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Monday, September 13, 2010

Travel for Work and Dressage

As you may have guessed, I caught a cold and then started traveling for work a lot! So that means my free time is completely gone, thus the blog has suffered! I will just put a warning out there: In September I will be a horrible blogger! But I promise to pick things back up to show our progress for the Kathy Connelly Clinic the end of October! Until then Gram and I will just have to make the most out of our times together.

I was able to get a lesson last week Sunday and Tuesday. I light bulb kind of went off for me. Gram tends to lock to the left, so I thought that meant trying to get her to give in the jaw. This was part of the problem, but not the root of it... Ryan had been trying to explain this, but of course sometimes the 10th time you are told is when you actually hear it! So the root of the problem, was her bend in the rib cage. Instead of focusing on the jaw, I needed to focus more on the bend in her body. Once this clicked, wow things have been great. When I start it is long and low in walk, canter and trot. Then back in the walk, I start with quarter turns, to really focus on moving that front end around. It has really been helping, because then when I start my lateral work in the trot, she is all set up. Now I just have to remember to not lock my outside when leg yielding.

One of the exercises that works incredibly well is to canter on a 20m circle, when crossing the centerline, trot and 10m circle in the opposite direction, then back to the 20m circle and canter again. It gets her to engage, since she is so long, her canter shows tons of promise, but takes a lot of work on her part to come together.

Aside from our hard work in the barn, I have also been going through old videos of My Willy and Rushonne. I am hoping to get some videos posted soon, we are just waiting for the right cables to transfer the actual tapes into a digital format! yes that means I am old...

Thursday, September 2, 2010

It has been a rough couple of weeks

So as the summer is starting to wrap up, that means that my job gets more demanding for the next few weeks so Gram will be under the expert supervision of Ryan Yap! To make matters worse, I have caught a nasty cold...goodbye 90 degrees welcome coughing, sneezing and freezing. Well not entirely true, we will have like 2 weeks that are perfect for riding, but I will be traveling for work. So since I haven't had too much going on on the riding front, I thought I would post some funny videos I found today as I sit on my couch, home sick :(