No, I didn’t already have this Tuesday’s lesson. This is last week’s. ;P Depression and work has continued to distract me from actually getting things done.
It was, however, a pretty good jumping lesson for me and Murphy. The goal was to work on turns, and we had three jumps down the center line that we had to turn onto from a fairly tight angle from the short end. At first, we jumped just the first fence and were supposed to take the turn in such a way that the horses knew they weren’t supposed to continue on to the second. The second exercise was jumping the first and the third, and we were supposed to go to the right of the middle jump and then turn left after the last jump. We finished up by jumping the whole line.
Of course, as always happens when there’s a lot of turns and changes of direction to consider, I overthought at first. I came in too cautiously, concerned that I wouldn’t have time to turn, and ended up with a lot of wobbly, uncertain lines. Then, as my instructor told me not to ride so carefully, I went into full speed ahead mode. It worked for a little while, but then Murphy really got into things and I was so stuck thinking about going forward that I forgot all about how all the energy I created at the back needed to be collected up at the front.
Once we got to jumping the final line, it was going a wee bit fast. As my instructor noted to me, when Murphy doesn’t fit in on a line where all the bigger horses fit in, something’s up. Oops. Anyway, she had me redo it, and redo it, and redo it and then the penny finally dropped. I got some amazing trot in the last approach, and good enough canter from my ground-crawling Irishman that he even managed a pretty tight turn afterwards.
We chatted a bit about the problems I had had afterwards (though she liked the last bit of decisive and together riding), and I said I had realized that its easy for me to get single-minded. I focus completely on the last instruction heard, and I can’t seem to always chain several steps together. On the other hand, the constant starts and stops of the week before had kept me from getting stuck in a rut, so that was why it had worked so well.