I’ll blame Easter for this one. First I had to cook a bunch of food, then I had to eat a bunch of food. Exhausting.
I had a pretty good jumping lesson last Tuesday. We were out in the paddock for the first full lesson of the semester, and that was probably a good call because Murphy was actually a bit lazy even outdoors. Possibly, he found it a bit too dusty (I certainly did), but I think he’s just having a bit of a lazy period.
Given that we were going to be jumping some tricky curving and bending lines, I knew I’d need decently engaged, so I tried to focus on getting him a little charged up during the warm-up. At first, I got a little too active, but after a reminder (and a suggestion to use transitions; I have to keep that in mind) I managed to wind him up so I didn’t have to constantly be there with my legs reminding him. Its very much been a focus of our instructor’s of late: get the horses thinking forward so that you’re not carrying them every step of the way, because you need to focus on other things than just maintaining movement.
This proved to be a key ingredient for this particular lesson. We had some tricky turns to negotiate that first resulted in a lot of drifting out to the side, but where I managed to get a pretty good feel for how to turn him after a few tries. Even with his rather terrible canter, I managed to get him lighter in front so I could raise him up through the turn instead of tilting him over to one side and letting him dig. I am not sure if he’s gotten a little bit stronger or if I have learned a few new tricks, but I am definitely having more success at getting a bit of an uphill feel in the canter.
For the last exercise, he was almost too forward, but he wasn’t just running and getting long and flat. So, when my instructor asked me to slow him down, I was able to do so without losing the canter, and for the last jump I got a nice, controlled turn afterwards where I clearly felt he was going slow enough that I could easily turn him, but that didn’t mean he was going to lose the canter. Afterwards, she said this was the first time she’d dared to tell me to slow down, because otherwise it usually just means losing the canter entirely on him.