Hill Work

Today we tackled the aforementioned hill work. It was a pretty good ride, except for Rush's momentary regression in which she decided that standing still for mounting was too difficult and she was just going to run off before I was all the way in the saddle. I put a stop to that lickety split- we turned right around and stood by the mounting block, then I dismounted and remounted until she stood the entire time. It took two tries after the initial mounting before she settled down and found her brain again.

mirrors!

Then we toddled down to the dressage ring to warm up. Everyone else is at a show today, so the ring was still freshly dragged from this morning. I love having a tabula rasa to ride in; I get to see how crooked and wiggly Rush is when we do things like change direction or trot down the diagonal (very). We did light walk and trot work- she gets very antsy if you pick up the reins at the walk, so I'm getting her used to treating the walk as an actual gait and part of the ride instead of the pace where she gets to do whatever she wants. Our trot work was average, nothing special but nothing horrible. She got pretty distracted looking at herself in the mirrors and tripped over herself a couple times coming around the corner.

Then we went up behind the barn to the long incline. There are two other hills on the property we could have used- one is medium length but pretty steep, and one is a more sloping incline but is pretty short. The one I chose is a medium grade and about the length of the barn, so that's.. probably 120ish feet. We did 5 sets, so 5 times up and 5 times down. She seemed to enjoy it; she definitely wanted to keep exploring once we got to the top of the hill the first time.