There must be a shoe-stealing leprechaun hanging around the stables recently. As I mentioned last week, I discovered after the riding lesson that Murphy was missing one of his shoes, and probably had been since earlier in the day. Today, that shoe was back on, but another shoe was missing instead. And that wasn’t at all. Another horse, Campino, was also missing a shoe, and he too had been missing one last week as well.
So ... either we have someone stealing shoes or Murphy and Campino are ‘helping’ each other to misplace shoes when they’re out in the field. Given their respective tempers (Murphy wants to be the boss and Campino occasionally thinks he’s a stallion still), I suppose that isn’t so very unlikely. Either way, its a nuisance, and today I think it had a bit of an effect on my riding lesson too.
The plan was to focus on half-passes, so we were asked to start working on getting the horses to move laterally even during the warm-up by asking for a few steps towards the middle and then a few steps back out onto the track again. We were supposed to start with this as soon as we had a good feeling for our horses at the walk, so I started off by concentrating on my seat, my breathing, my posture and my hands. Murphy felt okay, though during the walk on a long rein he’d been a bit slower and more reluctant than usual (but similar to how he was last week), and after a while I started working on the lateral movements. He moved away really nicely from my left leg, but he was very unresponsive to my right leg.
As a result, I guess I got a bit caught up on trying to get him to be more responsive to the right leg, which resulted in me losing my concentration on all those other things plus I forgot about making sure I kept the forward momentum by using the other leg to keep him moving both forward and sideways, which is necessary for the half-pass to be performed both correctly and efficiently. The horse’s outside hindleg has to move forward enough that the horse has to work at stepping past it with its inside hindleg. If he’s allowed to move either too much forward or too much sideways, there’s very little effort involved on the horse’s part.
After a bit, we started doing the same work at a trot, with much the same results for me. Murphy was getting a little more responsive to my right leg, but not greatly, and though I tried to focus on both getting him to move forward with enough energy while at the same time keeping him inside a well-defined frame, I was clearly not doing a great job with it. At one point, my instructor noted that I needed to make sure to keep the legs on more when trying to shorten him, since he ended up just moving more slowly instead of maintaining the energy but shortening his strides. His head was also coming up a bit more than usual.
So, not a great preparation for the main exercise, which involved turning in at the short end of the arena, just after or just before a corner, and doing a half-pass towards the centre line, either to the left or to the right depending on where you turned in. As I had expected, the half-pass to the left (that is, with my right leg as the lateral aid) was pretty bad and the half-pass to the right okay, though here he almost moved too much sideways. After a couple of tries, I moved my whip to my right hand and kept it there regardless of which direction the half-pass was done in, and that helped a little bit. But something definitely wasn’t as it should be today.
We finished up with some cantering on the circles, and here I noticed that although I made an effort to get a good canter transition and managed to get Murphy to respond quite well too, the actual canter was worse than usual. Very jarring. I managed to sit fairly still through it, but my legs (especially my inner leg) came up a lot. The trotting we did following the canter was okay in one direction, then became rather too rushed in the other, though he was still fairly supple and had his head forward and down. Afterwards, my instructor noted that the main issue she’d seen was the lack of efficiency on my part, and that I need to keep reminding myself to always start working right from the get-go. I agreed, though I said I thought he was bothered by his missing shoe and that I got too caught up on trying to solve the problem with his lack of response to my right leg.
So, not a great class. I do think the missing shoe may have impacted his performance some (though he certainly wasn’t lame or anything like that), but I definitely run into trouble when I get stuck on something that doesn’t work. I try to methodically apply the approaches that have worked before, but as soon as I run out of options I get both single-minded and lost at the same time. A very common end to such a lesson is that I get too tired to keep trying, and all of a sudden the horse starts working much more nicely as I relax. ;P Not this time, though. Still, there was some improvement at the end.
I think I need to focus some on finding a good balance between being an efficient rider from the start of each lesson and getting stressed about not getting the desired effect right off. I guess I tend to get a bit stuck in a rut, and maybe a bit stressed too, when I work hard at something and I don’t get the result I was expecting. After all, the work itself is as important as the final result.