Drill ride

[alobear]

It was raining heavily when I got to the stables this morning, so several extra individual lessons had been moved to School 1, along with the A and B lessons. That gave us 18 horses in the school. The instructors had a brief conference, then joined the A and B lessons together, along with three of the individuals and we did a drill ride, using the whole school.

I haven't done drill riding for about fifteen years and it was really fun. I was reunited with my lovely Flossie and we were made lead file of one of the rides (most definitely the best place to be when drill riding).

What we did was split into two rides of 8, one going round the school one way, the other going round the other way, passing left to left at each end. Then we turned down the centre line in pairs and both turned the same way at the top, so we were going round the school together in pairs. Then we split up again to form two rides going opposite directions, each changing the rein at opposite sides so we had to cross alternately in the middle of the school. That's why it's best to be at the front, because you only have to cross behind one horse and whatever happens in the pile up behind doesn't affect you!

Now, this was pretty easy at a walk - the trot version was much more interesting! I don't think we had any real collisions, but I did hear quite a lot of yelling behind me at one point!

Then, we formed back up into one long ride all going the same way round the whole school, and took in turns to do walk to canter to the back of the ride, overlapping the start points so we had up to five horses all cantering at the same time. Flossie was an absolute star all the way through, doing every manoeuvre perfectly, right up until she ended up stuck in the middle of the ride after our first canter. Then, she decided she didn't like the horse behind and started pirouetteing and kicking out. The rider of the horse behind was sensible enough to get out of the way and keep a safe distance after that, but it wound Flossie up until she was bouncing, so our second canter was rather faster than I anticipated! Still, it was good fun overall.

However, observation and awareness have never been my strong points (it's what I failed my driving test on first time round), and today was no exception. At the start of the lesson, I put Flossie's bridle on and led her down to the school. When I got there, I turned to get on and discovered she still had her blanket on! Oops!