Horse Update, March

 

 

The weather this month has been something like this:  blue sky and warm. Two days later, cold, windy, and snow.  Several days later, blue sky and warm.  A couple days later, wind, cold, and snow.

But, we're getting there.  Camaro is shedding more and more.  He's getting a lot of scrubbing this month, both because of all the loose hair, and because he's delighting in rolling around in the mud while wearing his new 'spring jacket'.  In the picture above, he'd been wearing it less than 48 hours, and I'd all ready taken a rice root brush to it to get the caked on mud off. . . 

Riding is picking up.  I'm trying my darnedest to stick to a M-W-F riding schedule (since Tues and Thurs are babysit Faline days and I have to be done with all barn related things by noon on the dot).  So far, so good. Even the weather has cooperated with that plan, not being too windy and gusty on those days.  

I feel that progress is being made more rapidly.  We're doing better on the scary door end of the arena, and on the non-scary end, we canter both directions nearly every ride.  Left canter depart is great, to the point that he's starting to anticipate it and I don't need to prep him quite so many steps ahead of where I want the depart to occur.  To the right, some days are smooth and natural, others are a bit tense and rushy.

Meanwhile, when we're not cantering, we do quite a bit of walk work schooling leg yield in both directions,  introducing shoulder in, playing with shortening and lengthening stride at the walk, and just general responsiveness and suppling.  Especially suppling and responsiveness approaching that horse eating door area.

In terms of trot, if we're not concentrating on staying.  on.  the.  bit.   when going towards and through the scary end (while NOT trying to fall through the inside shoulder to avoid the door), we're doing lots of 10 meter circles, changes of direction through the diagonal, stretchy trot and , especially to the right, alternating between rising and sitting trot because he still thinks sitting trot means that we are going to canter any second and gets really flat and rushy to the right.

Will we be ready to show Intro C (with it's canter circles) in two months???  I'm hoping so.  At least this door nonsense is giving me lots of practice in keeping my cool and position and enforcing to Camaro that he needs to concentrate on me and listen to my aids no matter what is going on.