Cob Jockey

Last Friday I had a lesson.  We've definitely hit a plateau, which is fine, or at least that's what I keep telling myself after six straight weeks of amazing rides and now a string of mediocre rides.  You can't have progress without getting out of your comfort zone...right?

One of us is excited for our lesson!

We started out getting him really good and on my aids and using both hind legs equally.  Lots of counterbent circles and lateral work.  Also that SI - half circle - half circle - travers movement from 2-2.  I am kind of in love with what that movement does for us right now.

Not quite the best he got this day, but look at my torso moving forward instead of backward with each trot step!  #progress

Once he was really on my aids, my trainer had us work on the canter.  All winter I've been working through the laundry list of items NK dumped on me during our last lesson in October, and the canter is the last thing we haven't yet focused on.  I told my trainer recently I want to focus on the canter these last two months of winter.

She put out two sets of parallel poles and, to greatly oversimplify her instructions, told me to canter through both sets of poles.  To the right, this was REALLY hard.  Like, we completely missed the poles sometimes

I had every intention of going through the second set of poles here and...didn't make it.

This exercise preyed on all of our weaknesses.  I turn into a pretzel on the right, I'm still so used to affecting the canter with my hands that I struggled to do my new "forward" hands, he runs through the outside aids (I'm probably causing that somehow) so it was tough to hit the poles, he was basically a motorcycle, he only has one canter speed, I have almost no ability to affect the gait...


To the left things were better:


I'm sitting better, I'm more upright, he's way straighter and not as inclined to run through my outside aids.  In comparing the two videos while writing this post, I'm seeing an overuse of the inside hand to the right but not the left, which makes sense.

I can tell there's a lot to unpack that was highlighted by this exercise, and I'm interested to see where my trainer takes my request to "focus on the canter" from here.

"Oh, I have a fun lesson for you tonight.  We are going to work on his canter!"

I looked out at the arena full of jumps and poles and standards in the most random places imaginable.

"Game on!"

"This is not going to feel good tonight, it's going to feel rough, and this isn't something he'll get overnight.  He'll need to sleep on this one.  And we are going to wear him out."

Let me see if I can approximate the arena in MS paint...

There was another crossrail out there too that we didn't use, so I didn't include it.  It looked crazy in there.

We started out with the four poles at the top, which were approximately on a 20m circle.  She had me pick up the canter on the circle, and go through the poles, no matter how bad it was, and we kept going til it got somewhat better.  We just asked for a little bit better, no major miracles.  The three poles around the corner were one strides, and they made it quite clear that he still motorcycles around at the canter with little regard to where his feet go.  He hit the poles, often.  I mainly tried to stay out of his way; I've said it before and I'll say it again, I like an independent horse that knows how to rate himself.  Obviously I'm actively riding him, but some lessons he needs to learn himself, and he did.  Probably the fifth time through he actually rated himself and thought about where his feet went.  Success!

The other success was that he was really moving well off of my leg in the canter transitions.  I would even say he was hot in the beginning, but we've done so little canter that that quickly wore off.  I am extremely encouraged by how comfortable and responsive his transitions are getting, though lately he's developed this vexing cross-canter habit unless I'm 100% perfect with my aids.  More incentive to improve myself!

It wasn't all roses though.  I'm afraid that sometimes I make my life with Connor seem like a picturesque rose garden.  This was rough, awkward, tough riding in which I lost my stirrups twice and had the reins pulled out of my hands multiple times as he tripped over poles.  I struggled to rate him and he is STILL stiff as a board to the left, which hopefully our Nancy lesson(/sort of clinic/mostly just a lesson because she comes here so often) tomorrow will help.  All in all, though, after we ended with a few good jumps over the crossrail, I felt pretty good about what he learned today.

Now it's time for him to sleep on it.  And get ready for a hardcore Dressage lesson tomorrow.