Riding Recap

I mentioned wanting to do more riding recaps in this new year, so here is the first one:

Monday night I had a few extra minutes and I decided to ride Knots. Unfortunately the weather has been awful, so finding a nice place to ride was more of a challenge then I was hoping for. The places with ok footing were taken up by beginner riding lessons while the extra places in the open were going to get dark quickly. I hustled.

Initially I walked into the jump field and tried to do some trot work, but the lesson was three very timid little girls, and there was not additional room for me to trot, much less canter. I tried riding on top of the "hill" and Knots actually stopped and looked at something. Knots never spooks. I have never seen him jump away from anything (although as I am typing this I imagine he will spook later this week and I will bust my hind end). Apparently there were some deer across the pasture that he noticed and we watched them jump across the fence into the back 300 acres. After the deer I putzed for a few minutes and listened to the little girls make excuses to their instructors for why they could not trot, and then walked over to an empty grass spot before the light disappeared.

We had enough room for a 20m ish oval, and so we tried to work on our dressage. Although I was being really optimistic about the riding and had tacked up in my jumping equipment... Anyways, he was really stiff and trying to hold onto the bit, so we worked on transitions and focused on bending instead of holding. He started to relax and gave me some relaxed work at the walk and trot, even without my spurs, which is a nice things indeed.

Unfortunately, the canter really fell apart and I can tell we haven't worked much. He was trying to motorcycle around the turns and giving me some trouble running and then stopping. I think he hit a wall of [easy] strength and started to remember how he has mostly just been eating a round bale constantly.... Anyways, I worked on more transitions and bending and let him rest when he did it correctly. We had just enough daylight to end on a mostly good note.

I was glad to have the good dressage ride, but I am also hoping to have at least a couple jumping schools before the show on Sunday... and maybe even something bigger than 2'3" haha.

This is Gracie and Jellybean hiding from the fireworks on New Year's Eve. Although in their defense, we were blowing things up reasonably close to them.