But a slow poster. I am late again. But oh well, its December.
We’re stuck with the later time slot for next year, but its too pricey for me to go to private lessons right now, so I will try riding at that time a few times. If it doesn’t work out, I will try to move to an earlier timeslot on Mondays. They also have a good instructor, though I am concerned there are too many juniors (and thus smaller, lighter riders) in the group for me to be able to get the less weight-carrying horses as often as I need them.
During this lesson, we continued with the canter work, and we cantered more than we’ve ever done during a regular lesson. If I had not had my private lessons with lots of cantering earlier during the year, I would have been a total mess. As it was, I had a hard enough time finding a good seat on Gamir for extended periods of time. But I was really working hard on trying to feel the canter, and to sit on the outer hindleg and really feel it moving. At times, though, it felt as if I was digging down into his back too much.
I asked my instructor about this afterwards, and she said that you can’t really push the back away as long as your seat is perfectly vertical. But if you start leaning back and digging in that way, you’re affecting the horse the wrong way. I used to do this a lot, a bad habit I developed from riding a lot of lazy horses (that’s where my tendency to work too much in general when cantering comes from too), and I think it surfaced a bit again this lesson as we were asked to get the horses galloping forward as much as possible to then be able to dam up that excess energy. Unfortunately, Gamir is so darn well-behaved that even galloping really fast with all the other horses galloping around him does not create much excess energy to dam up.
Overall, a good exercise, both because I need all the canter work I can get and because I got to gallop really fast (really fast for me, anyway ;P) while feeling perfectly in control, which may help a little with my nerves.