Riding Diary: 8

Horse: Quiz

Time: 1 hr.

Ride: Oh, the lovely Quiz. This horse amazes me, we get into the arena which is full of jumps and flower boxes and a managery of general craziness and you can tell she's not always 100% comfortable. (Coloured cut-out squares and flowers are here nemesis) Then you add like 4 other riders, sometimes more, most of them jumping, and she's basically like, "meh, whatever, we can handle this." & she's just coming up 4!! I love it. It really helps me because while she's being Miss cool-as-a-cucumber, I'm like... christ, this is hectic, I might die.
Anyways, started with a posting trot warm up... why do I have such a hard time picking up the right diagonal?! (as in the correct diagonal, not the right diagonal.. hardeeharhar) I really need to work on this, it annoys me greatly that I can't immediately pick it up. Then we moved onto the jog, Quiz & I have the jog down, I feel so much more comfortable at the jog than I did in my first lesson. I guess all my life people told me, "if you want to post, post, or you can sit the trot, it doesn't matter", I was also told that sitting a trot is "very advanced", something you need to work on and basically not to do it... it is times like these where I'd like to go back in the past and whack certain people upside the head. So, all my life i've been posting the trot... incorrectly... ugh... and the first time my trainer told me to sit the trot I felt like a big 'ol sack of potatoes/a mexican jumping bean because it just felt so.. foreign to me I suppose. Now I pretend I'm a western pleasure riding in a jacket so sparkly I blind you whilst I jog on by. :) (I hope that image is as wonderful for all of you as it is for me)

On to some loping and the beginning of some rollbacks! I definitely need to work on my rollbacks, but they are new to my lesson regime so I will forgive myself. My trainer has me stopping completely, and then moving my rein over before adding my leg. I add my leg too fast, with not enough rein to begin with, so it always ends up a little sloppier than I'd like. We worked rollbacks at a trot first, then at a lope, overall I was comfortable but would like them to grow more and more precise.. practice practice practice. I also have a tendency when picking up speed from a stop to lean forward and lose my heel, I need to focus on sitting back and tall while asking for speed from a stop or walk.

Finally we worked on loping the rail, Quiz has a tendancy to jump the gun and then when I attempt to check her back she'll fall into a trot. I'm not pulling on the reins very sharply, but I think she just doesn't really care to slow lope. So that's something that I definitely need to work on with her. I just need to reinforce my leg if she goes down to the trot and try and try again until we get this slow lope thing down. (Again, i'm picturing myself as a WP queen)

Next Time: I kind of addressed all of these things above, but, perfect diagonals every single time, more precise rollbacks and a calmer slower lope.