This week I’m finally starting to feel caught up with work. We’ve been making a few adjustments to the way we are running my business, including that Brian is now going to handle all billing and invoicing, plus some of the correspondence with potential new clients. This only amounts to a few hours of work a week, but for me it feels like a huge relief. We’ve also decided to cut a few things from our services offering, so I can continue to specialize. These things combined into a far more sane work week than I’ve had in a while. The weather even cooperated and we had a cooler day today, so we were keen to celebrate the end of the week with a nice ride.
We rode on the strip. I rode Steen in the hackamore. I was hoping we’d have another awesome ride, but it didn’t quite work out that way. It wasn’t a bad ride, but for some reason when we started our no-handed figure-eights, he just wouldn’t move off my left leg when I was asking him to turn right. I know my left leg is weaker, and I can feel this sometimes when I ride, but still Steen normally moves off such light pressure, it’s not a problem. We worked on it and worked on it and it got no better. I must admit I got a little irritated about it, so I stopped working on the figure eights and worked just on moving his front around his hind. This was great, and we did a full circle much faster than we ever had before. But when we went back to walking, he’d just blow through my left leg every time.
I decided to shift gears and try some trotting. He was good at the trot, though not very soft when I asked for collection. He was also quite bad with leg-yields. Then we stopped and I did more moving the front around the hind. Then I asked him to side-pass, and he completely surprised me by collecting off the lightest pressure and taking five huge, consecutive steps to the right. I asked him to go back the other way, and he did it just as softly and well. So that was by far the best side-passing we’ve ever achieved. I tried a few other things, and basically everything I asked him to standing or going backwards (also whirligigs and short-serpentines) was perfect, and most things I asked for going forwards were a tad flawed. But not every ride can be incredible, so I shouldn’t complain.
Ride Time: 1:10
Horseback hours YTD: 88:00