Lesson 6/3/14 - Gali

On Monday, Gali and Acorn got their shots.  Long story short, when I was done at the barn, I knew they were staying down there to eat, so I left them in the paddock that attaches to the barn.  Forgot to close up the door to the actual barn, and they both made a mess in the barn.  Yesterday, I had a lesson.  I guess Nicole didn't forget about that, because it was a TOUGH ride!!

Gali was seriously inconsistent and not really respecting my leg.  I think I need to start riding in spurs again - I don't know why I haven't put them back on yet this year.  We started off doing 15m trot figure eights to get him off of my inside aids and to get him to lift up his shoulders and stretch his neck down.  He kept bobbing up and down in his neck, and it really took a while for me to get him forward enough that his hind legs were actually *moving* and not just dragging along.  It's tough, because I'm constantly fighting his "I'm going to be strong and bolt!" brain when I'm trying to get him to move out.  Yesterday, he was actually quite good about not running off, but he still tried to skip to canter at first, as a way to get out of working hard in the trot.

Trying on his new jammies... a LITTLE tight

We did some leg yields and started to introduce something similar to a half pass... I started by just leading him from F to X with left bend, ~12 m circle around X, and then leading him from X to M with right bend, and then doing the same out of the short side.  As he got better with that, I started adding right and left leg to get his body to follow his head better.  It wasn't a true half-pass, but it was some solid lateral work and I was really proud of a few of them.

We then moved on to some canter exercises, which were similar but with no real lateral elements.  Canter diagonal, canter circle around X, canter diagonal to trot and then back into canter on the other lead.  I had to work really hard to keep Gali soft in his trot-canter transitions, and I almost had to trick Gali into thinking he was just falling into the canter, but it worked and we did get a few good transitions.

It's hard to go from his normal gaits into what need to be his working gaits!  This horse takes all of my energy... but at least he's cute!