The past few days have been a little frustrating. Rush seems to have so much energy at the beginning of the ride that she's incapable of focusing on anything, and if I ask for anything she doesn't like, such as slowing down.. or looking less like a llama.. or traveling in a straight line.. shit blows up and she's throwing one of her hissy fits. Yesterday I worked through it, kinda, by cantering on a circle. Today.. yeah, not so much. I was so tired of dealing with this ridiculous behavior that I went to the zone of: I'm hot, sweaty, and tired. You're being a brat. If you want to trot like you're in a harness race, fine.
So then I bullied her around the ring, making her TROTFAST while keeping her head down, and if she wanted to canter? No beans, you'll just have to go in a tiny circle until you trot again. I'm not exactly proud of this method, but it worked. So there's that. After I deemed her tired, we had a walking break to separate that work out from the actual one, and then went on to have a lovely ride. We did more work on bending, then did some solid cantering that was pretty impressive. Her canter has been the best surprise of bringing her back into work so far. When I first started riding her, it was like a jackhammer. You could two point, lifting yourself as far out of the saddle as possible, and still have your butt smack the saddle every stride. Now? Her canter is wonderful and rolling and forward; she seems to have lost the up-down motion that was so horrific to ride.
We finished up the ride with some wonderful relaxed cantering in the jumping arena, which was awesome. I was worried she'd get fast because there was more space to accelerate in, but she stayed nice and relaxed and just rolled around the ring like a doll. So it was, all in all, actually a good ride- but the way it started out was godawful. And it seems to be a trend, so I need to find a solution, fast.
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