Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Things to work on

I rode Lefta for the first time in a.g.e.s. Monday night and I realized I have a few things to work on.
First of all I need to ride her more so that we can get to know each other, and secondly we need to build some trust in each other. 
For some reason I'm just not comfortable on her.  Part of it is that Lefta is a bit green,  but also she just doesn't feel "right" to me.  The best analogy I can give is that being on her feels like being on a unicycle whereas on the boys it feels like I'm on a bike, when I'm on her I don't feel like I have much horse in front of or behind me.
Now don't get me wrong, she's got some power and I'm sure that when she's in shape and I'm comfortable enough to ride her like I ride the boys that she'll do fairly well barrel racing.

This was my first ride on her since late last summer, early last fall.  And it was her second ride this year (Nell rode her a few weeks ago)  We warmed up then trotted the barrel pattern and she was pretty great, you`d swear we had just done our last barrel work the other day not last year. 
The only thing that really showed up was that she was a bit grumpy going left.  She'd get her nose up and toss her head a bit.  The more we worked on it the stiffer and crankier she got.  So we came off the barrels completely and worked on trotting and loping circles.  She relaxed about going left at a trot but when we kicked up to a lope that bit of attitude came back.  We worked on transitions up and down and got her relaxed and then worked on a few circles.
(I told her she just needed two NICE circles loping to the left and we could stop)
Lo and behold she dropped her head, took a deep breath and gave me 1 and 3/4 nice circles.  I told her we were doing one more and if she didn't shoulder in we'd stop... perfect circle lol

She doesn't seem sore and I don't think her teeth need done, I really think it was just a bit of attitude coming out.  I DO know that both she and Applejack (Nell came over and was riding him) were a bit cranky at having to work in the arena because it was more work... the ground is a bit deep.  Not "it's going to make my horse sore" deep, just deep enough to make it more work than traveling over the grass lol

1 comment:

  1. i like working where its gonna make them work, lol but they do sometimes have an attitude when its been a while. Bailey has the other attitude she just gets sooo excited its exhausting, but makes me glad she enjoys it.

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Wordless Wednesday ~ new trailer!