Well, things were rolling along well until the workaround I discovered to let me put in photos stopped working again... Sigh. So I went back to the Blogger app AGAIN and it actually sort of works now, despite making me add photos one at a time instead of clicking several, but I guess I'll have to live with it. So frustrating.
Anyway. I missed recapping an entire lesson with Ruby (that I do have photos from), but in the interest of not getting so far behind that I can't catch up, I'm going to focus on Emmy's lesson from last week.
Pretty girl!
Apparently I can't left align text between photos in the app. Fun. Ignore the formatting disaster portions of this post I guess. I'm doing my best.
Freshly dragged arena <3
The only time TrainerB had that worked with my schedule last weekend was a 9 am lesson. Pros, first ride on a freshly dragged arena! Cons, I had to get up way earlier than I wanted on a Saturday morning and my new meds made me so foggy I grabbed Ruby's bridle instead of Emmy's...whoops! She was a reasonably good sport about it although she hates any bit that isn't her Myler.
Post lesson cool down
Truck seems to be all fixed after the weird fuel computer issues we were having, so that's also good news. Aside from forgetting her bridle, the lesson was great! I ended up also riding her in Ruby's saddle (possibly the reason my subconscious reached for the wrong bridle lol) because I have my suspicions that Emmy muscling up and actually developing topline are causing our borrowed wow to tilt and change the balance, making it borderline impossible for me to keep my leg under me in the canter (contributing towards our inability to stop throwing tempis on the right lead canter haha). So the ride before this lesson and in this lesson, I used Ruby's saddle, and felt like my leg was much more stable. I still need to try shimming a half pad under the wow, but at least I have something I can make work either way.
When I first took Emmy to a lesson earlier this summer, the trot was very QH-ey, with short, choppy strides. Over time, we've definitely improved into something with more swing - she's never going to move like a WB, but at least now it doesn't immediately scream "STOCK HORSE"! We touched on a nice, swingy trot to begin with, and did lots of serpentines, with me focusing on her not letting the haunches drift out. The photos inserted backwards (of course they did lol), so the following ones are from the last 10 minutes of the lesson.
We worked quite a bit of SI/HI and baby half pass towards the end. It's a lot of work to corral all these body parts!
Getting a feel for the correct amount of angle in the SI
Baby half pass
More SI, focusing on not letting her fool me in to more neck bend than we actually need
....not a fan of Ruby's bit 🤣
We spent a lot of time working on the canter - we started to the right, and sure enough, she started throwing flying change after flying change. I tried to sit chilly and just keep riding regardless of what she was doing underneath me, which did help a bit. TrainerB observed that Emmy mostly seemed to throw them when I was asking her to supple her neck, so we ended up going back down to the trot and then switched to left lead canter ... Where she was basically perfect, which I think we both found a little baffling.
It was a good lesson, if tiring! It still makes me laugh when people act like getting a schoolmaster is an "easy" way to go up the levels. I've been riding this horse for 9 months and still struggle to ride a single 20m circle on the correct lead without getting upper level movements I don't even realize I'm asking for 🤣 but I am learning so much and I love it! Even if we never show, she still has so much to teach me.
Sorry again for the formatting and how disjointed this may seem, I have written it over the course of three days while simultaneously cussing both mobile blogger and the app .. sigh. I like being able to think through my lessons while watching the footage and writing about it helps me solidify concepts in my brain, but damn this platform is making it impossible ðŸ«
