Wednesday's Recap

Well, as usual, I haven't been riding as much as of late. Mainly due to the extreme heat we've been dealing with here in MN but also because life has just gotten in the way.

I did end up working with Gringo on Monday (I think it was Monday anyways). He still looks to be slightly off in the front. I'm assuming the LF but I'm having a hard time telling for sure. He was being a really good boy though and I think, despite the fact that he's being worked with very irregularly, he's come a long ways since this spring. He truly does like to have a "job". Maybe one day we can do more then just w/t on the end of a long rope... One can only hope, right?

Wednesday morning I had a lesson. First one in about two weeks (first ride in about that same period of time as well) and Gus was a good boy. After the usual warmup lunging, we started our undersaddle work with serpentines, primarily three-loop. Instead of changing the bend on the center line, sometimes we kept the original bend the whole serpentine, while other times I started off with a counterbend, so that the middle loop was in true bend. The goal with this exercise was to (I think) get Gus moving more back to front and FLEXING and BENDING throughout his whole body ... not just faking it (and he's good at that).

Our canter work consisted of 20m circles at ABCE and a smaller 10-15m circle immediately proceeding the larger circle (still at that "major" letter). We then changed up the exercise a bit and worked on lengthening and collecting the canter stride on the circles ... 20m = lengthen, 10ishm = collect and long sides = working. The goal was to try to improve the quality of the canter and Gus's stamina. B really liked Gus's canter work on Wednesday, and I did as well. It's still quite funny how Gus will be just fine one minute and 30 seconds later, he's finished. Done. Exhausted.

I was really pleased with the lesson again. I had this whole week off work and well, haven't done much of anything (and still am not planning on doing much of anything) but my goal for the next few weeks is to go out and ride as much outside as I can (weather permitting) to try to improve Gus's stamina. Lots of long/low trot and canter work ... maybe some hills/cavalletti too. We'll see.