Not much to report

Yet I’m sure I’ll still be able to write a mini novel. I haven’t done much since last week. Call it burn out, call it lack of motivation, call it whatever you’d like I just haven’t had the desire to be out at the barn.

We had drill practice last night in spite of the weather (storms moving in) so I decided to only take one horse. I didn’t want to be messing with 3 horses and 3 saddles if it decided to pour down rain so I just took my steady Eddy (Max).

We are trying to practice with a team of 8 & a team of 10 and we happen to be on both teams so when we got there the team of 10 ran (walked) first. We have one member who is not very comfortable on a horse so we can’t move past a trot (if we can even move into a trot). It is very hard to remember the pattern at a walk/trot and it takes forever to get through it. Max was in a “go, go, go” mood last night and he wasn’t very patient walking.

We finally got to the team of 8 and we were able to run. Of course one horse was fresh and wanted to buck which scared one of the other member into thinking her horse was bucking (which he wasn’t) so we had to slow down. We ran the pattern twice and Max did well. I was trying to be more thoughtful about my body language while I rode and it seemed to help quite a bit.

Once we got done I decided to get on Sis. She’s been really stiff lately and the shows will be starting soon so I wanted to see how much work slowing her down we’d have. She is one of the few that flexes vertically better than laterally. She needs a LOT of work laterally. I can’t even begin to imagine how nice she’d be if she was soft laterally.

I was surprised at how quickly she came back to her WP form (so was MIL). I actually think she moved/traveled better than last year at the jog but we still need to work on her strung out lope.