Poking the Bear

Ahh the weekend. Friday was Ben's day off  which meant I could plan on riding 2 days in a row.

Saturday was pretty routine. Ben was slow to warm up, and behind the leg. Shocker, I know. I was pulled, pushed, and bounced in the tack (all while trying to resist these very things while pushing him to move forward and carry himself, LOL). He went sideways INTO my leg, bucked, kicked, slowed to a halt...pretty much did everything but go forward nicely. But eventually, about 15 minutes in, we got to where we needed to be. Nothing really to write about, apart from being a little disappointed because I thought we were beyond all that.

Sunday I was ready for round II of getting beat up by my horse. But Ben was really great from the start. He had a quick warm up, and we did pretty nice trot and REALLY nice canter stuff. We're both getting the hang of the transitions, and things are just coming together. Our ride was short.

 But it didn't end there. While I was letting him walk on a loose rein, I decided that I was going to, in about 10 minutes, pick the reins back up to do a quick trot and canter again. What I really wanted to do was school Ben out of his ratty-ness that I KNEW would come out if I asked him to work again after he perceived he was done. It isn't his fault- he is so used to riding for 20-30 minutes and being done. But the times he's had to go back to work after a break, he's shown his, shall we say, displeasure.

I was in the mood to deal with it, so deal with it I did. Our 10 min walk went by and I picked him up, and asked for a trot. Low and behold, I had a ratty gelding who was NOT happy. He started to grind on the bit and scowl at my leg (which wasn't doing much but softly asking him to go), and bounce around in his passage-buck thing he does when he's posturing. I schooled him out of it, and in 2 minutes or so he was back to trotting nice. We did a few canter transitions and got back a nice trot, and then I ended it.

I'm not sure if I did anything effective, but I was proud of myself for not taking the easy road, and instead, begin to fix a bad young horse habit.