Trotting and Fighting

Now we are beginning to express ourselves more freely. Today is a very warm windy wet day. We walked down the road to Snagwood Road, her mincing carefully for fear of slipping. Once on Snagwood we practiced trot out walk back. Repeatedly, over a short distance. She got more and more annoyed about both halves and I was almost unseated. I have been bingeing on George Morris videos so I was chanting "Leg to Hand" all the way out, somewhat less so on the way back. I am not so sure how to do that when she wants to run home and her head is high. When I bring my hands up and add contact and leg, she gets frustrated and wants to rear. I had to ride her as tactfully as I knew how today. I did not let her push us home, but I could not use the crop other than to lay it on her in a reminding kind of way. She would have loved an excuse to pop. We did fairly well, I can't say we got to relaxed head down walking or trotting, but definitely improved from beginning to end. At the end I just worked in the 40 feet at the beginning of the road, back and forth for very short distances, and that way she got to be very good. If I had done that at the beginning, we could have stretched out from there. We did get to walk home on contact, which we have never really done, and we played around with contact and head position in a fairly relaxed way. That was pretty successful. I looked at her ankle when I fed her this morning, it was nearly flat. Then I looked at it when I finished saddling her up, it was a little more filled and tight. After the ride it was not much different to before the ride. I wonder if blood pressure somehow has an effect?

Riding!

Today was our fourth or possibly fifth ride. We started out carefully with 10 minutes, after which I would hop off and we would walk down the road, and people going by would think I had fallen off my horse. Especially when we went past a scary place and she reared up and I made us go by it over and over with not as great success as I would have liked. One person kindly asked if I was okay, for which I am grateful but I said I was just fine as heartily as I possibly could. Now we have had lots of snow and cold and the road is slippery, so we have gone out on the path in the woods two or three times. We go back and forth, and practice going by the turn to the barn without having an argument, stopping and starting in both directions, coming back toward the barn at a relaxed walk. Today we worked on stopping straight, which we have never really worked on, and we actually did pretty well on. Also backing up straight both towards and away from the barn. However, I was horrified when we got back to the barn to discover she had been walking on ice balls on her hind feet, the size of tangerines. I had brushed oil in her hind feet but apparently that has no effect.