After last weeks amazing ride on Murphy, I had a strong feeling things wouldn’t go quite so well today, regardless of who I’d be riding. To some degree, I almost hoped I wouldn’t get Murphy, since I’d put more pressure on myself then. As it happened, he wasn’t on the list for our group, so I ended up with Nelson instead. He’s now been bought and insured, which means he gets to be turned out with the other horses. As a result, he was missing bits of coat here and there. Apparently he’s rather cocky, and has had a few run-ins with the more dominant horses in the herd. He’s quite sweet in the stable though, albeit very quick to beg for treats. He’s one I’ll make sure to always feed in his trough instead of out of my hand.
Once down in the arena, he was a bit better at standing still while I was getting him ready, though he did walk off a bit as I started mounting up. He’s fairly calm about it, though, so its just a lack of manners rather than a nervous or over-eager disposition. I found I had to shorten my stirrups quite a bit, as my feet otherwise end up too far beneath his stomach. He’s pretty square and solid, but oddly enough there isn’t that much horse between your legs even so. Getting them even was a challenge, though, as his saddle is prone to shifting around a bit due to his very round whithers.
We started off with some circle work. The walk was okay, but the trot was really rushed today, and I found myself very conflicted. On the one hand, I wanted to make sure I didn’t shorten him up too much (he’s pretty much able to scrunch his neck up to nothing, and make the reins ineffective that way) but get him forward and down like I had managed for a bit towards the end of my first lesson on him. But on the other hand, I couldn’t just let him run off. I tried to ride him more slowly, to get him to adjust to my pace instead of the other way around, but I didn’t manage that too well. In the end, I put my whip away, as I think he may have been reacting a bit too it. Its fairly long, after all, and he probably had excess energy as I suspect they hadn’t been out much due to the heavy rain during the day.
However, he was already pretty fired up, so the canter was even more of an adventure. Still, is his size is such that it doesn’t bother me, other than the fact that I get a little frustrated about not being able to get him to listen to me. Though I suppose its good to confirm that I can handle such a situation calmly—as long as its on a pony or a small horse. Not that he was bolting or anything, but it was definitely an over-active canter that I found it very hard to do much at all with.
After the warm-up, we moved on to the main exercise. Like we have been doing for some weeks now, we focused on using a circle to get the inner shoulder in and the outer hindleg well under the body as a preparation for a transition to canter at the end of the circle. Nelson, of course, decided to get even more fired up as he saw the horses in front of him start cantering, and I made the mistake of not keeping my legs on him when he got frisky. I wasn’t worried, but I guess its just a natural reaction when your horse is trying to run off. It takes some work to condition yourself to actually sit back down and ask for more engagement instead of just removing the leg aids entirely while using the reins to just stop him. Once my instructor reminded me of this, I did manage to get him working better on the circles, though my work on getting his inner shoulder close to is body often resulted in overbending instead.
However, the canter following the circles did not manifest. I did manage to sit still despite not getting a reaction from him, but in the process of concentrating on that, I ended up being too passive. At first, I just let him trot off too quickly, hoping I’d get canter that way (for a while, I did get instructed to do so on Murphy, so I guess that was a holdover from that), and when my instructor asked me to put some more pressure on him, I guess I didn’t think it through properly. We were supposed to go from walk to canter, but I got stuck on letting him move into a trot when I didn’t get canter right off. So while I actually started working him at the trot, and got him far more connected front to back, I forgot I wasn’t supposed to allow the trot at all. Though, to be honest, walk to canter on Nelson may be asking a bit too much of him. Towards the end, I tried a couple of times with a short whip that I could use to tap his inner front leg. We got canter then, but with the wrong leading leg. So, not a stellar performance, precisely.
The final few laps at a trot, at least, were rather okay. I finally managed to slow him down by riding a slow rising trot, and he did come forward and down much more than at anytime during the lesson. So, I guess the work on the circles did take him in the right direction, at least. But it will take me a while to learn to ride him, that’s for sure.