Saturday, February 14, 2009

February 14, 2009

Happy day o'love! How appropriate, because right now I'm ridiculously in love with horses. So in love, in fact, that I'm neglecting doing my paid writing assignments in lieu of gushing on my blog. NERD.

Volunteering at Equest (even tho it's only been twice) is already proving incredibly rewarding and today was the Volunteer Horse show. That's right, WE all got to ride and get pointers on our riding. Terry (I'm not entirely sure how she's associated with Equest...) was the "judge" and my class was some good little riders! It was supposed to be w/t/c but for some reason was only w/t. I rode this adorable 5 yo. QH mare named Aubie-I LOVE her. She's so sweet and inquisitive, and has a lovely little Western jog to sit. Terry said I was a beautiful, elegant tall rider (haha, I'm 5'5''!), but that my weakness was that I was lacking the appropriate muscles and compensating in other ways. She talked me through relaxing my pelvis from the waist down to go with the movement of the horse, something I always thought I was doing but apparently wasn't. I could immediately feel the difference. My lower back is incredibly weak, and as I'm sitting here writing this and concentrating on relaxing those muscles to sink into my chair, my back says OUCH from all the work I gave it today. :) I think I may have an Equest favorite-Aubie's a very good girl for being such a baby. I hope I'll get to ride her again soon.

Of course, learning this made me super stoked to go see Blaze. Despite an obnoxious snow dump last night, the round pen was good footing. I know where I'd see the most difference w/him was bareback at the trot, since it's something I've really struggled with. I'm so happy with how things went. We didn't rid ourselves of one problem we have (his trying to run through my hands and putting his head down to brace against the bit) but his trot for the most part was nice and slow, and I was able to sit deeply and really feel myself going with the motion. It felt fantastic, and my balance was really there. I got a little video of it, and I'm anxious awaiting it to load so I can post it for critiques. After we did that and I was feeling confident, we worked on our walk to canter transitions, still bareback. Ha. That was a bit of a joke. It was mostly walk, super rushy trot, bring him back down to ask again. He DID get it once going each direction, so I let him go a few strides and brought him back down, praising to high heaven.

I love my horse and my horsey life. It's so good right now.