I had some papers to deal with this week, so the lesson report ended up falling by the wayside for a few days. It was, however, a lesson well worth reporting on. I had worried that I’d be back on Fleur (it was pretty cold, so I figured she’d be frisky) since Murphy had done two jumping classes earlier in the day, but I was pleasantly surprised to find myself on Sammy. That’s a rare treat these days, since the big Irish boy is the oldest horse in the stables and mostly used for lower level lessons.
As usual when his coat is a bit shaggy, Sammy was very bothered by being groomed, though he’s all bark and pretty much no bite. He snaps after you all the time, but if he hits you even the slightest by mistake, he gets very remorseful. He did, however, not care one bit for the horse next to him, and Winston seemed to feel the same about Sammy. They did a lot of glaring at each other during the lesson as well, and if one ended up behind the other, they tried to get closer to take a bit out of each other.
It was a pretty straight-forward and rather simple lesson, which it had to be as we focused on something we rarely work extensively on: cantering. One lap of countering wears as much on the horses as ten laps trotting, our instructor has noted, so on riding school horses you really can’t do as much cantering as you as a rider would need. Certainly, I need lots of work on it because it is my weakest gait even though the private lessons have improved it a great deal. In particular, I need work on being forward-thinking in the canter even on a bigger horse, and that was just what we did today.
We had two specific distances to canter along each long side, measured out between two rails. At first, we just cantered to get a feel for what the horses would do normally, and then she asked us to maintain the rhythm but change the length of stride to shorter or longer. Sammy loves cantering, though the rails made him think he’d get to jump (he hasn’t jumped for years after an injury to a muscle, and he sorely misses it) so at first he was very eager. Then, as he didn’t get to jump, he ended up going a little too slowly, in part because he still viewed the rails as a point to judge a distance for a jump from so he shortened himself each time. Back when he used to jump, he never bothered checking where to jump off, but apparently his injury resulted in some sense being imparted to him. ;)
His ideal distance between the rails ended up being about six strides, and I was asked to get it down to five. By then, I was comfortable with his obedience, and I really dared to just gallop on. That was a great feeling. And exactly why we did such a basic lesson: we’ll be doing a lot of canter work on from here, and she wanted us to find some fire and explosiveness to take along for the ride.