Look Mama, I made it!

....around the entire ring without breaking the canter! Actually, I would not want my mom to see that because she is deathly horrified of me falling off and I wasn't exactly graceful.

In any case, the victory canter required a lot of false starts on the wrong lead, some pulling on the mouth due to poor balance that led to a hasty trot and finally, a canter around the ring that may not have ended gracefully, but at least it ended with no one worse for wear. Turns out, I get really confused, while cantering, what my left hand is versus my right, because my instructor was telling me to hold on to some main with my left hand and open up the rein a little with my right and had to keep saying, "your OTHER right!"

Also interesting, she had me do this smaller square around four cones, pushing in with my outside leg at the turn and it felt wonderful, like Chance was reacting immediately and with energy to my leg.

I will admit that the canter still scares me a little. I remember cantering on some older horses and it was really just like floating on a couch. Not Chance! Who, by the way, is a quarter pony - short of a horse by a half inch. I love the little guy.

I thought I could canter around the ring?

I always knew that just when you think you know how to do something on one horse, you get on another and he really tests you. Chance is that horse, because he's green and he does EXACTLY what I ask, meaning all those cues I don't realize I'm giving, he picks up on. So I'm not yet able to canter around the ring on him, because we go down the long side and once we get to the corner he falls in and we find ourselves spiraling into a tighter and tighter circle. It feels like we're going to topple over! As my instructor pointed out at the end (too late to correct that day), I need to put weight in my outside stirrup, while keeping leg on inside and...okay I don't remember what I'm supposed to do with my reins? Open the outside rein? Open the inside rein? Cantering has gotten so much more complicated! The old lesson horses just stay on the track and go!

Group lesson for funsies and Argghhhh circles

I got the opportunity to do a group lesson a couple weeks ago and I was excited about the opportunity to play some equestrian games. I knew what tennis lesson games were like (you know, hit the ball at the cone to get your friend out of "jail") or basketball lesson games (knock-out!!) or swim lesson games (relay races) but I wasn't sure if I had enough multi-tasking skill to play any sort of game on a horse. As it turns out, the equestrian "games" we played were all centered around passing each other. We trotted in a line and the person in the back had to pass everyone to be in the front, or the person in the front peeled back, or did a circle or cut across the arena, etc. It was fun because I had to focus on making a nice circle as if I was at a horse show. We also got to switch horses a couple times so I rode 3 horses in 1 day! Which sounds super professional to me.  One horse was older and steadier but you had to keep your leg on to energize him. Another was a pony that was older and steadier but also couldn't canter so you had to work around that. The third was younger and energetic and would get confused by mixed signals. The last game involved a 20 meter circle with 2 people riding counter-clockwise on the inside and two people riding clockwise on the outside. I couldn't get the young horse (Chance) to canter on the inside circle because I wasn't very good at steering wtih my legs and ended up pulling on his mouth and confusing him.

Which is why my instructor is so awesome and with it because in my private lesson the next week she remembered that I had that issue on Chance and decided to take a step back and approach steering with the canter more generally. She explained how Chance is a 6 year old (youngest horse I've ever ridden!) quarter horse who is still green and needs clear instructions because older lesson horses have a set bag of tricks based on what you tell them to do, but Chance does not. We worked on bending Chance around circles and it was indeed more difficult than it was with the older lesson horses. His shoulder would fall in an the circle would feel (and obviously look, from my instructor's point of view) sloppy, even if it was pretty good in overall shape. I am getting a little better at feeling the difference between falling in and bending, but it's a delayed feeling where I realize a little too late. We also worked on the canter and focus on keeping my inside leg on to steer. I was getting better at this and could see progression to being able to canter in a tight circle like I was supposed to in that game.

At the end of the private lesson I went on a little trail ride around the property with some ladies who were getting out of their lesson. They told me that Chance got very sick when he first arrived a few months back at the barn and almost died. I was already impressed with this mild mannerd, eager 6 year old and now I think he's a pretty special horse. He's also for sale, so I'll probably be broken-hearted to see him go by the end of the summer!