First Storm of the Season

Work has been a bit much recently, but I'm on the other side of some really difficult projects and feeling much better! Obviously the moment that I get any ounce of free time, the rains are starting. But that's really great news for the environment. And theoretically this means that we made it through fire season without having to take any significant time off due to smoke! Woohoo, no lung damage this year! 

This will be our second winter at the ranch. Last year life was throwing a lot at me, so I decided to not pursue moving TC to a barn with a covered arena. This year life is also throwing some stuff at me, so I'm also not going to put him at a barn with a covered arena. It just doesn't seem worth it given that he's got so much space at the ranch even when it's raining vs at another barn, I'd have to go get him out every day. 

Plus, we have nothing real on the calendar next year, so he can have another light winter and then we'll come back in the spring.

As much as I don't love not riding, I'm
really enjoying the winter weather!

TC also was overdue for shoes for a while, so it ended up working out okay for him to have a few days off during this storm. Today is my insane meeting day and also the day he finally gets shoes, but then I have Friday off and hopefully by then my ring will be dry and we'll get back to it! 

It has been mostly just doing leg stretching rides working on improving our aid system and doing some of my favorite exercises. 

Super pleased with how he's looking

Learning to be a little longer in the canter

One of my favorite things to do is to do a bunch of transitions one after the other with counted strides in between. So doing 10 strides of canter, then 10 strides of trot, then 10 strides of canter and so on. Once that is perfectly on the aids, then you start reducing the strides until it gets too hard. It requires the horse to be on the aids and to remain balanced throughout, at least in order to have the transitions occur exactly as the rider asks (and not because the rider knows to ask on stride 7 to get the horse to do the transition at stride 10). 

With Rico, I got him down to doing 2 strides of trot, 2 strides of canter, and so on. TC and I have managed 6 pretty easily, so I'm sure that he's capable of doing the smaller numbers too. He stepped right up with the only issues being a minor straightness problem to the left when he had to pop sideways to get the canter and was delayed by a stride or two. Other than that, it's downright easy for him. 

My headphones falling out always make for better
posture from the horse lol

Probably need to not do weird shit with my arms
but I haven't had a biomechanics less in ages sooo

The other thing I've been doing is putting the flying changes back on. I had stopped schooling them because they were clean but not well balanced and I wanted to go back and fix some of the problems we'd been having. 

The other day I decided to ask and they were surprisingly not too rusty. After going more than two years since really schooling them, it showed me where some of the holes are that were hidden by how he was going at the time. 

He definitely struggles to jump through the change and instead finds it easier to prop a bit. They're still a bit downhill, but I'm kind of riding him more on the forehand deliberately right now (more on that later) so that wasn't surprising. I'll do some brainstorming on how to improve the changes and keep plugging away at them. 

Lucky to have a safe horse to road walk

Hopefully this weekend we can head out to the trail facility and just do the bottom loop, I haven't really taken him very many places this year and I really miss it! But with the rain, we may be delayed.