Pro's Ride

Hey,

I guess since this is my first actual post I should introduce myself at least some. I'm a grad student at UNC getting my PhD in Bio. I grew up with horses riding mostly hunters. Around high school I got bored of hunters and attempted to swap to jumpers/eventing but my TB at the time was not amused by the idea of logs on the ground as jumps. He'd jump 3'6" without blinking in the ring, but a solid 18" tree trunk in a field terrified him. So we stuck with Jumpers and then I started doing dressage when I moved to NC and had no horse to ride. I figured if I was going to pay for riding time (lessons) I might as well learn something. Around Christmas I saw Kate's post that she was looking for someone to half-lease Pro in exchange for barn chores. Definitely best deal I've ever gotten in on! My mom bought a 6 month old Polish Arabian 12 1/2 years ago and I miss him so Pro's a great substitute. (That's my mom's Arab, Lyric, in the picture).

So, back to how today went. I last rode him on Sunday right after he'd pulled his "OMG everything is going to eat me!" trick on Kate, so he wasn't sure what to expect. I'd been very low key about the things that seemed to be residual nerves, lots of pats and good boys. Of course that meant that today he was offering to spook at random stuff just to see what I'd do. Nothing like fighting with a desert bred horse in 95 degree heat... He wasn't bad, we just had to go through all of his 212 resistance tricks to get to the good part. Once he was going better I did some work on getting a really nice, animated trot out of him. He tends to get stuck in his front end so I used Kate's almost-walk-now-TROT trick and kept after him with rhythmic bumping from my inside leg. Then I tried to really collect him at the canter. Kate gets him to do this amazingly collected canter but then he starts swapping leads in back. I don't collect as much and he doesn't do that, but I was tired of him thinking I was the push-over rider so I made him collect more. I'd say that contest ended up being something of a draw.



We've got a lesson scheduled with Gayle on Wednesday, so I'm excited about that. Kate's going to ride after me on one of the other horses at the barn, Elvis, so I'm looking forward to a full afternoon of horses and horsey gossip and pretending grad school doesn't exist!



(Kate's edit -- Sorry to hijack, but I just HAD to add in a picture of Andrea and Pro!!!!)