The chaos continues, so no wonder that I completely missed writing about last week. I’ll just have to make it two for one.
The previous Tuesday we had our second of two jumping lessons. I had Nelson, just like the week before, and we continued to work a lot with turns. The trickiest part of the exercise was a two-jump line across the middle of the arena. We were asked to start turning just right before the second jump and I kept underestimating how fast Nelson would turn. It felt like a very useful exercise for getting a better sense of turns and how to prepare for them. We also jumped some more straight-forward lines, again focusing on letting the horses sort most things out themselves, and Nelson and I got to jump a bit higher than usual which always is fun. We generally keep the jumps pretty low to keep from wearing on the horses too much, but its one of those things I like doing because its something that could scare me but it doesn’t. Have to appreciate the little things.
This last Tuesday it was back to dressage and back to Heddvig. Good canter departures was the theme of the evening, from walk on a small circle and going into canter on a larger circle around the others. I wasn’t really happy with how I did, on the whole. Heddvig was very sweaty before the lesson and Ulrika pointed out that she has sweated a bit much lately. So, when she felt a little less energetic than usual to start with, I think I ended up being cautious about asking too much for her. And cautious Linda tends to mean way too cautious and generally ineffective.
So…end result wasn’t so inspired. I am getting better at just taking for granted that she will canter and not overdoing my aids, but the work outside of the canter wasn’t focused enough from my side.