Round'em up

Yes, it's been a slow week for posting. In my defense, we've had very "blah" rides all week.

One day I decided we would devote ourselves to circles and circle-like arena figures (serpentines and figure eights). Toler, on the other hand, decided that he was going to spend the day finding creative ways to drop his inside shoulder and make me work at least twice as hard to do a simple 15m circle. Then he insisted that he had no idea how to circle at the canter. He must be bored at canter work lately, because he tries to offer (very bad) flying lead changes wherever possible. Even if I'm not even remotely asking for any. "A circle? But I could switch directions and throw my legs around with no coordination whatsoever!"

Another day we gave up trying to focus outside over 2'3" jumps and hit the trail instead, which went fine for the most part. We even had to negotiate past a Monster. (Riding lawn mower. Note, Toler barely batted an eyelash at it.)

Later on in the week we had a nice jumping day over 2'6". He'd been warming up very lazily and I really didn't think either of us was going to be able to pull it together, but he jumped. And came back wonderfully between the lines. I'm really quite surprised at how well the mullen mouth is working for jumping. I'd expected it to be terrible. Granted, the way I'm using it makes it act like a kimberwicke, which probably helps, but still. Happy mouth, happy horse. =)

Then we did two days of dressage work. Both rides started out horribly. I felt like I was all over the place, and Toler was barely shuffling along. Neither one of us could focus, much less at the same time in the same way. Finally, towards the end of the first day we pulled it together after some cantering, and we ended the session with some excellent work on medium-collected-medium and medium-lengthening-medium at both trot and canter. The next day was a bit tougher to pull together, but towards the end I decided we would just ride a made-up dressage test just for something more complicated to do. Besides, I figured riding a pattern/test would get us both to concentrate on the same thing and "snap out of it."

Worked like a charm. Which has led me to decide that for the next few weeks, all my dressage work days are going to be centered on riding through tests. Just to be thorough, I'll start back at Training Level Test 1. I'll ride each test during three separate sessions, working on what needs to be addressed as we go and adding it to a final "list" that we'll return to. Great diagnostic tool and motivation driver! (Should perk Toler up nicely.) I'll only be riding tests we've shown at before (which puts up into Second Level, though I can't quite remember which test we left off at).

Tomorrow is going to be a free lunging day over jumps, I think. Mostly because I have to track down my tests to start memorizing. I'm looking forward to it. I haven't ridden through an actual test in *years.*