Today was lessons with Samantha again. I opted to ride him second because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to catch Lyric quickly and Samantha was waiting on me between horses. But, in retrospect... that's not a great idea. I'll have to swap next time.
He was turned out and we walked all the way up to the arena so I didn't feel too bad picking up the trot fairly quickly, but... he was way behind my leg. And he felt a bit off behind again. Sigh... I also felt a bit like I was falling off the left side of him again. And... I got upset. I got upset that he's broken again and I can't seem to fix him. I'm upset that we keep getting soooo far and then hit the roadblocks again. I'm upset that I told myself that after injecting his neck again, I would know if we've hit the end point and he just can't do the work we're wanting to do... and maybe I did actually hit that point. And then add in the fact that I'm hormonal and was rushed because of Samantha so... I took it out on him. I was annoyed that he was behind my leg and I was trying to do some shock and awe but Samantha kept teaching and I got annoyed at that too. Which... isn't fair. So, I did a few shock and awe's but they weren't very effective because I was trying to also do what Samantha was telling me, so.. poor Dan basically just got spanked. Samantha was trying to get him in front of my leg with lots of transitions. Which did help, eventually. Then I felt embarassed and horrible for Dan. It's not his fault I didn't get to warm him up like usual. And then I felt terrible because he probably knew I was upset and thought it was at him... instead of the circumstances. But I tried to apologize to him and carry on. Samantha ignored me and kept teaching, so..
The lesson got better. We started out with our trot and then she wanted him more forward.. quicker tempo. Duh! That's why I'm trying to do "shock and awe". ha! We did lots of transitions. We started with walk, then immediately trot again. Then we progressed to halting from the trot, and trotting off again. She had me go back to the halt using my rein aids only - in an effort to simplify and "clean up" the aids. She also said it would help him halt more uphill rather than plopping down onto his forehand. It did seem to help. And I could be very subtle with the rein aids. Then when we trotted off, instead of using my legs, she wanted me to try to get him going with my seat first. Which was a lot harder to do than I thought. Mostly because of habits being hard to break and Dan not quite trusting it. But we kept trying.
We then moved on to leg yields. She had me come down centerline or quarterline... then get him straight.. then get inside bend.. then leg yield. And she wanted the inside hind moving quicker than the other 3 legs. Which is hard! She did say it got better though and at one point she told me to get him swinging and... not sure what I did, but he did get more swingy! Maybe I let my hips swing more and stopped blocking him??? We then worked on making our leg yields steeper, thus more accurate and more push/reach with the isnide hind. We started with this at the walk and progressed to the trot. And then after the leg yield, we trotted off straight and very forward to get him moving forward again after the sideways.
We moved on to the canter. She had us do 10 meter circles and then back to our working canter. She noted that he was using his neck to lift himself in the 10 meter canter vs sitting and pushing. Sigh... this seems to be the common theme in all the things... trot, canter, jumping. We did some lengthen on the rail.. then 10 meter circle.. and then canter on. He kept falling out or trying to swap from the left lead canter to the right. (Hmmmmm). I did try to get more flexion to see if that helped him lift his sternum by unlocking the base of his neck, but I'm not sure it helped today. Then we cantered across the diagonal with a simple change focusing on the straight line. I thought we did fairly nice on that. And when I focused on holding the outside rein and not giving it up, our upwards were decent too. Although a few times we didn't show a clear enough transition. But, yay smarty pants for being so smart!
Overall a good ride and we ended well. She mentioned that I needed to focus on riding Dan in dressage like those horses that do all the fancy dressage moves in a neck rope only. Don't worry about his neck. Let it go where it goes. And... okay, I"M TRYING!!! I'm trying to send his neck forward and out. Sigh. I'm a little hormonal today I think. But we had some good stuff today. I do feel bad because there's not much breaks in our lessons. But we also kept changing it up so he wasn't fatiguing. At least it didn't seem like it.
She had to run to get her baby chicks from the post office so there wasn't any talking, so... I was able to grab Funny and took them both to the lake and back for Dan's cool down. I don't think he was as thrilled as she was. :)
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