Not worth the extra sleep

[alobear]

I switched to the 11:45am riding lesson today, in the hopes that the extra lie-in would improve my general fatigue levels. Bad mistake.

Dominic only teaches at 9am and 10:30am, so my lesson was taken by Michelle, who failed utterly to create any kind of a lesson out of a difficult situation. The school was much too crowded so she spent most of the time telling me (as lead file) to do some kind of exercise and then having to cancel her instructions because other horses were in the way. She sent us round the whole school rather than half so we got in the way of all the other lessons going on, and I couldn't hear a lot of what she was saying because she was mostly really far away from us. One of the other people in the lesson had very little control over her horse, and Michelle in general had very little control over the lesson so it was basically chaos.

All we did was trot round and round the school, occasionally chaning the rein and eventually taking turns to canter to the back. This was murder on my ankle as we didn't slow to a walk at all throughout the whole lesson, and we ended up cantering round the whole school to get to the back of the ride, which was exhausting.

For some reason, nobody but me noticed that poor Kofi is much too small for me, and the combination of three extended cantering sessions and my big fat arse bouncing up and down on his back nearly killed him! By the end, he was staggering along at a snail's pace with his head practically on the floor. I hope he hasn't sustained any long-term damage from the experience.

Good points - I mounted from the ground (which isn't all that impressive on a small pony, but at least I proved to myself that I can still do it) and I think I rode really well, considering the circumstances and lack of any kind of instruction.

Additional bad point was that I really missed sharing the lesson with the others (not to mention having interesting things to do and decent comments from Dominic) so I'm eschewing extra sleep and rejoining the 9am lesson again next week.