Today’s lesson could actually be summed up with a single word (and one exclamation sign): wow!. However, that’d make for a pretty boring post, so I’ll elaborate some. ;)
After last week’s small glimmer of improvement among all of the so-so riding, I had really been hoping I’d get to continue on Murphy, so I was very pleased when I got assigned to him again. Murphy, alas, seemed less pleased, since he made a serious effort to take a bite out of my face as I was trying to get some of the mud and sweat out of his coat beneath his belly. These last weeks he has behaved quite well, and he’s been very good about moving aside when nudge him on either shoulder, but today he was clearly in a mood again and threw a real tantrum when I nudged his right shoulder. That’s the one he can be really difficult about, but today he started threatening quite a bit when I insisted, and even after he had given in I had to really watch my back. Still, he looked positively charming next to the new horse (Tierra), whom I suspect won’t last too long at the riding school.
After we had finished up in the stables and started walking down to the arena, our instructor shouted after us that we could ride in the paddock if everyone wanted to. Since I was on Murphy, I had no objections at all, and this turned out to be a very lucky change of plans for me. Murphy loves it outdoors, and where the other horses might get too frisky and tense, he just gets a nice amount of extra energy. He does get very curious about his surroundings, and it can be a little hard to get him to think about work, but the most he’ll do for a ‘spook’ is lift is head slightly suddenly to look at something new. That’s my kind of horse.
We started by warming up pretty independently, and I found I could concentrate my main efforts on finding a good seat rather than creating energy, since Murphy was moving forward at a quite nice pace. I tried to work hard on both the position of my legs (still no boots or leggings, but I think I did a little better today even so) and the position of my hands. It feels like I am starting to adapt to a higher hand-carriage. Initially, had some trouble with sitting both deep enough with my butt and forward enough with my stomach when transitioning from walk to trot, but I managed to improve this a fair bit by the time we started the main exercise which ended up focusing a lot on this.
Since the paddock is much larger than the indoor arena, our instructor suggested we use it to practice turning up to ride down the centre line, by doing the turns from long side to long side, across the centre line proper. We were supposed to stay at a trot for most of the time, but at the point where we crossed the centre line, we were supposed to come to a halt, stay like that for about 5 seconds, and then move forward again at a trot. Oh, and we were supposed to ride along a nice, straight line, of course.
To accomplish this, you need a horse that is moving forward with enough energy to stay straight and with more of its weight on its hindlegs than on its front legs. Without more weight on the hindquarters, you cannot get the horse to come to a good, collected halt that conserves the energy, and if you don’t get that you cannot get the horse to start trotting again by starting to move with its hindlegs instead of starting with its front legs and ‘dragging’ itself into a trot. Murphy, being Irish and not precisely built for dressage (dressage is not a priority on Ireland), prefers to keep his weight on his front legs and he has a really hard time moving from a halt to a trot without some shuffling walk steps in-between. However, I know he can collect himself quite nicely (he did last week), and I know this kind of exercise can yield great results with him, so I was quite keen to get started.
It started off so-so. Not badly, at all, but through I kept him pretty straight towards the spot where we’d do a halt, we wobbled a bit afterwards. I also kept having the energy sort of fade away in the last step or two before the halt, instead of him coming to a more decisive stop that left some energy pent-up for the transition back to trot afterwards. But I wasn’t too worried, because I could feel he was improving, and I know it does take him a while to start becoming more responsive and alert. And eventually we got there. He ended up quite light in the front end, so it felt slightly as if he was moving uphill (not a mean feat on a horse built like him), and when I was strong enough to sit properly he would collect really, really nicely. At this point, I managed some very good halts, and some pretty decent transitions too. He never managed to go straight into a trot, but he did start from his hindlegs, and he started with enough energy to move in a straight line.
My instructor was very pleased with how things were going the last ... oh, 15 minutes or so, and afterwards she commented that I had really outdone myself this time around. She hoped I’d be able to sit as well and ride as effectively even when he is not quite as naturally energetic, now that I have had a good feeling for how its supposed to feel when things click. I imagine I’ll run into more slumps sooner or later (it always happens, after all), but I do feel as if this lesson really meant some major steps forward. It was just such a great feeling towards the end, to be able to sit back more deeply, with my hands up and my chest and stomach forward, and feel the effect it had on Murphy. If I had only been fitter, I would have been able to keep him working like that for much longer than just a short stretch at a time.
Of course, he was getting pretty tired too towards the end, and whenever I had just a fraction too much rein in comparison to my leg aids, he’d immediately slow down to a walk. However, each time he would also move back into a trot—very smoothly, too—as soon as I increased the leg and seat pressure just a touch. So to a large extend it was just as much about him being very alert and responsive as it was about him being tired. But it was definitely a work-out for him, there’s no doubt about that, and equally clear was that he enjoyed it immensely. His ears were pricked forward pretty much the whole lesson, and he didn’t try to get out of work at any point.
So, in short, wow!