Sound, sound, sound

This weekend I finally carved out some time to ride the horses, which is really good because I don't have time right now lol.  This week I am leaving for 4 days and won't be able to ride either so I had to get some saddle time.  RB4 came over and we tacked up the horses and had a pretty good ride with lots of chatting.

I rode Mia first while she meandered around on the TWH.  Mia was pretty well behaved, especially compared to her last ride which was super zoomy.  She was much quieter in the bridle and pretty steady in her striding.  We started with some baby lateral walk work, in which she is getting much better, and some circle work.  I am still working on ensuring she will hold herself when going in a small circle instead of falling in on her shoulder, blowing through the outside shoulder or flat out ignoring me.  She had to get a good jab to the ribs a couple of times but she decided that it was probably best to support herself and after a few good circles, we bounded into a trot.  Her trot is so cool, it is so easy to sit back and be a passenger on her.  I can only assume it is partially due to her conformation, with her being definitely uphill I think it would be difficult to lean forward much.  It is awesome.  Her trot was pretty nice, she is moving along with a fairly low headset (which I prefer right now to help get rid of her upside down neck/underdeveloped topline) and she didn't fidget with her head much at all.  She kept a pretty steady pace, maybe tonight we will work on specifically changing our speed in the trot.

We finished up with some canter, while it isn't great the canter is coming along.  We started the bad way first, cantering to the right.  She is heavy, out of balance and fast this direction and during our last ride she gave me a slight indication of a better canter.  The first 2 times I asked for a canter she gave me the wrong lead so I put her on a very small circle and asked for the canter while coming out of the circle.  She gave me the correct lead, success!  I used a ton of rein to hold her back and with some strong leg we were able to get a semi-decent canter out of her.  It looked almost normal!  Yay us!  After a quick break we went the other direction and there was a most definite, obvious kick when I asked for the transition.  Mia got a very sharp correction in the reins and spun until her nose touched my knee while I jabbed her with my outside spur.  Very. Bad. Horse.  It was a pretty big kick too, just like when we rode in the pasture a couple of weeks ago.  After I thought she got the point across I asked again and she gave me a really nice canter.  It still required a lot of rein to keep her from plowing along but there were moments of brilliance.  More work to come, I am planning on riding her again tonight so we will see how she behaves.

The shining star really is the TWH however.  He is just amazing since coming off of injured reserve, in our last ride RB4 was gushing about how much better the TWH is moving now that his suspensory is better.  This time she rode him and she had more of the same to say about him.  She doesn't ride the same way as I do and is mostly a trail rider now so she had a hard time getting a great canter out of the TWH however she said he feels SO different from this summer.  She said he now feels like a wave that you just ride along, you can't always feel where he is in his canter because it is so smooth.  Kinda yes, kinda no but I do agree his canter is SO much better than last year.   I really do agree that he must have been slightly off for a good while because I don't know when he has felt this good. This show season is going to be awesome, I can't wait to show him off!!