Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Riding Lesson #2 - I Loped !!

Geez, I'm tired! I have to say, though, the weather so far this week has been phenomenally wonderful for riding. The highs this week have been 80 or 81, about 5 degrees lower than "normal" for June.

I rode Peyton again (he's the "spotlight" horse on the program's website), and we did really well. I'm the only person riding him this session (he doesn't like kids), so we're getting used to each other, and I can get a better jog out of him now. I also got to lope on him tonight - the first time I've ever intentionally loped on a horse where we both knew what we were doing. (I loped my first horse a few times, but bareback, and lets just say it wasn't a pretty sight, although I didn't fall off.)

I actually loped 4 or 5 times, maybe half a lap each time, both directions of the ring. Peyton's a bit left-handed, apparently, and starts off pretty fast. The lope to the right, which we did first, was decent, but not so much when we turned around. After a try or two, I got a decent walk-to-canter transition, but keeping it going was the sticky part, especially to the right. One problem is that I usually forgot to breathe, which kind of makes things hard. The first time, I did have a good hold on the saddle horn, but after that I had sort of gotten the hang of it. Sara said I did a good job with him, and it was the slowest lope he'd done for the summer riders. Gotta say, though, if that was slow, I do not want to ride his fast lope right now, because it felt pretty darn fast to me. Not quite the super-slow rocking-chair WP lope that I was expecting.

Other than that, we did some short obstacle courses - trotting (jogging) over poles, half-circles, and that sort of thing. The final course was to trot over 4 poles, curve around the ring, then trot into a pole-box, stop, and do a 360-degree turn. Peyton likes trotting over the poles more than jogging over them, so it's a fine-tuning thing to get the speed right. Last time, he threw in a bit of a really low jump over the last one.

(One of the girls in the class is riding a pretty grey mare, dappled with some flea bites, who's a granddaughter of Seattle Slew. She's only 7, so if she had any racing career it wasn't much. I'd like to find out her registered name, so I can Google her.)

Anyway, I loped!! Intentionally! And I didn't fall off, or curl up into a ball, or have a death grip on the saddle the whole time. Next time, I'll remember to breathe. And maybe then I'll be able to lope, breathe, control the speed, and steer all at the same time. Because this time, the steering was pretty much non-existent on my end. I was mostly concerned with staying on, rating his speed, and breathing - in that order, and breathing sometimes got ignored a bit.

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