Roads & Tracks

Sometimes, you get the ride you want and the ride you need.  After an abysmal day at work, and an even more awesome conference call, I got home and decided that I really, really needed a nice, quiet, relaxing ride.  So, I decided that instead of "working", Zigs and I would go for a hack around the neighborhood.  No worrying about him being on the bit, getting canter exactly when I ask, or anything like that, just me and my pony exploring the neighborhood.  I took Ziggy out of the gate from the pasture and he gave me a look as if to say, "What's going on, Dad?  There's no trailer here.  You only bring me out when we're going somewh-Oh look, grass!"  After a quick reminder that he was on the clock now, I mounted up and headed out.  Ziggy was very bouncy, and looky, which I expected.  To make sure he kept his mind on the task at had, I made him do lots of leg yields and shoulder ins.   I veered right from my house, and came to a cul de sac, which looked to be about 20m in diameter, and decided that this was the perfect place to do circles.  I started off on the left rein, and got a few good 20m circles in, so then I practiced spiraling out on the circle, which also went really well.  Why I didn't do any spiral in, I don't know.  I blame my fried brain.  I did, however, remember to change rein and do the same thing on the right.

 

Man, I need to work my horse more on the right rein.  He wasn't nearly as good on the right rein as he was the left.  He kept trying to cut off the circles, and I had to give a pretty strong leg aid to get him to spiral out on the circle.  I know that when I ride him in the pasture, I tend to spend a lot of time on the left rein, so I need to make a concerted effort in the future to fix that, because I ride Dressage, not Nascar, and I'm pretty sure that XC requires right turns as well.  Call it a hunch.  At any rate, I kept after him until he was crossing over behind to sprial out, and not just popping his shoulder and walking to the outside, and then resumed exploring the neighborhood.  We did a little bit of trotting, but it was hard ground and he doesn't have back shoes, so I didn't ask for more than 5 or 6 strides before going down to walk.  There's not too much to report about the rest of the ride other than the fact that Zigs was a very good boy, with one caveat.  He has a bad habit of jigging when he knows we're headed back home.  My strategy for dealing with it was to immediately make him circle, do a serpentine, and then point him back home.  Unfortunately, I don't feel like it was spectacularly successful.  But by this time, it was starting to get dark, and I wanted to get him back in before I lost all the light, so I didn't deal with it as thoroughly as I think I should have.  If any of y'all have suggestions on other things to do when he jigs, I'm all ears.  To compensate for that, once we arrived home and I got him back into the pasture, I made him do three trot circles on both reins, so he didn't think that just because we were home, we were done.  I checked my pager after I'd untacked him, and realized I'd ridden him for almost two hours.  He wasn't hot, or blowing, and the only sweat on him was from the saddle blanket. (I use a puffy saddle pad, and a half pad on top of it, so that gets pretty hot.  Especially in the Texas summer.)  I really enjoyed that ride, and I think it's something I'll be doing on a more regular basis.  Zigs seemed to appreciate the change in scenery, too.  I think part of my frustration with riding him right now is due to the fact that he's a very smart horse, and he gets bored just riding around the pasture.  I'm going to see about building myself some caveletti, and getting some cones so that when I do ride him in the pasture, I can give him several different activities to keep his mind engaged.  

 

I'm not sure if I'll be riding tonight, I'd like to, but I need to do some urgent work on one of the websites I maintain, so it all depends on how long that stuff takes me.  If I don't ride tonight, I'll definitely ride tomorrow, and will probably focus on sprialing in and out of circles on the right rein, and turns on the forehand to see if I can't make strides towards loosening up that right side of his.