Today, we had a substitute instead of our regular instructor, as she was feeling less than well after extracting a wisdom tooth earlier in the day. Ouch. As usual, that (the substitute, not the tooth business, though I really dislike dentists) made me a little nervous, and being assigned Malupin didn’t make it better since this would be his first class for the day. I was told he’d at least spent some time outside, however, and hoped that would have been enough to use up some of the extra energy he was bound to have considering the cold weather and all the snow. Still, he seemed to be in a bit of a testy mood, both as I tacked him up and when I was preparing to mount up. Apparently some of the other horses had been like that the last days too, so it might be the weather, or something hormonal.
Anyhow, I did get up on him and he didn’t feel too tense, even if he did seem a little too alert. I settled for half-long reins to start with, to be on the safe side, and once we started working I tried to ask a lot of him from the get-go, to distract him. He was very wobbly and slithery (I think there’s some snake somewhere in his family tree), and despite that we were working on alternating extension and collection I still had a hard time getting him to move steadily forward with his hindlegs tracking his frontlegs.
After a while of that, we moved onto a similar exercise to what we did two weeks ago; riding on the main circles and turning them into diamond shapes and doing a partial turn on the haunches at each corner of the diamond. This time, we started by coming to a halt at each corner, and then doing the turn, which I found was more difficult than just doing a half-halt before proceeding with the turn. Actually doing the halt made it easier for Malupin to escape by moving his haunches around his frontquarters instead of the reverse. I also found it difficult to make any progress at first since I was still a bit tense and since the instructor we had today isn’t as experienced as our regular teacher, and I felt she didn’t really have a good idea for how I should ride to improve on things. She was also quite busy with the new students in the group, since this was the first time they did turns on the haunches.
I did, however, slowly manage to improve things on my own, and when we got around to trotting it was clear I had been doing something right because I got the most fabulous trot I’ve ever had from Malupin. It was even better than what I got two weeks ago. It was big, bouncy and even though he did try to come behind the bit for a while (something he often tries when sticking his head up in the air fails to work) I certainly felt a fair amount of hindquarter action. Fortunately, the instructor insisted I ask for even more than that (which gave me even more energy, but perhaps he did become a little heavy in front), or I would probably have made the mistake of becoming to passive just to enjoy the feeling.
I suspect the trot was the result of today’s exercises being very well suited to me getting a good grip of Malupin’s slithery shape. Even if I didn’t get the results I wanted while doing the actual exercises, the fact that I worked so hard on being in control over all those body parts (sometimes, he feels like he’s got extra joints all over the place) ended up making him straighter and more together than usual, which meant that he ended up much better setup for trotting than he usually is. In fact, he didn’t even try pacing instead of trotting, which he always does if you leave him enough freedom to do so. So even though I wasn’t too thrilled with the start of the class, that trot sure made up for it, and I was very pleased to see how big a difference preparatory work can make.
I was also pretty pleased to have one of the new girls (these are the younger girls who moved up from group III to IV just last week) compliment me on how well I rode Malupin. Its always nice to know you’re not looking totally hopeless in action. ;)