Happy New Year! After taking some time off to travel, and then deciding it would be fun to contract 'the plague,' it has been about two weeks since I have been able to ride Ruby. Ruby does best with consistency, and when I am unable to give that to her, things get wonky.
Monday was pretty much what I consider a 'training ride;' we get stuck on something I consider 'basic' and play on repeat for the lesson.
The jumps were only set to about 2', but for some reason Ruby wanted to drag me over them at full speed- we even had some bucks and head-throwing in there. I was hoping she would chill out after a few minutes, but this didn't happen. So what to do? Spend 40 minutes doing transitions until she FINALLY figured out what I wanted and listened. The only thing worse than having a horse that won't 'whoa' is one that won't go...both are equally frustrating!
The key (here's that word again) is consistency. If you let your horse run off with you, they will continue to do it. Debi had me do trot-halt-trot transitions until I no longer had to do it with loads of hand force (your horse *should* stop or slow down when you lean back and close your leg, but we missed that memo). I then took her over the jump and halted after until she had that down. Next up was canter, where she forgot what she was supposed to do so we had to go through the exercise again: canter-halt-canter. The biggest difficulty here was that smarty-pants figured out the routine and started cantering like a slug...not what I wanted. I needed her to be full on cantering like she normally would and still halt when I asked.
Not exactly the lesson I wanted to have, but sometime you have 'those days.' With the weather being as cold as it is, it has been hard to get out there and ride.
I can't even imagine how those of you up north ride in this!
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