Interview with a Psycho Pony

The full moon is over, but I don't think Zigs got the memo.  My plan for tonight was to do  some work on spiraling in and out on a circle, do some turns on the forehand and do some trot and canter to round the ride out.  It all started so well...  I had a couple of very successful spiral ins/spiral outs, and then went to turn on the forehand.  This also went well.  However, Zigs was beginning to protest about being on the bit for too long.  I informed him that that was too bad, and he had to deal.  After a few more good turns on the forehand, and no protesting about being on the bit, I let him stretch down and free walk.  

"This is awesome!"  I thought.  "I should trot!"  Well, Zigs must have read my mind because he immediately started trotting.  He got a pass on that one because I probably did think too strongly, and on a horse like Zigs, sometimes that's all it takes.  I brought him back to walk with the intention of making him wait until he stopped anticipating before I started trotting him.  It worked fantastically well in theory, but my weak link is that this was practice.  Out of nowhere, he'd start trotting on me, and sometimes I would have to resort to yanking teeth to get him back down to walk. He was also rushing like all get out.  These discussions went on for about 20 minutes or so until I finally started getting a sane, consistent trot when I asked for it, and a down transition... sort of when I wanted it, kind of, goddammithorse HO!  Just to round out the ride, I asked for the canter once I had a good trot going.  The good news is that I got canter when I asked, and that my transition was sound.  The bad news is that I asked for canter, and got hand gallop, emphasis more on the gallop.  To make things even more exciting, someone had been kind enough to go in and disengage his brakes.  I tried sitting deep and making my core solid granite.  Nothing.  I tried yanking teeth, nothing.  So, I went to the old standby the one rein stop.  

Did you know that my TB can canter a 5 meter circle?   I didn't.  He can also do a flying change across the diagonal and do a 10 meter circle.  At long last, I put psycho pony back in his box and got a walk.  By this point, I was pretty annoyed, and was thinking I had to do something to salvage this ride.  So, I decided to work on halt from the walk.  It was a little rough at first, because Zigs was really pulling against the reins, and I was having to use far to much rein for my taste to get him to stop.  As an experiment, I let my reins out, picked up a walk, and selected an arbitrary point in the pasture to stop at.  I imagined that when I wanted to slow down, I was shooting grappling hooks into the ground from my heels that Zigs had to pull out before he could move.  They got heavier and heavier until nothing Zigs could do would pull them out.  Lo and behold, IT WORKED!  I didn't even have to pick up the reins.  Just to prove it wasn't a fluke, I tried it twice more, and it worked just as well each time.  After the third successful halt, I decided that was an excellent note to end on, and pulled his tack off and hosed him down, since he'd worked up quite a sweat, and there wasn't enough light left to completely walk him out.  

As soon as I let him off the halter, he immediately kicked up his heels, bucked, and went flying around the pasture, so I guess he just wanted to run. ;)  Hopefully my ride tomorrow will go better!