Pleasure pony in the making

Last night I headed over to the arena for a little ride time. I wasn’t sure if I was going to miss the rain or not so I just took Abby over. We started off with some YHQ (under saddle) and then with some flexing. I can’t blame her too much for not being as responsive to the flexing since Chase hasn’t been releasing her in time but she’ll have to learn the difference in riders and what is expected so she got a few “bumps” to get around faster.

Then we did some ORS at the walk. I could tell this was going to be a good day by her “exhale”. I’m not really sure what it is called because it isn’t a nicker but it isn’t just normal breathing either. We started doing our ORS at the trot and she was finally starting to rate me a little bit so we moved onto the passenger lesson.

Keeping her in a trot for longer then 2 minutes is a chore but we continued with our squeeze, cluck and spank. I tried pushing her into a bigger trot but she just took that as a cue to lope so I let her pick her pace (for now) and just continued to get after her when she would breakdown to a walk. After about 15 minutes of this *I* could feel the burn so I decided to move onto loping.

Now if you remember this is where we had most of our problems last year. When I asked for the lope she went right into it with no head shaking or taking off. The only thing she did that I don’t like and that time will fix is that she braced against my hand when I tried to do a ORS the first few times.

Her version of the passenger lesson at the lope was pathetic. She was barely moving. She would try to take me over by Bishop and I would speed her up so she decided that maybe, just maybe if she went faster I’d shut her down. Well it wasn’t fast enough for me to shut her down and it didn’t take her long to realize she was burning calories so she came back down to her almost 4 beat lope. When she was dog tired I put her in the middle of the arena and flexed her while Terry loped Bishop. She was very happy to stand still.

Once Terry was done I worked on stopping off of two reins from a walk. Abby really is smart (which is a concern of mine since she is a ‘kid’s pony” and picks up quickly. I think with time and consistency she could be a very nice pony for Chase.