Dressage Lesson #24

Last night's lesson wasn't terrible but it wasn't the best either. Just one of those days I suppose. Steph was lunging Kalani in the pasture to get him used to something besides the round pen. She had planned to ride but he was pretty worked up to say the least. So she's gonna hold off on the riding until later. I tacked up Axel as fast as I could. Not that it really matters, it's dark instantly when I get to the barn. Tricia hadn't arrived yet so I did a few circles at the walk to warm up and things were okay.

We started tracking left this week since that's Axel's more difficult direction. I wasn't totally on and Axel wasn't totally on so it was kind of a mess for the most part. We had our moments that were decent but we also ran into the tree once. And then coming down the long side by the bushes, Axel took a quick side step and darted through them. He may have spooked, in anycase we were now on the wrong side of the trees. He's still loosing it on the corners and most of the time I try and put some outside leg on and he speeds up so now I'm bouncing around trying to not fall off. And I'm supposed to be really supporting him with that outside rein and leg and I just can't get the leverage on that leg, so zoom, off we go falling out of our turn.

Near the end of our lesson Axel was being his usual lazy self and stopping ever few steps. We were getting sick of it and I kicked him a good one (which was nothing at this point my legs were like jello), and he got both back feet off the ground and bucked. But he moved after that and actually felt fairly good. We switched directions and the right side was better but not perfect. There were a few canters in there that were horrible as usual, though on the right lead occassionaly. By the end he was sweating buckets. It was 50F and he's in his full winter coat. So I walked him around to cool him off. This was the first time I've had to use a cooler for him. Unfortunatly I haven't sewn the ribbons on yet and in any case the cooler isn't big enough for him. I'll have to get an old wool army blanket to make into a cooler instead. He finally cooled down so we let him out to roll and then brought him back in for dinner. We dried him off the best we could while he ate and then turned him back out. Hopefully he was dry enough at that point. He must have really been cranky to work up that sweat, we really weren't doing any more work than usual. Though we did start and spend most our time on his bad side.

I need to really work on my seat so I can start giving him the support and cues that he needs to do this stuff properly. Instead of falling out of the turns and me bouncing around not being able to cue and Tricia on the ground yelling "outside rein outside rein!" Luckily she's there to tell me what's going on, there's no way we would have gotten this far even, without her help. Whew!