“Which horse will I get today?” That was what I asked myself when I arrived at the barn today. You can never be 100% certain with horses. This past week my horse Biasini had been a couple of different horses. We have cold weather and that means he will always have a lot of energy. In our lesson on Tuesday he was all fired up and willing to do what ever I asked. At the end of the lesson my coach Belinda Trussell said he was “Brilliant!”
The next day, Wednesday, we had another lesson. Again he was full of energy. But this day he was using most of it against me . Tough ride! But with encouragement from Belinda I rode on and dealt with it. At the end of the lesson she said: “Well today was ‘real life’. He threw a lot of manure at you but you just picked up your shovel, threw it over your shoulder and said ‘We are working here. Get on with it. ” Belinda felt that six months ago I would not have been able to throw that stuff over my shoulder and get him to focus and work.
Thursday I did not have a lesson and decided to to some pole work rather than repeating the exercises we had been doing in the lessons. Something different for Biasini and for me. I laid out 12 foot poles in a square and trotted through them turning after each pass to form a clover leaf pattern. Sometimes I would halt in the middle of the square and then trot out.
Friday we had another lesson. This was when I wondered what horse I would have. It was another cold day and at the start we had the usual spooking at the far end of the arena. But once we got to work he got over that. Belinda asked us to go through the first few movements of the Prix St George dressage test. In this lesson she was giving me pointers. Here is a video of that.
We continued to work on the trot and at any given moment I had to feel that I could ask him to passage. Here is some of our basic trot work.
Then we worked on the canter and the flying changes. Belinda felt that in the “real life” lesson the changes had been ok but somewhat “meh”! So she asked me to give Biasini a tiny tap with the whip in between the changes. So on the second stride I would tap and ask him to go freely into the change. The timing is critical and I did struggle with that a bit
Overall Biasini worked well with me and I believe he tried to do his best. What was Belinda’s evaluation? “Brilliant!”
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