Focus

This week is dedicated to taking a whack at focus, something which Rush has a lot of- it's just not usually directed at me. For instance, the staring at herself in the mirror and forgetting to turn and almost falling on her face every. single. time. we go through that corner.

Two days ago we had another sloppy ride, because I decided hey maybe we should have some brakes! and she definitely did not agree with that. Cue instant drama and scrambling around and pretending like we have no idea what stop or turn means. This revelation was brought on when we attempted to canter, and picked up the wrong lead. This was, admittedly, my fault- I keep forgetting to set her up for it because I'm focusing on smoothing the transition, and since she's usually bending herself in the wrong direction, she picks up the wrong lead. What happened after was not my fault- her freaking out when I asked her to come back down to a trot, bracing against the bit, and taking off down the ring. There were some interesting maneuvers on my part to get her to stop.

So yeah, that ride was crap and we didn't really have brakes ever, even after lots of walk-trot transitions to get her paying attention (really it just amped her up :/) so I quit after a relatively not running off lap around the ring.

Yesterday I felt lazy and was not really up to fighting with her, so we did some round pen work instead. I worked a lot on engaging her attention and keeping her focused on me, which involved lots of changes of direction. She learned pretty quickly to turn facing me going to the right, but to the left there seems to be a lot of hesitation and stickiness even though she did it successfully and was praised for it. So we'll keep working on that. She started keying in on my body language pretty well walk/trot, but is still spacing once she gets to RUNFREE aka canter, so that also needs to be addressed. Today I'll ride, cause I've been a bad mom this week and have neglected her terribly, opting to stay inside and have the sniffles instead.

Fingers crossed for a good ride today! We're going to work on transitions again; I think I'll be putting her in the pelham for this because the D-ring was definitely not cutting it.