New horse today again. Little thing broad as a barn door called Pojken (‘The Boy’) since his real name is German (and just means ‘Yellow Boy’ or something like that anyhow). Real imaginative. ;) He is, we think, a Haflinger, with the lovely golden coat and white mane and tail. Though, today he was rather dirty, which is no surprise given the torrential downpour yesterday and the general wetness of the last few weeks. He’s apparently a former trail-ride horse and something like 18 or 19 years old. Given this, they’re not buying him (too old to insure) but if he works out they’ll be borrowing him until the summer. He has apparently bucked off some kids already, so I suppose they might not, though he behaves quite well with more experienced riders. But he certainly tried to test me some first in the stables, and was quite happy to try to walk over me to get to some food. Haflingers are strong-willed little tanks.
Before I mounted up, I had thought he might end up feeling a little too small for me. He’s probably a little smaller than Nelson, even, so maybe a bit under 14 hands. That, however, proved not to be a concern. His back is so broad that there was no way that my legs would end up too far below his stomach. In fact, my legs just reached around enough to be in a good position. You could probably use him as a dining table, and seat at least four people around his butt.
His gaits turned out to be rather like Nelson’s, with his walk and trot being a little too hurried (though not with the high-stepping tendencies that Nelson has) and his canter surprisingly good and round. During the warm-up my instructor also warned me that he, like Nelson, can easily get his neck bunched up too much, so what I had to concentrate on was lengthening him to get him forward and down and his back rounded. She suggested a lot of transitions for the warm-up, so that’s what we did. Once we got to cantering I was, as noted, pleasantly surprised by how round and steady it was. Once again my instructor noted how good it was that I could switch to yet another horse and maintain a steady seat when cantering. Today I even managed to keep that pesky inner leg in, at least for the ‘normal’ canter, though it may have had some to do with how easy it was to sit deep on Pojken.
After some cantering, his walk improved quite a bit and I was able to lengthen him out and get him to come forward and down rather more than from the start. It felt quite good (a bit more engagement from behind would have been nice, though) and he looked relaxed and balanced in the mirrors. Very cute, too, but he’s always that. The trot, though, remained very pony-ish and bouncy to sit. He has quite a long back for his size, and he definitely tends to hollow it out and not use his hindlegs much during the trot.
The main exercise was once again counter cantering, and we did it more or less the same way as last week, with us just giving the aid to canter on the long side of the arena and then cantering down that side, making a soft curve past the short side and coming back down to trot after about half a lap. The difficulty for me this week turned out to be being able to tell which canter Pojken was doing. I am not good at that under the best of conditions and moves in such a way that it was really hard to tell which was the leading leg. Plus he has a lot of mane that obscured my view. As a result, I am not sure how well we did on the counter cantering.
My instructor did manage to watch me a few times (with eight of us in the group, she doesn’t catch everyone each time, and we had some horses that took up a lot of her attention today) and at first I had some problems because I gave the aid most strongly with my outer leg. She said he was very programmed to react to the strongest aid, and once I switched to focusing on a clear aid with my inner leg, I managed a few transitions that she thought were quite good. Out of the rest, I think several others were correct too, but I can’t be sure. What I did do, however, was focus a lot on keeping my legs down, and I did better this week than last. At one point I got a bit over-active in the transition, but other than that I kept quite still.
I did have some problems trying to affect the speed of his canter when we had a slower horse in front, as he would just fall back down to trot then, and I suspect he doesn’t have the strength to be able to canter more slowly than his regular pace at the moment. He doesn’t rush or anything, though, so its only a problem if collection is part of the plan and everyone else is doing it. But on the whole I quite liked him. He was, once we had had a talk about who was in charge, quite happy to work with me and he was not at all lazy as my instructor had thought he might be. Now, this may have been due to whether or not it the bad weather that kept them indoors all the yesterday, but he felt quite forward-going and eager to me. Had quite a pulse afterwards, too, so he clearly worked hard.
As did I, and now I feel quite bow-legged as a result. ;)