quite good!

Definitely the best job in the 1860s! Galloping
along the mail train

To the right, the shoulder-in was harder, and the renvers, even worse. I worked hard to bear down, even when changing the bend, and started brainstorming how the Mary stuff could be utilized in the lateral work, since we didn't talk about that much at the clinic. I made a few positional changes, made a point to kneel more, and really pressed him into the left rein and things went much better.

Some leg yields that way and we had run out of time for our ride. Both in that we'd already done our 15-17 minutes of trot and 10 minutes of canter that he's doing right now, and I was out of time and had to get off and go get grain before work! So we stretched, hacked around the field, and then we were done.

Eventually have to sit this IN the show ring, boo

Sooo we didn't really do anything I wanted to do, nothing really new. But this is how so many of our rides go. If I just skipped all the stuff we worked on in order to hustle him along, whatever I was hustling was going to be bullshit anyway.

I wanted to write about it because so much of the time I feel like my blog comes across like TC is just the best and we're on this steady path upward and there's no back tracking because we're both so good at not making any mistakes. Nothing I did on Wednesday was all that new to him. It's just a matter of digging around and finding holes and filling them in.

This weekend I'm going to Horse Expo on Saturday with Peony (let us know if you'll be there!) and then probably hanging around at an event on Sunday! Horse weekends = the best weekends.