Mummy, I wanna pony!
Dec. 10th, 2006 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearUp until today, I've only ridden the big horses - Madison is *too* big, but Molly, Flossie and Flash are just about right.
Today, I was on Hughie, one of the ponies, and it was really weird. His stride is so much shorter than I'm used to, his body is so much narrower, and his head so much nearer. I had to rise to the trot a lot faster than normal and his canter stride was do fast and choppy that I actually couldn't tell when we'd made the transition from trot! On the second canter, I had to look at the movement of his legs in his shadow to make sure we were actually cantering.
However, the fact that I was on a pony and so was Mary, the other girl in the lesson, meant that we could do an exercise I've never done before. Dominic had us trotting round the school and then the lead file would do a 10 metre circle in one of the corners to end up behind the other horse. Then the other horse would do the same in the next corner and we'd switch again. By the end, we were both doing it really well, so we were switching lead at every corner and it was great fun. The idea was to get the horses listening and bending round our legs, rather than pulling them round with the reins, and for us to concentrate on keeping our position correct and still throughout the manoeuvre. It's not something I've ever done before, which made it really interesting.
The problem was, we had David on Molly as part of our ride. Now, Molly's too big for 10m circles and David's not that good at controlling her. So, a large part of the lesson was taken up with Dominic making David do a slightly different exercise on his own, and trying to get Molly to co-operate, which made parts of it rather boring for me.
Hey ho.
It was great to ride such a different horse, plus the C lesson was going on in the same part of the school, so I got to see the others riding, which was fun.
I've decided I must be some kind of horsenip to Molly, though. I've seen several different people ride her and she's really moody. She goes backwards, sideways, stops for no reason, kicks, bucks and generally doesn't do what she's supposed to. When I rode her, though, she went like a dream right up until we cantered, at which point she took off like a rocket round the school. So, must be horsenip in my jodhpurs!
Today, I was on Hughie, one of the ponies, and it was really weird. His stride is so much shorter than I'm used to, his body is so much narrower, and his head so much nearer. I had to rise to the trot a lot faster than normal and his canter stride was do fast and choppy that I actually couldn't tell when we'd made the transition from trot! On the second canter, I had to look at the movement of his legs in his shadow to make sure we were actually cantering.
However, the fact that I was on a pony and so was Mary, the other girl in the lesson, meant that we could do an exercise I've never done before. Dominic had us trotting round the school and then the lead file would do a 10 metre circle in one of the corners to end up behind the other horse. Then the other horse would do the same in the next corner and we'd switch again. By the end, we were both doing it really well, so we were switching lead at every corner and it was great fun. The idea was to get the horses listening and bending round our legs, rather than pulling them round with the reins, and for us to concentrate on keeping our position correct and still throughout the manoeuvre. It's not something I've ever done before, which made it really interesting.
The problem was, we had David on Molly as part of our ride. Now, Molly's too big for 10m circles and David's not that good at controlling her. So, a large part of the lesson was taken up with Dominic making David do a slightly different exercise on his own, and trying to get Molly to co-operate, which made parts of it rather boring for me.
Hey ho.
It was great to ride such a different horse, plus the C lesson was going on in the same part of the school, so I got to see the others riding, which was fun.
I've decided I must be some kind of horsenip to Molly, though. I've seen several different people ride her and she's really moody. She goes backwards, sideways, stops for no reason, kicks, bucks and generally doesn't do what she's supposed to. When I rode her, though, she went like a dream right up until we cantered, at which point she took off like a rocket round the school. So, must be horsenip in my jodhpurs!
