Tuesday, April 21, 2009

4/20/09 Ransom

Saddled the monster up dressage, and after a brief cooperative lunge on side reins, I hopped on. His warmup was really beautiful, nice tracking-up trot on the bit.. very pretty.

Worked on walk and trot only. Again, I was that close to cantering, but chickened out at the last minute. There's absolutely no reason I couldn't do it, and, after the show, I'm going to start forcing myself.

We did have a "stickie spot" yesterday, which confused me. I asked for turn right on the haunches, no problem. Turn left on the haunches, no issue. Turn on the forehand to the right - stickie stickie! He even tried sidepassing INTO my leg once. Realizing he was just trying to ignore what I wanted, I pushed him up into a BIG trot, headed around some circles, asked for a solid halt, and asked for the turn again. Much better, with a good quarter turn without hesitation. Turn on the forehand to the left -fantastic. Sidepass left? Great.. Sidepass right? Great, too. The one "stickie" was fixed by heading big forward, then I repeated it again after asking for a few leg yields at the walk.

Total work about 45 minutes. Again, I need to force the issue at canter in my dressage saddle. Ransom's been there, done that. There's absolutely no reason to believe he'll do anything stupid to hurt me .... courage courage courage...

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