2 For 2

We had another lovely ride today, although this one was more in the pattern of our typical rides. I hopped right on bareback, no warm up in the round pen, and set her out to work. I read this wonderful article in Dressage Today that had some great exercises in it, so we worked on one of them (the simplest one) at the beginning. It was basically making 20-meter circles at A, B, and C, then changing direction down the diagonal and repeating the exercise. I got pretty much the best walk I've ever experienced on her, which was awesome and it's good to know she can actually walk like a normal horse, reaching down into the contact and marching forward instead of doing her slow meandering crawl.

Our trot work was not the best we've ever had, and she put up a lot of resistance whenever I tried to get her in a frame, so we focused more on keeping an even tempo instead. Later into our trot work I got a couple stretches of her starting to hold herself together more, but they never lasted long. Cantering was, in a word, awesome. I had the best left canter work to date today, and it felt amazing. She was calm and balanced and steady and it was awesome. We scrambled around the corners a bit, but towards the end she figured out that speeding up through the corners in fact made it harder to go through them and after that she settled down and was practically perfect.

We ended on a slow trot with a semi-loose rein. She thinks that once we canter, everything afterwards will be cantering too and gets really antsy when you want to walk or trot only, so we're working on decompressing. She was a little bracing at the beginning and I was half-halting almost every step, but she figured it out eventually and we had some nice cruise control moments.

 There are some more exercises I'm itching to try out but whenever I try to plan out a ride things go to crap and we never accomplish anything, so I'm going to try the go with the flow technique.