Brrr. Nasty, cold, biting wind, and little tiny, stinging flakes of snow. Makes a girl want to hide in bed, and makes ponies mildly insane. Today was ... adventurous, and I must admit that while I lamented the departure of Pojken (the little yellow tank) before leaving for my lesson, I did not lament it quite so much once I found out I was on Nelson again. If Pojken (who was sent back for bucking off a few too many kids) had been there today I think ‘interesting’ wouldn’t quite have covered things. Nelson was in ... hrm ... high spirits, I suppose we can call it. As I led him down to the arena, it felt as if I was leading a 17 hand horse and not a pony of barely 14 hands. He was sort of floating half a meter above the ground.
That gave me a pretty good idea what the lesson would be like. Of course, to start riding, I had to get on him, which was easier said than done as standing still seemed to be a task of monumental difficulty for Nelson today. Need I say that I cast a few longing glances at Murphy, who stood perfectly still with his rider? Whom, btw, happens to have Nelson has her favourite horse, so we were a touch tempted to trade. ;)
But, no. My instructor probably feels I have ridden Murphy a bit much (well ... maybe ;P), and I was determined not to be scared off by a pony. I’ve said before I can handle pretty much anything as long as its not too big, and here I had a good opportunity to prove that to myself. I did, however, put my whip aside and I also elected not to ride him on a long rein during the initial warm-up walk. He was speedwalking around the arena anyhow, his little legs moving like pistons.
Today the plan was that we were going to start practicing shoulder-ins. To lay the groundwork for this, we were going to focus on getting a soft inner side with the shoulder moved into the body. Just the kind of thing you want to do on a hyperactive pony who, when you keep the reins short, ends up with no neck at all. And lengthening the reins didn’t feel like a great idea unless I wanted to go very, very fast. ;)
But, I tried, and tried, and tried. Mostly, however, I ended up trying to focus on riding a slow rising trot in order to change his rhythm. But since my own sense of rhytmn and cadence is pretty poor, I am very easily affected by how the horse moves, so getting him to adapt to me instead of the other way around was a challenge. I tried to recall how my old instructor had told me to ride Gizmo (a lovely but very lively pony we had in the stables a few years ago), which involved mentally dividing the arena up into short sections and controlling the pace carefully up to each point. Having that to focus on did make it a little easier to keep him from just running away, but I had one big problem that really set the tone for most of the lesson: my outer leg.
Nelson is a fair bit smaller than Murphy, and nowhere near as wide as Pojken. As a result, my lower legs easily end up below his stomach, where they do me no good whatsoever. Additionally, because of his inability to stand still at the beginning of the lesson, I had ended up with uneven stirrups. One was a notch shorter than what I usually use, which gets my leg into a good position on him, but the other was two notches too long. I first noticed how I ended up pushed too far to the right when circling to the left, and I then shortened it one notch. It felt okay for a bit, but the really big issue was how I kept having my outer lef lose contact whenever I applied my inner leg to move his shoulder in. This is always an issue for me, since my co-ordination sucks and one leg always wants to do the same as the other, but today it was compounded by my uneven stirrups.
So, I kept struggling with Nelson for a while longer, with very little success at all. Then I finally realized I needed to shorten my right stirrup one notch more. And sheesh, talk about a transformation. My outer leg ended up in a good and pretty steady position, and the very next circle we did was as different from the previous ones as night and day. All of a sudden, Nelson was working. His shoulder came in beautifully, I got pretty good softness in the inner side, and he trotted along quite happily, ears forward, neck down and no more antics. That unsteady outer leg must have bugged him like crazy. Talk about getting a very effective demonstration of the difference something like that makes. I really, really love horses that so clearly show you when you’re right and when you’re wrong.
The final minutes of the lesson were very pleasant. Oh, he didn’t do it perfectly all the time (he’s still not strong enough to work effectively for that long), and he did tend to get a little heavy on the forehand, but it was such an amazing difference (not the least in his stress levels) that I just enjoyed myself immensely.