Prince: Playing on the 45ft line, and riding.

May 31 2010

This morning I played with Prince. Before we went up to the riding ring we played at Liberty for a little bit Prince did some really nice figure eights!! I was so proud of him!  I took the 45ft line out to see if that would help Prince while he was cantering on the circle. We played on it for a while and did some nice circles. Prince enjoyed the extra rope we did some circles at the walk, trot and canter, change of directions, and transitions. Prince did really well. The extra rope helped but I also need to play with getting Prince more mentally connected to me at the canter. It will take time though.

When we were ready to ride I mounted up. We did a little bit of Follow the rail and then we went into Figure eights. Prince and I spent a lot of time with these. We started out at the walk and played with them. Prince was not listening to my body so it took a while. Once things were going better at the walk we went to the trot. Again it took some time because Prince had other ideas. Finally Prince started trying to figure out what I wanted. I couldn't believe how much we trotted! After a long rest we did some forequarter yields, sideways and some other small stuff then we did circles!! These were fun!!! We did them at a trot and circled around a rock and later when I took my long sleeve shirt off that was our center. At first Prince wanted to veer off but after a couple circles he was doing better. Then we did quite a few circles and after a while I suddenly realized just how fast Prince was trotting! I couldn't believe it, I was riding a really fast trot, and I didn't have any negative emotions!! Plus I carrot stick riding and I had a completely casual rein! It felt wonderful! That was huge for me!!  We continued on and also went the other way. This way was a little bit harder but since I knew exactly what I was looking for and how to get it it didn't take as long.

I have to play around with some different shimming because there was some dry spots that I noticed when I took my saddle off. I hadn't noticed them before because I never got Prince sweating! But now we are doing a lot more so he is, plus the heat helps :)

So yeah. All in all it was a great play time. One thing that I realized after was that I can tend to get stuck on what the beginning and middle looked like and I forget what the end looked like. The middle might look bad or in my case feel bad but if the end didn't then you know that there was improvement :)

Naturally,
~Keri