Lesson recaps

Last week during some downtime, I made a new work computer desktop image for 2020 :)

The last month or so of lessons has been very up and down. In those weeks, I've ridden Tosh 3 times (2x surcingle, 1x saddle) and Skylar 1 time (always saddle). 

3 and 4ish weeks ago, I was on a roll. My confidence was firmly in place. Things were feeling SO great. I was making really quick progress mentally and physically. Until I just wasn't. All of a sudden 2 weeks ago (Sunday after Thanksgiving), it felt like everything I had been building on just disappeared on me. Like my progress was a rug ripped out from under my feet. While I know I was kind of overdue for additional struggles and backtracking and it's totally normal, it admittedly has not been great for my confidence.

I think there were some extenuating circumstances to that particular lesson, like I hadn't worked out or done my hip exercises since Tuesday and I spent all day Friday in the car, plus it was cold, so I was just majorly stiff and uncoordinated. That lesson ended WAY better than it began, though and I was actually shocked to get in some really good work.

This past Sunday, I opted to ride Tosh in his saddle. No real conscious reasons for it, I just kept coming back to the saddle when I was asking myself over the course of the week what I wanted to do. It was cold again and the arena was busy, so I free lunged him in the round pen for about 20 minutes before bringing him back to the covered arena and mounting. 

When T asked me what I wanted to work on, I said, well, mostly seeing if I have a better handle on my body this week. I'd like to do some figures and really work on steering with my body since I was so incapable of it last week. 

So, she sent me off to do a series of serpentines and circles off of centerline and the quarterline at a working walk. We discovered pretty quickly that the left side of my body was a bit locked up, so I did some stretches in both directions, including twisting left to face behind me and reaching for Tosh's croup with my left hand, and then repeating it on the right. That helped a little. In hindsight, I don't know if part of my issue was having my cellphone in my left pocket. I had taken it with me to the round pen (T likes anyone working a horse out of her sight and/or alone to have a phone on them) and I could have sworn I had put it in my jacket before mounting, but when I dismounted, I was like, oh, damn. Oops. 

I struggled to turn my body a lot at the trot, but after just a couple of laps, she told me to canter. Strangely enough, I had a much better handle on my body at the canter, so we did most of the rest of the lesson at the canter. My only issue is that I felt like Tosh was really zipping around the arena -- it was probably mostly in my head, he has a long stride -- but my attempts to get him to slow down didn't really work, because I got tense about it, which all led to even more tension. T tried to get me to do a 1 loop serpentine from B to X on the right lead. At X, I was to go straight to C. At C, I was to turn left and shift my body to get a change. For the love of Pete. That was SO HARD for me. Like, so hard that I couldn't actually do it. Tosh was a saint and he tried to give me what he thought I wanted, but since I didn't commit to any of it, he was just guessing at what that was.

My issue with that exercise was that I just didn't feel like I had it. I was so stuck in my head overthinking it, and my brain and my body wanted a much slower/more collected canter to complete the change. I needed to just ride the horse I had. He was more than capable of doing it if I had just continued to use my body correctly instead of shutting down and panicking. As for the rest of it, I honestly don't know what my brain malfunction was. Overthinking it all is the theme for the class, clearly. I needed to just shut up and ride! But my brain wasn't having it. I wasn't actually over-faced with the exercise, but T mentioned afterwards that I can always ask her to break things down into pieces when I am spiraling (my word, not hers) like that. I need to keep that in mind. Maybe what we should have done is do the loop from B to X, continue straight to C and halt. Then canter off on the left lead so I could take a breath to change my bend, etc.

I'm still working through why this ride was/is such an issue for me. I feel like it is a lingering mental block linked to having misbehaving lesson horses in cold weather with barns that didn't let students lunge their school horses before riding. I actually really love that T allows AND actually regularly says, you're gonna want to lunge him first. She knows her animals. But more importantly, she knows that they are animals that think, that feel, and that are affected by cold weather! She wants everyone involved to be safe and sometimes that requires reinserting the brain between the ears with little bit of work (and sometimes silliness!) on a lunge line.