training

Since I’m a bit late to the National Blog Post Month party, I’m going to be playing a bit of catchup for a day or two. The prompt for Day 02 of NaBloPoMo is…

“The last time you rode and what you did”

Conveniently, I had a lesson yesterday so this is a nice forcing mechanism for me to write a lesson recap and continue contributing to NaBloPoMo.

The past few weeks have been bonkers life-wise, and I’m definitely struggling to balance everything. As a result I’ve been spending less time at the barn than usual and that showed up in my riding yesterday. Marley was ridding on Tuesday and Wednesday, but unexpectedly got Thursday off since I got stuck at work. He then also got Friday and Saturday off because I was helping run a big product management conference in NYC. Needless to say, neither of us were in top form yesterday.

Marley is not one of those horses that needs to be lunged if he’s had time off, particularly if he’s been getting turnout. He is, however, a horse that can get a little lazy and behind your leg if he’s feeling rusty. The combination of him being a little sassy and me being kind of tense and frustrated made for a less-than-stellar ride. Since getting back into riding I occasionally have these rides that are incredibly frustrating – I intellectually know what needs to be done and understand that what I’m doing is wrong, but I cannot make my body do the right thing. Very frustrating.

To illustrate the above – Marley likes to fall in when tracking to the right, and I like to hang on my left rein no matter what direction we’re going. I know that when pony man starts to pop his shoulder, I need to stay steady with my hands, and use my inside leg to fix his straightness before worrying about his head or really anything else. Despite knowing this, for some inexplicable reason when Marley starts to fall in I nag with my inside leg and weirdly twist my upper body out to the left while also nagging with my left rein. Spoiler alert: this is not a recipe for success.

After watching me ride the struggle bus for a while, my trainer actually hopped on for a little W/T/C work to help Marley unstick himself and show me what I should be doing with my body. The frustrating part was that I knew what I was doing wasn’t right, but I somehow couldn’t make it happen.

We did end the lesson with some acceptable if not spectacular trot work and then headed out to the front hill for some power walking. It had been a while since I’d had a truly frustrating ride so I was probably due, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

All that said – any time with horses is good time, as far as I’m concerned. Every ride isn’t going to be smooth sailing, and I walked away from yesterday’s lesson with much to work on during the week.