Riding Update

I've been a bad blogger lately! So, here is the skinny on the last few weeks.

Last week I was battling a 2 week cold/flu that was trying to make its way into my chest. I didn't get a whole lot of sleep and what little I did wasn't very good. I showed up to my lesson determined I wasn't going to miss another one so soon (I‘d missed the previous weeks lesson because of fevers). It was basically a lesson in why rest is very important before going riding. Luckily my lesson horse is this dead-head Percheron cross that only registered mild shock/surprise over my tom foolery.

The focus of last weeks lesson was trotting over a series of poles with my eyes closed. This was a fun lesson and good for learning to feel the rhythm better.

This week I worked on transitioning from trot to canter back to trot over poles. I had a very difficult time transitioning from canter to trot. I was getting really frustrated with this lesson. A good trainer though knows how to recognize this though and that is exactly what I have, a good trainer. She had me take a walk brake and told me a story of one of her other students who started riding late in life and was training for dressage. I won't go into the story here but the moral of the story was that sometimes we think we are doing more poorly then we really are. So, I stopped being hard on myself and it suddenly became easier to do the transitions.

I was also really proud of how much more stamina I had last night. I can't wait for next week's lesson!