Selena Ride 26; Wizard Ride 96: Sticktoitiveness

Monday, 9/14/09

Another dose of top-shelf Jersey weather. Ahhhh!

The horses have been spending all day and night outside and I can feel a difference in Wizard and Selena. Both are more focused and settled.

I rode Wizard for about 15 minutes at the walk. We walked around the property with Mary the Morgan. I did not take him in the arena because I’m still trying to figure out if his resistant behavior from a few months ago was more physical or behavioral. He stood quietly for mounting (and cribbed on the fence- little booger!) and was a perfect gentleman for our walk.

Selena was also fantastic- this may have been our best ride yet. This was our ride plan:

– walk on loose/long rein for 10 minutes
– trot on a large oval, asking for contact and asking for a stretch
– walk and ask for leg yield in both directions, using the wall
– trot in figure 8, making sure to make them loopy without too much straightness at the center
– trot in large oval, asking for a longer stride on the long sides and as shorter stride on the short stride (I hesitate to call it lengthening since we are not at that level)
– ask for the horse to stretch and chew the reins at a trot on a large ciecle
– walk to cool out

I got more bend tonight than I’ve ever gotten before and Selena is responding really well to my half halts, meaning that I’m doing them better. Hooray! I did not feel quite as secure in my position as I did last week, but I think it is because I was doing so much hiking and activity last week. I need to keep it up.

As a final exercise, I lined Selena up with Mary the Morgan, horse show style. Selena stood quietly and sighed as if to say, “I’ve done THIS before, silly!”

I asked Mary’s owner to leave the arena before us to work on separating Selena from other horses. We’ve done this exercise a few times and Selena is becoming more and more relaxed.

Progress is a powerful thing. It makes all the difficult days so worthwhile.