Not Linear: Lesson Recap 2/21

First time I sat on baby pony's back!!

Clearly learning isn't linear but sometimes it's easy to be slightly frustrated about how up and down things can be with my pony right now. Lately it's pretty much been an e/o week thing where one week is amazing and the next is a struggle. I think it's more strength related (or maybe a little bit of resistance when Katai feels like it's been hard) than anything else. This mare picks things up so quickly that she certainly hasn't struggled to understand the work, just to get her body to do it or sometimes to do it appropriately :)

The lesson this week was definitely a struggle week. It wasn't nearly as much of a struggle as we've had in the past, it just hasn't been as much of a struggle since I started with Jane. Now a struggle week is where our canter isn't as nice rather than that Katai wouldn't stop threatening to rear which certainly used to happen.

This lesson I was also feeling a little emotionally sensitive which is odd for me. I LOVE direct feedback and that would always be my preference. I didn't get emotional in my lesson but just left feeling pretty down.

This lesson we focused mainly on lateral work and also tried to get a canter on a smaller circle. Unfortunately for us Katai didn't want to play at the canter and didn't want to work on the bit. I think she was just a little tired from Monday and since we continue to increase the difficulty each week I think she was just feeling a little like this was tough work and she didn't want to play.

Poor pony, oh well we'll be having a toodle/bareback day soon.

On the way home (even though I wasn't that down, just feeling less positive than last week for example) I was thinking about how far we've come from the beginning and thought it might be fun to go back to my first lesson recap and share the first riding video I have of Katai.

This video is from May 2015 and I have to apologize for the blurriness. It got transferred to a few different phones before I ever uploaded it so the quality is pretty bad. At this point I'd been riding Katai for about 6 months (but I'd hesitate to call much of it riding and I wasn't on her back more than 1-2 times per week for that time).

Then here is our first lesson recap! This was from September 2015 and we were working on changing directions on 20 meter circles at the trot! I was still getting lots of pony tantrums and sass and some days I could barely ride because of how stiff, tense, inverted and stubborn Katai was.

This is exactly why I have this blog. To be able to look back and see the net change rather than feeling like I need to make positive change each day :) It's fun to do this when I'm feeling down and since I don't have much to share about the lesson since we did a lot of the same thing and struggled the whole time I thought it would be fun to share!