Bel Joeor

Short, sweet ride on Wednesday. Limber and loose in the walk, so we forged on into the trot. In retrospect: probably a bit too soon, as he was hopping a bit in the first few strides of the trot, asking to canter instead of trot. I pushed through with the trot instead and he shook it off after a quarter circle.

The ring was very busy, so we didn't do nearly as much circling/spiralling as we usually would to start off, and more complicated figures were out of the question. So we warmed up in big long laps, diagonals, working for soft and forward on the (sometimes) trickier straight line.

We worked on transitions, in part because I am a bit nervous about the hunter pace on Sunday - His Highness has run away with me enough times to still leave some residual caution in my brain. I'm getting better about it. But in the meantime: transitions and lots of 'em, concentrating on the quality in the gait before we make the transition, concentrating on keeping all parts where they need to be through the transition, and keeping the forward impulse through down transitions.

He was a bit more stiff to the left than usual; rather, he was stiff and didn't work out of it quite as well as he usually does, probably in part because I couldn't put him on a 20m circle and really work him out of it.

Did a little bit of canter to the right, focusing on the quality of the transition again. Walk-trot, trying to stay forward and uphill, then capturing that upward into trot-canter, really not letting him fling his head up and his body to the outside, and his canter was MUCH better as a result. Got some really, really nice stuff.

Saturday: long hack outside with some quick work to test the brakes and attention span, then Sunday the hunter pace!