This week, the last week of the semester, I finally managed to get around to private lesson in addition to my final regular lesson. Its been a few months since the last one, and I have been feeling that lately. I really wanted to get some serious work in on the weaknesses that have troubled me the most lately; my poor sense of rhythm and my lack of co-ordination. And, of course, I wanted some quality time with Murphy.

But before I dive into the lesson on Monday, what did happen last week? Well, I wasn’t alone there, so we had a theory lesson. Horse anatomy, in fact, and Campino and Nikita got painted up with green marker pens to show various bones and angles. I enjoy these sorts of things (the anatomy, not putting green marks on horses), and it fit in well with my homework about dog anatomy for the show training class I have been attending for a few Thursdays (the last one was this week), though I am not very good at it so far. I imagine it takes a lot of practice to get an eye for what is or isn’t a good angle, for example.

There won’t be much of a report for today’s lesson, as we’re having theory. Well, unless I am the only one showing up so I get to ride again, which is vaguely possible considering the time of the year and the collision between the match between Sweden and Greece. In fact, I am tempted to stay at home myself, but I probably won’t as I need to try to arrange a private lesson for next week. That’s our last week of riding until August.

So, why am I posting now, then? To catch up on last week’s lesson, of course. ;P

I ended up on Gamir, and since the paddock was incredibly dry and dusty, we rode indoors. It wasn’t too hot, actually, but hot enough that Gamir started out soft and limber from the get-go. That was quite different from how he tends to be in winter. We warmed up mostly on our own, so we didn’t get a lot of feedback right then, but it felt to me as if he moved with a longer strider rather than a quicker stride when asked to move forward a bit more. Keeping my mind on the difference is, slowly but surely, making me more aware of what exactly is happening.

The lesson itself focused on working towards a half-pass, though we started out just doing a leg-yield with the neck flexion in the direction of movement as opposed to away from the direction of movement. We then added the bend of the horses body once we were able to get good sideways movement while retaining the neck flexion. At a walk, I was able to more or less sort this out. Gamir is well-schooled and finds moving sideways pretty easy, though maintaining the flexion and the right amount of forward movement takes a bit more work. At a trot, it did not go so well. These sort of exercises demand a lot from my own body control and co-ordination, and I pretty much twist myself into a pretzel trying to do it at a trot.

I was pretty pleased with the start of the lesson, not the least because I felt as if I had a better grasp on how Gamir was moving, but I need to work a lot on my co-ordination. I suspect that if I wasn’t riding, it would be a lot worse in general, and I should probably get back to taking dancing lessons to work on it outside of the riding.

It may be Sunday now, but I am still a little sore from last Tuesday’s lesson. Or, well, more from carrying out all the materials needed to build our little jumping course. Since we had a double jumping lesson, our instructor had put together a course consisting of 10 fences. Ouch. Lots of fun to jump, less fun to drag out and even less fun to drag back in afterwards.

This week, I blame Eurovision for my tardiness in posting. ;) Though, there wasn’t much to write about either, since we did our little once-per-semester tour in the nearby woods last Tuesday. Some of the horses had been sick with a mild virus, so it was decided that not doing anything strenuous was best. Since I was put on Murphy, that was fine by me. Riding outside of the arena or paddock is always something that makes me a little nervous, though Murphy is pretty reliable and that makes all the difference. This time, I had a very good ride. We got to do a fair bit of trotting and cantering for once (after all the development in the area, we don’t have a lot of good paths to use), and it even made me wish we had some jumps we could do. Murphy would have loved that.

Last week was taken up with worrying about the dog’s test on Saturday, so of course it totally slipped my mind to write about my last lesson. Given that its already Tuesday again, its definitely time to get it done now.

I was put on Gamir instead of Murphy this time, and given that we ended up focusing on a lot of canter work I suspect that was a rather purposeful shift. Gamir needs much less help with his canter, so he’s a good horse for me to work on doing less. Which I still need to work on. A lot. ;P I also managed to continue the trend from last week of mistaking a higher stride frequency for a longer stride when working on varying the tempo, both during the warm-up and during the actual canter work.

No, I don’t miss last week entirely. We didn’t ride, as we will be doing a double-length jumping lesson in a few weeks. This week, though? Well, I almost didn’t ride this week either, since a lovely norovirus (also known as “winter vomiting disease") decided to forget that it was May and struck me down with a vengeance on Monday. I was sick as a whole pack of dogs, and while the worst was over on Tuesday, I was still very weak then. But, I took a bunch of pain killers and some fruit sugar to perk me up, and headed off.

As I sat down to write this post, I realized that I would once again be running into vocabulary issues, and that I probably need to tackle this sooner rather than later. I do have a horse terminology dictionary which goes from English to Swedish and from Swedish to English, but it doesn’t cover as many dressage terms as I would like and some of them I am a little suspicious of. Some searching around seems to have uncovered what I needed for this post, however. 

This Tuesday I was, once again, reminded that I could really, really use a pair of longer legs when riding. I don’t suppose they sell extensions anywhere? ;P

I was put on Sammy instead of Murphy, and while I love the old fellow dearly, he’s rather broad. For stumpy-legged me, that means that even just sitting straight up and down, my legs don’t quite end up in the right position. And if I start trying to have a more forward leg, or a leg drawn back a bit, it gets even dicier. As we were doing shoulder in work, and were asked to have our inner leg a little forward (to emphasize to the horse that it should wrap around the leg a bit) and our outer leg a bit back, I struggled quite a bit.

I don’t have great leg position to start with, and when it becomes physically difficult to get into a certain position, I tend to avoid it as I don’t much care for discomfort. I am trying to improve it a bit by doing leg exercises again, to make them a bit stronger and a bit more supple, since it did help when I did that regularly some time ago. But there’s no getting around the fact that my build is not great for riding and that my seat (which needs work to start with) deteriorates very quickly as soon as I get onto something that is a little too big. I imagine that if I rode more regularly and if my seat and my coordination was much better, I could compensate for my shortcomings more easily. But as it is, it takes very little to throw off my precariously gained balance.

So, that lesson ended up being a lot about my body, and I didn’t have as much success with Sammy as I would have liked. However, I did manage to act on one error from the week before, namely how I was handling his outside. This week, I concentrated a lot on riding his outside forward to the outer hand, and I think it made quite a difference.

Last week was a theory lesson, and another round of loose jumping, so I didn’t have too much to say about that. The most interesting bit was seeing how Vermir, a relatively newcomer to the stables, followed our instructor around. They’d had a bit of an argument some days before about who should be in charge. He clearly lost. ;)

Yesterday, we were back to dressage. I got Murphy, but unfortunately both him and I were lacking a little in motivation. Or perhaps it was just my slight lack of focus that did it, though it wouldn’t be the first time that he decided he wasn’t keen on working. He was also in a really bad mood towards the other horses, although he was quite pleasant to deal with in the stables.

More snow, more frisky horses, more jittery nerves. That’s about what I had expected from today’s lessons, and its more or less what I got. Since I knew there hadn’t been any lessons for a few days because of Easter, and since its been cold and snowy for a whole week now, I expected Fleur to be quite a handful if I got her again. Which, of course, I did.

Fortunately, she had been exercised some, though she wasn’t exactly calmer today as my instructor had thought she would be. In fact, she was a bit more tense, and I wasn’t able to get her working quite as well as last week at walk and trot. However, because there was only three of us, we had plenty of time and room for the warm-up and I was able to get some more cantering in before we started jumping. At first, I kept her way too short again and got her bouncing up and down more than she cantered forward, but then I forced myself to let her have a bit more rein, and she actually didn’t really increase her pace, she just stopped bouncing. So, getting to feel that before we started jumping helped keep me from pulling her back too much and losing the flow entirely.

My plans to post a timely account were foiled by figure skating and by Easter. However, last week’s lesson can be summarized quite well like this: It was cold, Fleur was jumpy, she spooked me but at least I stayed on her the whole lesson.

I may not have mentioned it in so many words before, but I am about the least brave rider you will find. I was in a somewhat bad accident when was about 10, and I never regained the confidence I had before then. For the first few years after the accident, I freaked out if a horse so much thought about doing something I hadn’t asked it to do. Eventually, it got a little bit better, but now the natural timidity that comes with getting older has kicked in, leaving me with a fairly limited range of horses that I can handle.

Bad Linda. I missed posting about last week, and now just about all I can remember is that I rode Sammy and he (as usual) got really frisky when we did the cantering because it was an exercise were we did the transitions in the same spots each lap. I think I was fairly pleased with the overall result, though.

I am also going to have to keep this weeks posting fairly short and sweet, because my arm is very strained from the work I’ve had this week. I was back on Murphy again, but unfortunately it was because Sammy had injured himself. He had both front legs wrapped and a small cut on the left. He’d apparently come in hurt from the field, though our instructor hadn’t been around just then so she wasn’t sure how bad it was. I hope it isn’t too bad, since he’s getting on in years. I made sure to give him some extra treats and petting, but he did look a bit bothered by one of the legs at least.

Murphy was, once again, in stubborn pony mode. He tried all sorts of evasions with me to start, though it actually made sure to remind me to ride him with fairly high demands right off, so in a sense that was just good. I think this was probably the most ‘tough’ I have been during a regular lesson, and it really paid off. I informed him I wanted him to work, and soon enough he was working. That is, as long as I kept after him. He was very quick to slip into contrary mode, even though he clearly enjoyed the work.

I managed to get some fairly good trot on my own, especially once I removed my stirrups after the warm-up was done, and then with some help in the canter it came out nicely too. The transitions to canter actually worked pretty darn well right off (I do so much better without my stirrups), but the transitions from canter were more of the ‘falling into trot’ kind. So I was told to ask for more work in the transition, and to just lay my whip against his outer hindleg during the transition to get it more under him. It made quite a difference. It still came out a bit ‘rough’, because Murphy’s coordination isn’t great, but at least he retained momentum and hindleg activity.

On the whole, being more decisive and a bit ‘tougher’ right off paid off, and for the most part Murphy had fun too. I just wish I could ride all horses without stirrups for a while, because it makes a big difference. Of course, then I’ll probably forget how to use stirrups, which might not be so good.

Another week on Gamir turned into another week on Murphy, and I wasn’t exactly about to complain about that. Murphy seemed pretty pleased too, especially when treated to many minty treats. I am not entirely sure what he (or any of the other horses) think of my occasional habit of ... well ... sort of ... singing to them as I tack them up, but at least they don’t run away in fear. Of course, they are tethered ...

After last week’s luxury of being all alone, it was back to a regular lesson and back to someone other than Murphy. In this case, Gamir. The worst part about him is how surly he is to get ready, but last time I managed pretty well with plenty of bribes, and it worked fine this time too. He basically needs to be distracted a lot to keep him from getting testy. He was probably also fairly comfortable as far as his back goes, because he didn’t feel particularly stiff (like he sometimes can be) once we got started.

Yesterday I struggled with my translation work as my right arm and shoulder started ached something fiercely. Most likely, its a repetitive strain injury of some kind, which is not exactly great if I am considering a career at the keyboard. I have had smaller issues over the years, but over the last weeks it has escalated, making each new job progressively more painful. So, that depressed me.

Until, that is, I got to the stables and got a nice surprise. We were supposed to have a theory lesson, but its a winter holiday week for schools so we had lots of early cancellations and the one other person who was supposed to show up called and said he wouldn’t come. So ... the instructor asked me if I wanted to ride instead? Did I? Oh yes. Fortunately, I had worn okay clothing for riding, since I had expected us to be in the stables for the theory. So, I had my coat and my gloves, though just regular non-riding tights and walking boots. But with a borrowed hat and whip I was ready to go. And I got Murphy, too. Of course, he was a little surprised to quickly get tacked up (we were a bit late since the fellow called just as the lesson started to say he wouldn’t come ;P) and to not get any candy, since I had forgotten to bring any. But he complied. ;)