My sister flew back to Arizona on Saturday and now I’m trying to catch up with my normal life. We had a good visit. Last Monday, she and I went out and I gave her a pretty long lesson on Steen while sitting on Bear so I could demonstrate things. She was interested in a lot of the new concepts we’ve been applying lately, so wanted to learn as much as possible.
She started out on Steen in the hackamore, and after a few minutes he was getting a bit stiff on her. I climbed on to gauge where he was at, and he was stiff for me too. I switched him to the snaffle and things went better after that. She rode for quite a long time, moved through all three gaits and had fun.
Unfortunately Bear’s back is still a tad ouchy, so I did very little on him. One of these days I need to ride him when he’s feeling good.
We spent a large portion of the weekend in Chicago, but managed a ride on Sunday. We were both really tired and we’re still trying to keep things easy on Bear. We only rode half an hour on the strip. I was in the hackamore again, and watching Meryl on Steen made me realize I have been neglecting lateral flexion lately because I’ve been so focused on vertical flexion. So we worked a lot on flexing, short serpentines and whirlygigs. He started to soften up almost immediately. There are so many things to work on each ride, I find it a little bit hard to keep them all in my head at once.
Horseback hours YTD: 48:35