Awesome night!

What a great night! Now that I've gotten the poles in the arena, I am determined to use them! I started by lunging her over the poles for about 10 minutes. I don't want her to get bored or sour on this because we'll be doing it A LOT! So as long as she went through them well twice in a row, we'd switch directions, or change the poles. She was doing great straight off the bat! Careful and collected and willing to go straight through. She gets it! I started with two poles, then added a third, then lifted all three poles by putting another poles under the ends. It gave her something different to think about each time. She was being so good that I decided to take things up a notch and do it at the canter. So I specifically set the canter stride just a little shorter so that she had to collect herself and think and NOT just rush through, and I used the poles under the ends to lift them so she really had to pay attention. We started on the left lead since that is easier for her, and she got a couple of canter circles to warm, then I just opened the circle up to include the poles and she went through them in a perfect hop-hop! She really looked, gathered herself up, landed square in the middle, and gathered for the second one. I was so proud. We only did it a couple times before switching sides. She had a little tougher time with the right lead particularly because she tends to fish tail a bit in the spot where she should have been turning to approach so she'd lose the canter. She got it after a bit. She picked up the canter right before it once in order to make it work, which was really smart of her! All that in the first ten minutes!

Then I moved her away from the poles just a bit so that we could do another ten minutes of lunging with the side reins. She was looking so good, both directions, and then I remembered I had brought the camera out! So after she was pretty much done, I grabbed the camera to get some video. She was not a perfect in the video, she fell into her habit of getting quick at the trot since she could tell I was looking at her through a hole in a little box and wasn't regulating her gait. But it was decent. I tried taking pictures also, but I never heard the camera click, and lo and behold, I have no pictures. I think I had the wrong card in and the video must have used up all the space! Even the video got cut short.


So then I hopped on and we walked and trotted over the poles, then I asked for a little canter on both leads. She did fine, just not as balanced on her right lead and tends to get quick and go all over the place... young horse stuff. While on the right lead I attempted to get her steered over to the left just a bit, I was just trying to move father to the center so that I could turn her back to the rail and keep the right lead. What started as my creative navigating ended in a sort of a test. What I was asking for, or would have been asking for if she was a well trained horse, was a counter canter to the left, what I got was a totally natural and balanced flying lead change! I guess she know where her feet are better than I think! Good news for her future owners. I doubt I'll get to the point of working on flying changes with her, but clearly she's going to be easy! We ended with some trot-halt-trot transitions since she had gotten a little fresh and forward with the cantering. She did great. We did really advanced stuff, and she did great.

She gets tomorrow off since I'm off doing my Wednesday thing. I would like to say that Thursday I'd give her an arena break and go out into the pasture to ride, but there is rain forecasted a week. I hope we'll get a break her or there to get out. Otherwise I'll have to come up with something totally different to keep her interested while trudging around the indoor arena once again.