Lesson 9/28/11

I know, not very creative with the title. Thats because nothing super eventful happened last night, which is a-okay by me.

Got there pretty early, so I got in a decent amount of flatwork. Lots of trotting circles again, figure eights, some leg yielding with some pretty decent forward/sideways movement. At least now I can really "feel" it when she's crossing those legs, as opposed to just tilting the body sideways and walking forward. And she *knows* how to do it perfectly fine. Its just a matter of me asking in the correct place, and being able to feel/correct her through the movement. That is what I really want to drill down, and then be able to leg yield correctly across the diagonal. Baby steps though!

I got kind of mishmashed in with the 4:30 group lesson that does the bigger fences (like 3'6", no way in hell was I going over those!) so we just stood around and watched them jump. I always think its a good thing to watch people more advanced than you jump, especially in a lesson. I was able to see what kinds of mistakes they were making, how they were correcting it, and how much better it made the horses go, and think about how it translates into my riding. Also, it was nice to see that even these much more advanced students make the same mistakes as me. Like one of the juniors was having trouble seeing a distance, mainly because she didn't have the correct canter pace. Trainer told her to just let go, canter and she would get there. And when she did finally just let the horse take her there on a good canter, sure enough, the distance and fence were beautiful. I tend to pickpickpick to a fence too, especially on a long approach. I think I've gotten better about it in the past couple months, but I could definitely empathize with what the rider was going through.

When they finished up, I did a couple of trot fences (which are now great, but I still force myself to practice them) and then a couple of warm up canter fences. Oh, and we did do a repeat of the rollback turn I was having issues with last Wednesday, and it was fine this time around. I just really tried to remember to sit up and down, instead of hunching forward and pulling. Definitely helped get her around that turn. Trainer then had me do a little course of some diagonal lines, roll backs and a one stride. Had to do the one stride to the diagonal line a couple times because Arwen was rushing a bit through the line (per usual). The last time through, I really tried to sit up, and she bulged a little to the right, but we made it through pretty nicely despite it being slightly bent to fit in all the strides. Eh...gotta pick my battles with that horse. She was pretty good overall so we decided to end on a positive note.

So like I said, not super exciting. But nothing dramatic or horrible happened either, so I'm happy!