Faceplant

My friend wasn't able to come out this week, so Buddy didn't get his massage.  He had Thursday off, and I only had time to do a light lunge on Friday.  He looked pretty good, and played on the lunge.  I rode in the outdoor today.  It was a little wet, but the footing felt good. We did a light warm up doing an exercise my old trainer in CA used to have us do.  It's called the momentum pattern.  You trot across the diagonal line and pick up the canter at the end. Canter around the short end and down the long side.  As you approach the next short end, come back to the trot and go across the other diagonal line.  Repeat.  This exercise really helps their trot, using the momentum from the canter to have a nice forward trot across the diagonal.

After we warmed up, I set a cavaletti on the center line and we trotted it, alternating directions on the landing side.  He was pretty good, but we kept landing on the right lead.  It's his stronger lead, and I really have to make sure to have him bending left (without over bending him and loosing his shoulder) and remember to look left over the fence.  When he landed on the wrong lead, I would halt him, then ask for the correct lead.

We had done the cavaletti maybe 5 times and trotting back around to it when Buddy tripped and almost went down to his knees.  Once he righted himself, I hopped off to check for damages.  Besides being muddy, his legs looked fine.  I walked him back to the mounting block then saw this:

He tripped so hard he hit his nose on the ground.  Graceful pony, graceful.  Once I was back on we walked around till the adrenaline stopped pumping thru my veins.  We trotted around for a couple minutes, then I decided to call it a day.  I didn't want to jump him anymore just in case he had hurt himself while tripping. His legs felt good when I untacked him, so hopefully he'll be ok tomorrow.