Redemption

I have a lot to catch up on, but first and foremost, we had some serious redemption at our show this past weekend.

Kisses for the best pony

Not only was Peebs back to his normal, happy self, we cantered our first full course at a show and didn't die!!  In fact we did pretty damn well. I honestly don't know why I was scared to do it; cantering him in the big show ring is so much easier than trotting around. For the most part we were able to find a nice rhythm and just lope along.  I found most of my distances, we made the strides easy (actually too easy, homeboy can have a 13ft stride, who knew?!).  I'll put a full show recap up later.

Of course getting here from our last show took some work.  The week after our last show Peebs felt really disconnected and when I lunged him to take a look, it was like his front end and hind end were two different horses. We also had another major spooking incident walking down the road involving a mail truck.  So I called the chiro and poor pony was way out.  When she first started working on him she said his hips were out and his neck was a bit wonky.  But once she started on his neck he was much worse than she thought.  He's very stoic and we think his way of saying he was out was spooking and being super amped. And a couple days after she worked on him, the tension I'd been feeling for the past couple weeks was gone and he stopped spooking at things. At the show we had multiple encounters with the water trucks and tractors and he never once cared about them.  Even when they got close enough that we got sprayed all he did was stick his head in the air and pin his ears.

The week before the show we had our best lesson to date. Trainer put the jumps up a hole and set the lines on an 11ft stride.  Our arena is small and it's hard to set on a 12' stride so we normally do a 10' or 11'.  Since we've mostly been doing baby stuff I tend to set on a 10'. The theme for the lesson was to ride him forward, in prep for  the bigger strides and lines at the show. And what do you know, once I committed to it, it was easy.  Once I'm comfortable with having a bit more pace and bigger stride, Peebs is super easy to find distances on. He's not a super fancy warmblood hunter, but he can have a nice pace and rhythm that makes doing the hunters fun. Now, all we need is a flying change and we'll be set!!