After yesterday’s ... trials, I was feeling decidedly jittery before today’s lesson, and before the horses had been handed out I was very tense and apprehensive. Fortunately, I did get Murphy today, and that immediately settled my nerves. I knew he’d be bomb-proof even if the other horses decided to act up today as well.
However, as it turned out, all the horses behaved quite well today. Possibly because our instructor had cut out their evening feed of oats yesterday, having decided they seemed to have plenty of extra energy anyway. So, the lesson got off to a good start without any incidents, save for much laughing about yesterday’s misadventures and an inordinate amount of pooping on the part of the horses, leading to our instructor having to spend a lot of time cleaning up after them before she could get started telling us what to do.
After some warm-up (where I managed to get a nice trot out of Murphy, and a so-so canter), we started jumping on a single obstacle, approached through a relatively sharp turn. The instructor was very pleased with my position over the jump, as I managed to give him plenty of rein without jumping before him or throwing myself too far forward. She did, however, think I took the turn too sharply, and for my last attempt advised me to round it off more. This resulted in a much smoother approach and a very nicely timed jump. So, a good start, I have to say.
Following this, we started on the main exercise, which consisted of three obstacles set along the middle line, parallel to the length of the arena. We were to jump these on a figure-of-eight pattern, though initially we did only the bottom loop of the eight, and the main difficulty was to get a good approach to the middle obstacle so that we could change canter lead while across the jump. I thought this would be quite difficult on Murphy given his issues with cantering in general, but the first time we tried it I managed a very good approach, got his new inside shoulder tucked in close to his body, and he landed on the correct lead. The instructor called it excellent, and laughed about my first reaction being to loudly praise Murphy instead of being pleased with myself. ;) Unfortunately, my second attempt wasn’t as good, as I got a bit of a diagonal line and thus didn’t get him to land on the proper lead.
Still, pretty happy with that, and he was feeling very nice and supply as we were circling around waiting for our turn. Knowing we’d be jumping on a circular path, I had worked a lot with getting him supple and yielding for the inside leg, and perhaps I ended up overdoing it a little because I think he may have become too relaxed, and perhaps a little tired as well. Either way, I got a bit of a nasty surprise once we got around to the final exercise: jumping along that figure-of-eight pattern until our instructor was happy with us. I noticed when we started cantering that he wasn’t at all as eager as before, and although the first jump went well, I felt a sharp lack of energy afterwards. And, of course, I fell back into my bad old habit of rocking and pushing to get him going. The instructor kept telling me to ride as if I had a long hunt ahead of me, and to conserve my energy, but it took me several laps to check myself enough and give him a couple of taps with the whip to get him going. Then I managed a pretty decent speed across the last few jumps, and for the final lap change across the middle obstacle I even managed a clean change of canter lead, something my instructor said she’d never seen him do. So, I guess I got him cantering with a lot of energy towards the end at least.
So, not as great a finish as I would have hoped for, but when I spoke to my instructor afterwards, she still thought I should be pretty pleased with the progress I’ve made over the last year. My leg is much steadier, I don’t throw myself across the obstacle ahead of the horse, and often I do manage to keep my upper body pretty steady. Hopefully I’ll get to jump him soon again, and then I’ll make sure to be quicker to tell him I won’t tolerate any slacking, in case it wasn’t so much a case of being tired as a case of trying to shirk his work.