Space to Answer

March 28 Ride Report

Every Monday, unless there is something significant happening that can’t be rescheduled, I go to the barn. This is an intentional choice. I’m setting the tone for my week by making something that is important to my mental health a priority.

Often, these aren’t my best rides of the week. Between my tween’s sports and gas prices, I haven’t been making the trip to the barn on the weekends. And Elf is really a horse that does best with as much consistency as possible. So, I go into our Monday rides with very modest goals – rhythm, connection and forward.

March is closing with a distinctly summer-like feel, so my afternoon ride – timed to end so I could handle school pick up on the way home – was warm. This month we went straight from the full rotation of winter blankets to 1 week of light sheets to full fly gear. Elf despises bugs (have you picked up the diva-ness yet?) so fly sheets and boots reduce hives and stomping while creating a much more relaxed horse. When I rolled up at 1 pm, he’d been out since 9 am and had been standing at his gate waiting to be returned to his stall since at least 11. Elf doesn’t particularly care for nature unless the grazing is fabulous.

On the plus side – he was definitely ready to come in and be pampered a bit.

Since we moved to Texas in August 2021, I done the majority of my riding in the morning just after school drop off. The school is about half way on my drive to the barn and combining the drives helps to cut down on that “in between” time in the car. Elf, being a creature of habit, appreciates that consistency. He’s always strongly objected to working during feeding time, and always riding in the morning expanded that “no work zone” of his to anytime between coming in from turnout at 130pm to feeding time at 3 pm.

While I don’t mind avoiding work while feed is poured, he has to work even when there are distractions. So, I’ve shifted my schedule to ride in the afternoons 2 days a week and do school pick up on the way home. Same driving time savings and a little less predictability for Elf’s brain.

Letting Your Horse Answer The Question

Between it being a Monday and an afternoon ride, I knew that our work was going to focus on basics. Elf was nicely forward from the beginning of our ride this time but pretty quickly he showed that he was feeling stiff in his shoulders and neck – which he first shows by not giving to the left hand.

After our walk warm up, that stiffness was immediately and clearly apparent with every change of direction. I alternated between serpentines, big figure eights and leg yields from the quarter line to center line. To the right, Elf was reasonably responsive with a little reminder to bring the shoulder in the leg yield. To the left? Not so much.

My brain immediately started running through all of the potential causes of pain that might be driving this other than his normal. But, none were particularly apparent and he was working out of it as we went. So, for whatever reason, he was a little stiffer than normal and our ride needed to focus on him feeling better.

As I stare down my 39th birthday, there are plenty of days that I feel stiffer than normal, too.

It was around this point in the ride when the question Pati Pierucci asked me during my clinic with her in November – Am I giving Elf enough time to answer the questions I’m asking?

In the clinic, Pati was mostly talking about when I was for a transition. Here, though, it also applied to me asking Elf to bend through his body and soften his jaw for a more productive connection. He was stiff, it was a little harder for him than normal, and he needed more time to give me what I was asking for than typical.

I went back to 2 20m circles. After getting a really good working trot and making sure that Elf was listening to my half-halt, I asked for a trot-walk transition and changed the bend at the walk before trotting the rest of the second circle. Switching this up gave me a little more time to be very clear with what I was asking and making sure that I wasn’t blocking Elf’s change of bend by being off balance or tense through my shoulders. That gave me much more solid ground on which to finish the ride.

After 40 minutes with lots of transitions and Texas’s 87 degrees, we were both sweaty so a easy walk down the driveway and around the turnouts rounded out the day. Even after 30 years of riding, it always comes back to two things: correct basics and putting the horse first. Those two things are always the right answer.