We Lost Reverse

Out to the barn again to ride with another boarder and possibly the barn owner. I checked out Axel to make sure he was feeling okay after the previous days ride. He decided to trot away from me in the pasture so I took that as a good sign that he was just fine. The one hunter girl was jut finishing up as I groomed Cody. No one else had arrived yet so I did a bit of ground work in the arena while we waited. If no one was going to show up I was going to let Cody have the night off so I didn't tack right away. The other boarder showed up after a bit and we tacked our horses. The barn owner wasn't going to be back in time so we decided on just a quick ride down the road and back.

Cody was slow and reluctant and we had a hard time keeping up with Danny, we had to trot a lot. When we finally got down the block and turned he was a little easier to get into the trot. Eventually that turned into a canter and Danny was gaiting next to us as fast as possible. Eventually he broke into a canter as well. It was a pretty good ride. Cody's canter was pretty big and a little on the out-of-control let's-run-home side of life but he transitioned down pretty easily. He was a little more energetic on the way home, trotting a bit, we had a few minor arguments on if we were going to walk or not but for the most part it was a nice ride back.

Instead of going past the driveway we went right to work on backing up down the driveway. Cody had other ideas. I thought we had backed up enough steps the time before that he'd figure it out, he's usually pretty quick to pick up those things. But he was not playing my game. He'd take just a few hesitant half steps, not enough for me to even stop early. At that point all I wanted was some good purposeful steps backwards and we'd stop since I wasn't going to get him all the way down the driveway. Instead I'd get one tiny shift backwards, head tossing, yawning, and only forward movement. The best I could do was when he wouldn't go backwards we went down the road again. The side effect was that he was much happier leaving the barn than backing home at that point. I even tried using a whip as an extra appendage to tap his chest. I was trying to translate our ground work to saddle but it just wasn't happening. Unfortunately I was getting a lot of head tossing to the point where I'm a little concerned and don't want to make it a new habit. I finally got off after a few sort of okay but crooked steps back. I was able to get him to back a bunch of steps then from the ground. Sometimes that horse makes me wonder. Back to the drawing board on our backing up under saddle I guess.