Cob Jockey

This is going to feel like word vomit after my slacktacular mostly-photo posts of the last two weeks, but bear with me.  First lesson in three weeks and we were drinking from the firehose.

Tonight's Dressage lesson felt like one mostly-stagnant-but-necessary step on the giant uphill climb of...something.  We turned one corner a while ago, where I could reliably get him on my aids, and we're somewhere in the long long stretch between that, and the self-carriage corner.

We're so far beyond one major breakthrough and so far from the next one that it would be easy to be down about today, even though nothing really went wrong.  It was just plain hard for both of us.

We were both pretty wiped after this one.

As a result of my trainer putting several rides and a lesson on him while I was gone, she had a very good idea of what to do with us.  Her current goals are the following:

1. His hind feet need to move quicker.
2. He needs to never be heavy in my hands. running through my rein aids, is the more accurate way to put this.
3. I need to think fast and constantly change things up for him.

To resolve 1, I have been using more whip when I feel his hind feet slow down, even if the speed of the gait feels fine.  She's helping me to recognize when he's just a bit sluggish behind.

To resolve 2, we have been applying liberal amounts of rein back, followed immediately by moving forward in a non-heavy manner.  Sometimes we do a turn on the haunches out of the rein back.  She said that at this (possibly brief, who knows) stage, I can't do too much rein back, but it must be controlled and slow and he has to come out of it better than he was before.

His preference is to race backward at 100mph with giant Cob reverse steps.  She says he's not going to like it because he's not inclined to want to both do the rein back and carry himself the way we want him to, which is all the more reason he needs to do it more.

To resolve 3, I have to change things up constantly.  Give this horse 10 steps on the rail and he's got his jaw and shoulders set.  So we change things up, quickly, between: leg yield, shoulder in, shoulder out, 10m circle, serpentine, spiral in/out, turn on the haunches, rein back, etc etc etc.  He must always be thinking, and always moving his feet at my direction.

My arms are too short for selfies! Ignore the weird loop, I'm fixing it.

This is hard for me, normally I get so wrapped up in thinking about feel I have a hard time also planning things, but it's making a huge difference on the flat and over fences.  When I'm doing it right, I have a horse that moves his feet faster and is sharply tuned to my aids, because he doesn't know what's coming next.

A horse that expects me to stay on the rail is going to check out, and we can't have that even for a step in order to get where we want to get in Dressage.  This is sounding a lot like the 2nd level discussion we had on here a while back...Karen?  Austen?  Tarra?

It was a hard lesson for both of us, both of us doing things that do not come naturally for us, but we're going to be better for it.

Things I do when my husband is gone: take my decisively gender-identifiable Huskies on a walk.