Lease Ride Dec. 11th Training Journal Entry #9

 Sindri was amazing today!

I decided to try riding on the track just to kind of see where he was at, and we also had been doing the same exercise in the arena for a couple weeks, so I wanted to do something different to keep his brain moving. I also knew he had been out on the track before so I wanted to try it!

The stuff we worked on in our lesson Monday for my position and how I ride definitely has helped a lot and I feel like it makes us a better team and it helped a lot today! 

We warmed up walk and trot and he was really good, we went both ways mixing up the transitions and adding some halts in as well. When we were ready to try a canter we went to the top of the track and just cantered the long stretch and then walked again just to make sure it was okay to canter and that he would focus on me. We went both ways at the top of the track like that, we started left lead and he was great and then we went right lead and it took us two tries to pick it up but then he was good. 

I decided since the little canter we did seemed good we would try a whole canter lap each way and then let him be done. We started to the left and he picked it up great and we made it about a 1/4 of the away around when something in the woods scared him so he swapped his lead and went a bit faster so i brought him back to the trot to switch his lead back and we finished our lap. Right lead was good, he half picked up the right lead but was cross cantering in the back so we switched that and kept going and he was great the whole time.

I was going to let him be done after our canter lap each way but after a walk break we just did a little bit of trotting to make sure we could still trot calmly after we cantered, and he was great!

Overall the ride was on the shorter side because I wanted to make sure I ended on something good.

Sorry about the lack of pictures and videos from today - I'll try to have some for our lesson on Monday!