Good lesson, but still, ‘bah’. Didn’t get Murphy (got Gamir), and what’s worse, someone else got him. I watched jealously. ;P Its a bit lik watching someone chatting with your boyfriend/fiancé; even if its nothing serious, you kind of wish they wouldn’t get along. At least I do, heh.
I did, however, have a pretty good lesson myself as well (I was concentrating on my own riding whenever I was actually doing something other than just waiting for my turn). Gamir is a very well-schooled jumper, and he is of course far superior to Murphy for me to work on my own technique on.
We jumped a similar combination to last week, with a total of three jumps, though on the diagonal instead. That made it easier for me to get the correct canter after the last jump, though I think it was mostly due to Gamir being on his best behaviour because I don’t think I did quite as well in terms of preparing for the correct canter.
Like last week, one issue for me was that we came in at a trot (though now we were supposed to get a canter right after the firts jump). Gamir is pretty short-striding for his size, and doesn’t tend to get particularly eager (at least not indoors), so at first I felt as if he didn’t have enough momentum to get a canter after the first jump. That meant I got a little pushy the first two times. A few reminders from the instructor set me straight, and once I trusted him to get it right it worked better.
He also picked up the pace a bit more on his own after a few attempts, especially once he ended up knocking into the second jump after being a little too lazy about picking his feet up. I was pretty unbalanced by his stumble (he has gotten more stumbly with age), so I just let the reins more or less drop for the third jump, to allow him to do it unhindered (that tends to be my reaction if I am unbalanced in a combination; I don’t want to risk pulling the horse’s mouth over the next jump by holding on when unbalanced). He did this very well, and my instructor noted the difference between him and another horse that had knocked into a rail. It jumped the next fence just the same, whereas Gamir immediately put in a better jump.
We did have one more stumble as the jumps were put up a little higher for those horses that jumped well enough, and I think this does suggest he’s having some little issues right now (will try to remember to bring it up next week). Again he followed it up by a very good jump, and she also asked us to take the combination again to finish on a clean series, which we did. Very smooth. So, yeah, he’s a lovely horse to jump. It just feels like cheating sometimes, because he’s so good. With Murphy a good series of jump feels like an accomplishment, with Gamir it feels like a privilege.