Cob Jockey

Stupid TuffRider pad.  It's a do-not-buy for several reasons.

Connor and I had a really good practice ride yesterday.  A really good ride.

My trainer may have been kidding about 500 halts before our next lesson, but she wasn't kidding that it was homework.  So after we established forward, then body control (a January goal!), I started asking for straight halts.

What I noticed is that he couldn't halt straight if he wasn't straight in the preceding gait.  So if his shoulder was popped at the walk, even so slightly that I wouldn't have noticed it a few months ago, he couldn't halt straight without me making some last second corrections.

To address that, in between halts I added the exercise from about a month ago in which she had me feel when his weight was on his inside shoulder, then use my inside leg to shift his weight and then my outside rein to catch that shift.  I also continued to throw in a stride of counterbend every so often.

Once he was traveling straight, we could halt square.  I felt a little stupid for not realizing it earlier, it seems so obvious now that if his weight is more on one leg than the other, he's going to halt like that too, with that leg parked out or that shoulder thrown around.  This is what she meant when she said we need to drill our basics.  He felt really, really good by the end of the ride, and I quit after he gave me like 10 uninterrupted minutes of really nice trot work, equal in both reins.

They have apparently been busy since Sunday, making a real stall out of the area that was once a stall, then was an aisleway, and now is a stall again.  They were nowhere near finished constructing it when I took this picture (pipe gate is definitely temporary, for example!), but I like it so far!  Talk about proximity to the indoor: the back "wall" of his stall is a sliding door, and the indoor is like 15 feet from that door.  We'll see what the final iteration ends up being!

Cob proof: tight bungie cord holding the gate closed, back wall is both latched and has a concrete cinder block in front of the door.  You shall not escape!