Everything Is Hard

I was promised a new exercise for working on the R-L change, and it was indeed laid out for me.

It was one pole. On the rail. Just chilling there.

We never made it to the change, the pole existing proved too difficult.

this canter is getting SO strong tho.
as long as there isn't a pole involved.

Yesterday was the first ride in awhile where I felt like we actually accomplished something so I was excited to go into this lesson. True, I had to ride every. single. step. and focus on controlling every single centimeter of my horse's body, buuuut it kind of turns out the higher you move up the levels the less grace you get in being a spaced out lazy rider. Like, I'm sure we've all heard "Ride half halt to halt halt." Oh, yes. And you legit are half halting every step. This riding thing actually gets harder not easier.

But anyway, on to the lesson.

MB dropped one single ground pole halfway down one of the long sides and was like, "Off you go." Walked it fine, picked up a nice (forward! Trying so hard to be more forward!) warm up trot, and promptly lost the rhythm at every approach, squirted through my right leg, and shot off on the other side. Finally got it together each way, and then picked up the canter.

Samesies. It was dreadful.

Eventually we got the left lead sorted, but the right lead - his harder direction - was just a mess. Couldn't hold the rhythm to find a distance to save our lives, and no matter how he got to it he basically just smashed through it and landed in a heap.

ONE SINGLE GROUND POLE. If you want to expose some huge gaping holes and your horse's inability to get its feet out of their own way, 11/10 recommend this exercise.

Eventually MB took pity on us and was like, let's do some trot instead. The trot was banging. Light, collected, forward, best SI to date (only took us five years to get those); my eyeballs were literally sweating when we stopped from how hard it was to ride. EVEN WHEN IT'S AMAZING IT IS SO HARD!

hacking out is a must for both our mental sanity

We still had 15 minutes left in our lesson so I asked MB if we could work on the canter halfpasses. The trot are fine. Easy peasy, Opie and I both understand them. Turns out I did not understand one single thing about how to ride a canter halfpass. Our fifteen minutes was thirteen minutes of MB being like, "No, that is not what I'm saying to you. Listen to the words coming out of my mouth and watch me prance across the diagonal like you are supposed to be doing." And me up there just like, "........wut."

She finally took my phone to video me from behind because I'm a visual learner, and the first attempt was a Fail.

I'm trying to shove him across the ring and it turns into a tense, fucked up, incorrect leg yield. MB kept telling me to just turn the shoulders onto the diagonal and let him go, and I was like, "But then he is not bent into a halfpass shape and won't go sideways and we will never make itttttttttt!!1!1!" So I decided I would PROVE THIS to MB by doing exactly what she told me.

No one will be surprised that this was indeed a more correct halfpass, and that I was wrong and my trainer was right. So that was a delightful win in that if I do less there, I fuck up my horse less. Poor Opie. We quit with that because he was over my shit at that point. 

So much homework to work on now though. And maybe one day we'll actually get to work on the change over the pole instead of just cantering over it without falling on our heads.