Lesson 3/15

A wee bit late on this post I know.

I rode Junior this time and really liked him. He seemed to be the perfect school horse, in my opinion. A tall bay gelding, with typical school horse quirks. He liked to pull blankets and halters off of their hooks, and avoid being bridled. But then again he was so sweet that I really didn't mind.

He didn't take a whole lot of leg but did need some guiding through my outside aids to avoid bulging shoulders in both directions. We had a nice relaxing warm up of working walk and trot, then M sent us through some trot poles where we then did a leg yield over to the rail at the sitting trot in each direction. It felt just okay. I need lots of work on my sitting trot. I felt as if I was bouncing all over the place and tended to brace a little more than I would like.

Junior is an interesting ride when asked to do downward transitions. He likes to pull and will literally throw his head down and trot as fast as he can while I try to get his head up. Kinda funny. M said he wouldn't do that so much if he had a regular rider. I'm sure she's right. Other than that I really enjoyed him. We moved up into his very (to me) up and down canter. M said our pace was good, but man did I feel like we weren't going anywhere. We did some circles so that I could really feel how to correct his bulging and then hit the quarter line into three canter poles. Each time felt pretty good and I was able to work on myself a lot - like counting strides and keeping my shoulders back.

Eventually we added a little jump into our circle at the canter and again I was able to work on seeing the distance by counting down from three and five. I felt great on Junior and was really able to trust him. That's something I had been missing for over two years - being able to have some sort of trust that my mount is going to get me over the fence. I was able to take a deep breath and not totally freak out that I would botch the distance and end up on his neck, or worse. What a relief.

After a few jumps in each direction we called it good. I can't express enough how wonderful it feels to be jumping a trust worthy horse.