A horsey update

Seeing as to how we still have another two months of hot weather, it feels a little provocative to say WE SURVIVED THE SUMMER but we did it!  All the horses are in one piece and we had neither a colic nor an abscess episode, which Mae is known for pulling around this time of year.

The last time I posted about riding (mid-July?), both horses were thriving under their respective workouts with both myself and trainer.  Mae put on all of the weight that she lost over the winter and looks fantastic.  She feels good and is an absolute joy to ride.  Dalton put on a TON of weight and is finally starting to look like a real horse.  Then in mid-August, we hit a slump.  Or to be more accurate, Dalton hit a slump.  

August is a rough month in Texas.  It feels like it's been summer / hot / sweaty for ages, and there's no end in sight.  Add to it the fact that we hadn't gotten rain since April, and everything was dry and dusty.  As a result, Dalton took a mental break.  He didn't want to pay attention, he didn't want to work.  He wanted to phone it in - the horsey version of quiet quitting?  My trainer texted me one day that he was tripping all over the place (read: not paying attention) and having a really hard time focusing during his training rides.  She recommended a solid longe before riding, to warm him up and grab his attention, let him know that we mean business.  And no post-ride treats for two weeks.

What I suspect is, during this time, I was also in a riding slump.  And that's not to say I wasn't pleased with both horses.  Dalton's canter feels wonderful (if strong on the right lead), and I can sit all of his gaits, including a really lovely sitting trot.  But we were all zoning out during the rides and going in circles and circles - walk / trot / canter - rinse and repeat.

Obviously that's my bad.  I've consistently used riding time as a break from work and a way to clear my mind.  I'd throw on a podcast (Mae likes them too) and we'd do our regular hack.  Mae has been with me long enough and is smart enough to where she can anticipate every ask I have of her and she would go through the motions with me.  She likes predictability and knowing what to expect under saddle (read: not jumping) so she didn't have too much of a complaint about our riding routine.  Dalton was bored.  His attention span is around 16-17 minutes and if weren't doing "something", he'd start dragging his feet and picking up on every other thing to look at.

As a way to shake it up, I starting introducing a lesson plan into my hack rides.  Every week, I pick an exercise or area of focus and do that for 15-20 minutes, excluding any warm up or cool down.  The first time I tried it, I did the below transition exercise from horselistening.com.  Purely based on experience level, I was fully expecting for Mae to get it and Dalton to flub it.

Mae's ears pricked up as I moved her from a shorter warm up into the first transition.  Then she got excited and started trying to predict my requests.  I fought her on every canter diagonal, where at the end, she wanted to turn it into a lead change.  Trainer and I have always asked for lead changes on the diagonal and Mae was only doing what we had always asked of her.  Half halts were very key for her in getting them right.  Dalton got the transition exercise perfect the first time, both directions.  He listened, particularly since we were riding a pattern that he was not used to doing with me.  I felt engagement from both horses and also their sense of accomplishment when they did something right.

Since then, we've done a bunch of different transition exercises.  At the maximum, we're doing around 100 transitions, per horse, per ride.  It feels like quite a bit to me but apparently Carl Hester has been quoted as saying that he aims to do 200 transitions per ride.  I'm so pleasantly surprised with my super star Mae.  Since we've been doing these lesson plans, our rides are a lot more about the dialogue between her and myself.  We have had some construction going on on one end of the outdoor arena, and I was fully expecting spooky suspicion by both horses.  There are workmen, pipes, giant mounds of dirt.  Surprisingly, no spooks.  Mae, who would randomly pick the jumps outside the arena to freak out about, hasn't batted an eye at any of the goings-on.

I'm trying to find more flatwork exercises to keep the horses interested - if you recommend any, please shout them out my way!