Why I Love Drill Team

Despite a lot of positive posts recently I've been having some struggles with my dear pony. Of course that's to be expected and the more we ask the more she will check to see if she really needs to listen or be with the program. Right now our thing is whether she really needs to make reasonable transitions. I'm focused mainly on her walk to trot transition but all of her transitions need work. My main thought process right now is just that we need to do it more :-)

Lately when things seem difficult I've been reminding myself that although my rides with my instructor are better then when I'm on my own, I'm the one that does at least 75% of the work with her which means that I get a decent amount of credit for our awesome progress so far. Of course we'd never be where we are without L (not even close) but it's the daily grind that is a big part of our progress.

However, no matter what the rest of our rides are like I always look forward to drill team. This last Thursday I ended up driving straight from work because I got stuck there late. On the way I picked up some food (we do potluck but most of the time no one brings any vegan food) and then ate and had a glass of wine with the other riders.

After dinner we tacked up and Katai was as happy to see me as I was to see her. We all mounted up and warmed up for a bit and then got to it. Unfortunately with the weather, a couple of lame horses, and some cold/flu going around we've only had three riders the last couple of times which makes it tough to do any of our patterns. However, L always has something great up her sleeve and so we've been doing a couple of exercises where we ride single file. One of these involves looping from front to back and the other involves leg yielding out and then extending the trot to pass and get to the front of the line. This last time we added canter to looping to the back which of course got everyone all fired up.

After one of those I ended up further back than I should have been (poor steering for the win) and so to catch up I decided to play with our lengthening rather then just cantering to the end. It was a long side of the arena and so I balanced her and then pushed out her trot and we FLEW. I could feel her pushing forward from behind and her front legs snapping up and L was jumping up and down and yelling THE PONY'S GOT A MEDIUM!!!

It was seriously awesome!

I'm fairly certain that we'll be doing this soon.

I was so freaking excited :-) We ended up doing one more pass and that time she broke to a canter since, I think, I wasn't doing enough to balance her but I was still grinning from ear to ear. From the sewing machine to this isn't something I ever expected so the slow, currently unrewarding, work at our walk/trot/walk transitions doesn't seem so bad.