No, I don’t miss last week entirely. We didn’t ride, as we will be doing a double-length jumping lesson in a few weeks. This week, though? Well, I almost didn’t ride this week either, since a lovely norovirus (also known as “winter vomiting disease”) decided to forget that it was May and struck me down with a vengeance on Monday. I was sick as a whole pack of dogs, and while the worst was over on Tuesday, I was still very weak then. But, I took a bunch of pain killers and some fruit sugar to perk me up, and headed off.
Since I got to ride Murphy, I was very glad I made the effort. Especially since the lovely weather allowed us to ride in the paddock for the first time this year. Both Murphy and I really liked that part of it. The lesson as such was also quite well suited to us. We were to focus entirely on attentiveness to our aids and obedience. Given that Murphy easily slips into autopilot mode when he’s done too many beginner’s lessons, waking him up is always a good idea, and focused work on getting him more responsive always yields nice results.
We started with transitions between halt and walk, then walk and trot and then changes within the trot. Murphy was actually a lot more responsive from the get-go than usual, it was probably being outdoors that did that, and this of course led my instructor to asking me to use less aids than usual to see if that would work as well. It did for halt to walk and vice versa, but walk to trot was a little tougher. Murphy prefers to jog into a trot instead of starting it properly, so that took a bit more work. Once he does do it right, though, he is immediately much more balanced.
The changes to the trot was harder. I thought I was doing fine, but no. Rather than maintaining the same tempo and lengthening and shortening his strides, I was altering the frequency of his strides. As usual, because I have a terrible sense of tempo. After a little help, however, I managed to get a bit of feeling for what I was supposed to be doing, and once I had that more-or-less right his trot got a little better still.
Then we had the canter left. Not his strong suit, and by that time I was starting to feel faint. I should probably have called it a day, but I just had to try some cantering. And when he came me a much rounder than usual canter, I just had to work on it some. Of course, my instructor decided to pick on me for a bit by asking for a lot of shortening in the canter, which both Murphy and I struggled with. Partly, my issue was that she asked me to just ask him to shorten it and not ride him forward so much. She said that I should stop applying so much leg as soon as she asked me to shorten him, and if he ended up trotting instead of cantering I should keep shortening the trot so that he wasn’t able to escape the specific demand placed on him by changing gaits.
To some extent, this makes sense, and its something she often focuses on. If we ask the horse to do something, like move along a curved path, she tells us to keep our focus on that demand and not care if the horse does it at walk, trot, canter or while doing back flips, as long as the core requirement is met. In this case, though, I have always been taught to always keep my legs on when using the reins (and vice versa), so it felt a bit odd. I didn’t have a chance afterwards to ask how those two things would reconcile, but I will have to try to ask next week.