Practice, practice, practice

Last night we had drill practice but it was running ½ late so I had time to work LLL before everyone showed up. MIL and I did some ORS’s at the trot in the arena and then moved on to the lope. I swear if LLL could be any slower she’d get passed up by a

One of the other members came so I’d lope LLL around and them pull up between MIL and the other member. LLL would walk along fine and then decide to pin her ears at Scooter (team member’s horse) so off we’d lope away from Sis and Scooter and then we’d come back and walk in-between them. She got the message pretty quickly.

Once everyone started showing up I hopped on Max to warm him up while MIL ponied LLL. Then I took LLL and ponied her off of Max. OMG is my arm sore today. She dragged herself behind us. Apparently we need to work on coming off of pressure with the bridle. Finally after a bit of give and release she figured it out and came up next to me.

We’ve decided instead of trying to have a team of 10 & a team of 8 to just have two teams of 8 so those who are on both teams don’t have to remember two patterns. We ran the first team of 8 and let me tell you we need a lot more practice!

It was time for the second team of 8 (this team consist of a few members who don’t like to trot or lope) so this time I rode LLL. She was cranky at first (never!) but then slowly started to enjoy herself.

After that run the original 8 ran again. This time we were a bit better.

Once we finally finished up I took LLL to the arena and laid her down again. It took a bit longer tonight and she had a little bit of struggle/fight in her but she finally went down.

I’d really like to be able to get her over to the arena this weekend and work on the passenger lesson (for both of us). She needs to do a lot of transitions and I need to learn to stay with her better. She almost lost me a few times last night because she can change directions pretty quickly.

One thing she likes to do (which annoys me) is to try to “hop” a lope when she’s supposed to be trotting. We go no where but we kind of rock this pathetic attempt to get out of trotting.

She’s also having problems with bridling and having my hand on her poll. I see she has a small scrape on her poll but she was horrible last night with bridling so we need to work on it.