This week continued the trend of improvements from Heddvig but a slight feeling of dissatisfaction with my own riding. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, so it might just be my general mood, admittedly.
We stayed focus on cantering this week too, though we started with an unusually lengthy trotting section. That gave me plenty of time to feel out my own seat as well as my effect on Heddvig. I tried to focus on the corners, in particular, and on using them together with half-halts to get her more together and off the front-end. I suppose I had some intermittent success at this.
It does seem to have set her up well for the canter, at least. To begin with we just cantered 20-meter circles to get a feel for what they were like on the day, and Heddvig showed quite remarkable improvement in her left-lead canter; she was able to keep a much less rushed pace and was able to take cues to keep it up for several laps. The right-lead canter was still a bit more rushed than what is practical to manage several full laps when there’s other horses around, but it was improved as well. Ulrika told me that now I need to make sure to switch gears, basically, and adjust to being able to ask for more of her. It probably will take me a little effort to make that change, because I didn’t expect her to improve this fast.
Of course, the next exercise was still rather tricky; going from canter to counter-canter by riding a figure-of-eight. At first I made the angle too steep when crossing over from the first circle to the second. Then I had issues with shifting my seat too much so that I ended up sitting as if I wanted to switch to the regular leading leg once on the second half of the figure-of-eight. My co-ordination (or lack thereof, rather) definitely becomes an issue with counter-cantering, but I must say Heddvig did quite well. I really didn’t think she would start developing like this when its gone fairly slowly up until now. But maybe she’s reached a stage of fitness and balance that allows a lot of pieces to fall into place all at once.