Equestrian Team Spring - Day 1

After not taking lessons for over two months because of my possible stress fracture, today was the first day back with the team.

To say it was terrible would be an understatement.

I was stuck with this little pony, who seemed like she might be annoying based on her ground manners, but I figured I could handle her. I got on, walked around a little bit and then started to ask for a trot.

This demon would NOT move at all. Stacy had me switch crops multiple times during the lesson and even with that, Wonder wouldn't move. She would only swish her tail, flick her ears, and continue on. Kicks, crops, even kisses, she wasn't having any of it. I felt angry when Stacy yelled at me to keep my leg on her because I WAS keeping my leg on her. This horse just would NOT go anywhere!

I literally spent the entire hour trying to get this horse out of a walk. She would only trot if Stacy walked behind us or yelled at me from across the arena, and cantered for half of a lap because Stacy yelled and snapped a longe whip at her.

Basically, I paid $40 for a pony ride.

I felt like crying for the entire second half hour because no matter what I did, it wasn't working.

At the end of the lesson, when everyone came in by Stacy for her little "moral of the lesson" story, her moral today was to believe in yourself and then you'll succeed in getting your horse to do what you want. I can only believe in myself until it's proven otherwise, and it was, so I accepted that this lesson wasn't going anywhere.

Afterwards (in which I untacked and groomed in record time because I was so sick of looking at Wonder), I went to talk to Stacy, and, ultimate insult, she said that I should come back for private lessons instead of group ones for a while. This really knocked me down. Even the girl who doesn't know how to ride, let alone have her own horses to train, was getting her horse to move. I'm trying not to take it as an insult, because I know Stacy didn't mean it that way...she said that she wanted to spend more time trying to fix this problem because my posture is great but it's like my legs aren't effective. She wants to analyze my riding more closely and figure out what I can do to really improve. I guess I should feel honored that she's asking to just spend time teaching me and working on my riding to really be where it looks I should be, both based on my experience with my horses and with my posture. So I have to figure out when I can start private lessons again. I might give next week's group lesson a go and see if it's any better on another horse. If not, I'll do privates for a while. I actually prefer privates.

In other news, I'm pretty sure Stacy is going to come out and ride this month! I'm so excited =] I just know that once she sees me riding my own horses, she'll be able to come up with something to help me better translate that into jumping. I would even love to bring Brie out for a jumping lesson some time, if we have a private lesson, or even a group lesson. I would love it even more if it were a group lesson so I could show everyone what my horses can do, but realistically I'll probably have to have it be private because we'd have to trailer Brie out there.

It can only get better from here, right?

Equestrian Team Fall - Day 7

Tuesday

This was officially my last lesson of the quarter! It was spontaneous. One of the girls was able to get her car and drive us out there, and I'm glad that I got to end my quarter on such a good note.

I rode Wonder, this little white mare. She was kind of hard to get going, but Stacy had me working on transitions more than anything else. I wish I could just pick up the right diagonal when I start posting, I always have to switch and it bugs me that I know that I have to switch right as Stacy's telling me to. Ugh! I wish there were some trotty horses at my barn so I could practice for free over the winter without going out to lessons, especially when I'm not working over break, paying every week for lessons sure adds up!

At the end of the lesson, Stacy said that she thought that Wonder was "too much horse for me". I'm not really sure what she meant by that, because I thought I was handling her fine. She got spooked twice on one end of the arena because of construction noises and although I could have handled it like I would've the Pasos, I didn't know if I would get yelled at for flexing her far to the side into a circle to stop, so I did a big-ish circle to calm her down. It's not like I was going to fall off. I mean, yeah they shouldn't spook, but I don't know if they've worked under construction before, so it could've been okay for them to be scared of the noise. I thought I had a great lesson because I was able to recognize the wrong diagonals and not have to wait until Stacy told me when they were wrong and that as the lesson continued I got better at asking lazy Wonder to pick up her trot and canter.

Oh well. I can't wait to show Stacy how much horse I can handle! She's going to come out and ride at my barn over the break! I can't wait to show her what I deal with, where my roots are. I'm sure she'll just be amazed at how much we stress being like rubber-band flexible, because every time I circle a horse in a circle that I think is huge compared to what we do, she's always like "Not so small! You don't do that on these horses until at least third level dressage!"

Oh and a random note -- that show I was going to go to this upcoming weekend, yeah we're not going to it anymore. There aren't any gaited classes. I supposed I could take Brie for the barrel racing class for fun, but it wouldn't be worth giving up a day of training just for that, especially since it'd be the first time we'd ever do that!