Saturday 10th January

Today with Blossom I played with:

1. Extreme Friendly with CS and plastic bag.
2. Friendly with the umbrella, this still needs a little work as she wasn’t sure of it in zone 1.
3.Yo Yo game
4. Yo Yo over a pole
5.Sideways without a fence
6. Sideways over a pole
7. Trotting sideways
8. Transitions on a circle
9. Change of direction
10. Working on getting 4 feet on the pedestal - 3 today!!

I then saddled and followed the rail of the round pen, she was very calm and relaxed so I started adding in transitions from trot to walk to stand to back up. She was really good and stayed relaxed and connected to my energy.
As everything was going so well I decided to try cantering the rail of the round pen and see how she was with this. Well it wasn’t as calm as I hoped, but it wasn’t a full gallop either so I basically done a passenger lesson following the rail to see when and if she would stop herself. I found that yes she would stop herself after about 4 laps, but the canter never seemed to get any slower or more relaxed. I played with this for a while with lots of walk and rest in-between and found it to be the same and also in both directions..
Eddy then appeared just as I had got off, so I tried to get him to ride her as see if she would be better for him.. But he said he was too big for her, so instead he offered to play with her online with me on her and look at her canter this way. I had explained to him that I just felt I was getting nowhere with the canter as she was always going so fast and I was just always having to hold her to stop her going too fast as it would be really dangerous to let her do this.
So what Eddy thought would be the best idea would be if he controlled where she went and if she did go too fast he would make the circle smaller to slow her down, but I had to ask her to trot and then to canter and I was to try and control the speed of the gaits from my body. Well the first canter was really fast and I don’t think Eddy really expected her to actually go this fast (he hasn’t seen me doing much canter work with her before) We played around with this for about half an hour doing lots of transitions from trot to canter, but we didn’t really get a very relaxed or slow canter. But it was good for me to get a good feel of her canter and to really work on my fluidity without having to worry about Blossom running off with me. Eddy says he will try and do this with me for the next couple of days or however long it takes to teach her to stay calm in canter.