Friday, January 16, 2009

Lesson #2

Willow's toes are back under control, so we were able to have our lesson Thursday night. Someone else was in the arena taking a lesson in how to lunge her gelding, and the gelding was having none of it, bolting and bucking and causing general mayhem (lungeing is not as easy as it looks). I lunged Willow, and she kept it together admirably, but she was definitely tense, and that carried over into the first part of my lesson. We focused on throughness and the quality of the trot. It took about ten minutes for Willow to let go of her tension and stop bracing, and then we had a great session. I was reminded of something I should already know: that when Willow braces against my hand my first reaction should be to boot her forward, rather than trying to fix things with my hands.

We did a little canter at the end, and Leslie wants to spend next week's lesson mostly on canter. That will be great, because I know the canter needs a ton of work. Leslie said Willow is not lifting through the wither in the canter jump.

Willow, for her part, wishes bad things would happen to Leslie because Willow really has to work when she's under Leslie's watchful eye. Poor mare.

1 comment:

Kathleen @ ForgingAhead said...

That's so funny...my gelding LOVES my trainer. Perhaps he's not as smart as Willow because he blames me for all the hard work and thinks Anke hung the moon. Glad you guys got another lesson!