Yesterday was awesome. I rode Ana in our paddock and I just worked on getting her to settle down. I found that if I kept the pulling back to a minimum and just tried to relax myself, to really think about relaxing, she just got calmer and calmer, lowering her head and just plodding along. This probably took me maybe 15 minutes. This is very good compared to two hours of a prancing idiot.
After that I took her into the pasture, and just let her have the feeling of freedom while she cantered. Feeling of freedom isn't quite right. I wanted her to be able to have a nice canter wherever she was, and that was a good environment to do it in. There was a fence so she couldn't run away if something bad went wrong, and she was familiar with the footing, so she didn't freak out at something that was unfamiliar to her. The point of this wasn't to get her energy level down, but to work on getting a consistent speed. It was fun, because it's not often that I let my horses gallop, witch brings to mind that maybe I should do it more so that I can learn to get a better seat. When I was cantering Ana, it felt like I did not have a very good seat. Aleythia was watching from the fence, and she said it was fun to watch and that it looked like I was going with the horse, but it so did not feel like it.
When I slowed her down to a walk, she immediately dropped her head and walked nicely. Since she did that I moved up from walk, stop, back up, hold, to trotting. The one condition with trotting was that she had to be walking nicely in order to trot. If she kept trying to trot I would either turn circles or pull back on the reins. It worked better to turn her in a circle, but I still ended up letting her trot, and making her do it longer than she wanted to. It was a good day.
Then I rode Misstack. Nothing there, except that my stirrups were way to long.
While I was riding Misstack Terry's grandson was riding Santana, and Santana was getting really hyper. He loves to run poles and if you do it a lot he just gets really wild. What ended up happening is when Terry's grandson got off Santana I rode him. I made him canter, and take lots of turns. Every time he would try to take off I would turn him again. One place he really wanted to run was turning the third barrel in the barrel racing pattern. After turning that barrel he would take off and I would end up turning him. I did this until I got it so that instead of bolting after taking that turn he trotted. It was a really fast trot, but at least he didn't bolt. I rewarded him by letting him trot back to the finish line. I kept at it for a little while more, but I could now control how fast his canter was, and he was breathing really hard. I stopped and let him just stand there then I got off.
I told Terry's grandson, that when Santana is really hyper like that he needs to make him do lots of circles. It doesn't matter if he trots, but the moment he goes too fast you gotta turn him. This will end up being a little challenging for him, because first Terry's grandson is in like 4th grade, and turning Santana when he wants to go fast is hard, but it is possible. I also got Terry's grandson to not let Santana take another step after he stops when leading. If Santana did take another step it would result in him backing up. Santana didn't back up as energetically as I would have liked, again because Terry's grandson is small and not using enough force, but Santana did stop taking more steps.
I was going to talk about skydiving horses and sledding, but this post is really long, so I'll try to get it in tomorrow night.
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