More snow, more frisky horses, more jittery nerves. That’s about what I had expected from today’s lessons, and its more or less what I got. Since I knew there hadn’t been any lessons for a few days because of Easter, and since its been cold and snowy for a whole week now, I expected Fleur to be quite a handful if I got her again. Which, of course, I did.
Fortunately, she had been exercised some, though she wasn’t exactly calmer today as my instructor had thought she would be. In fact, she was a bit more tense, and I wasn’t able to get her working quite as well as last week at walk and trot. However, because there was only three of us, we had plenty of time and room for the warm-up and I was able to get some more cantering in before we started jumping. At first, I kept her way too short again and got her bouncing up and down more than she cantered forward, but then I forced myself to let her have a bit more rein, and she actually didn’t really increase her pace, she just stopped bouncing. So, getting to feel that before we started jumping helped keep me from pulling her back too much and losing the flow entirely.
Of course, today’s exercise actually involved keeping a very short, collected canter, so once we started jumping I had to try to find the flow again, at a very different pace. The exercise consisted of four jumps placed along the centre line in a zig-zag pattern. We had to jump one of the obstacles at either end of the line, then come around in a loop in the ‘wrong’ direction from where we’d expect to go to jump the obstacle next to it. Going fast was not an option. Planning ahead was.
Fortunately, Fleur has the shortest little canter strides in the world, so turning her tightly isn’t too much of a problem. I did have some issues with timing (as usual), and ended up jumping ahead of her a few times. Then my instructor observed that it was usually the first jump in any set of jumps that I had the most issue with, so I tried to not think of it as a start but rather imagine I was in the middle of things already. It actually helped a little.
It was also fortunate that the exercise was fairly work-intensive, so it did keep Fleur’s brain cell fairly occupied. She got a little frisky on a few occasions, but she didn’t get very tense, so on the whole I wasn’t too nervous once the lesson was in full swing. I’d say she was a pretty good pick for me for this kind of exercise, but I wish I didn’t have to get so tense before the lesson and during the start of it.