Not a Plateau

Other than the minor colic, the last few weeks has been a lot of the same. Working on the quality of the canter, working on my own biomechanics, working on the uprightness of the right side, working on the quality of the trot. Every day we come out to work on these things and every day that it went on, I got a small feeling of "is this all for naught, is this ever going to get better, isn't the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"

Yes, I suppose. I like tangible progress, and while TC has been a good boy in the last two weeks, by watching my rides (and by riding them), it's a lot of the same.

But progress sneaks up on you, you just don't see it every day or every week. And that's what happened the other day when I put TC across the diagonal and he did two super easy, big, clean flying changes in each direction (separately, no tempi changes lol) without anticipating or running off or anything other than just doing his change and getting pets. After the hard direction, I literally just walked and let him leave the arena, gotta reinforce the hell out of that change.

An actual niceish day

I have only schooled the changes once other than that in the last two weeks, but they are so much more solid. And a lot of that has been that plateau-like steady grind on the basics.

TC has pretty much wanted to change late in front in the RL and late behind in the LR. In my experience, this isn't unusual. The late in front doesn't bother me and is mostly fixed with me *not* pulling on the left rein (a lesson I will learn for the rest of my life and I'm okay with it). The late behind is the harder fix and that's why we didn't school them in that direction for a few weeks.

The fix has been increasing the quality of the right lead. He can easily change from a lesser quality canter to a higher quality canter, but going from a high quality canter to then change to a lower quality canter, that's hard. So I've been on it with getting him stronger to the right. Most of this has been getting him more upright.

Wishing the outdoors were open! 

I think with this work, I've discovered something kind of huge. He's starting to fling his right hind leg a bit in the same way Rico did, and I think this is ME, I mean oh my god of course it is. We've known that for a while. But Tracey and I worked our asses off trying to figure out what EXACTLY I was doing. I have a theory though... I sit left and push the horses' withers to the right, in order to make the change clean, they need to kind of kick upward with the right hind to get themselves balanced enough.

Rico developed that habit from the beginning and it was tough to get to go away, so I'm slowing down the schooling until I can really get a more upright canter right and then I'll really school them again on TC. I don't want him developing any bad habits with these, especially because there's no way we'll be doing Third level until I finish the L program anyway.

Looking out over the muddy pasture he'd love
to live in

I'm so excited about this work. Changes are one of my favorite things to ride and I'm excited to be working on them with him. He's handling it all really well, in the past I've wondered about his mental state with some of these harder movements and he's taking this work and the work on collection really well. Onward and upward!