2023 Riding Journey

#1 Starting Off with Mariah

I ended last year's lessons by riding Mariah, and I started this year's lessons by riding her as well.  

Both Vivie and James came for their lesson.  Vivie was on Romeo, I don't know if it was her first time riding him for sure but I got the impression that it was. She adored him ;) And James was on Cordell. 

The stirrups on the saddle I like to use have not been 'rolled' back up.  Thus, I still struggle with adjusting them.  I chose to adjust them as if we were going to be doing some jumping, though I didn't know if we were. 

So I mounted up and just walked around for a bit.  My trainer didn't speak to me for a bit, but when she did, she told me to put my heels down, that I was grinding them into Mariah's sides.  She said that might be because my stirrups were too short, and I might have to adjust them longer.  

So I turned my heels down as far as I could manage.  When my trainer looked back to me, she said that I had taken my heels off Mariah's sides, but the effort of keeping them down was going to wear me out over the course of the ride.  So she told me to adjust them longer.  

The thing is, I was at the first whole that is punched after the holes that were already in the stirrup leathers.  If I went down, I'd have to make a pretty big leap downward, and thus my stirrups feel more like dressage length to me.  But it appeared I really didn't have a choice, and it didn't feel as long to me as I thought it would.

While I was dismounting and adjusting my stirrups, my trainer was demonstrating / talking about something new she'd discovered about Twister. (This was part of the reason why I chose to dismount to adjust my stirrups, I didn't want Mariah spooking at Twister while I was up there.)

My trainer finally noticed, discovered, whatever you want to call it, that Twister likes to look out of his left eye and doesn't like to do so out of his right eye.  This is not because he has vision problems, but somehow he has developed this habit, this preference, of looking out of his left eye.

Part of how she figured this out was with the change of direction exercise when she ground-works him.  If she asks him to step one way with his forehand, where he can look out of his left eye, he does it smoothly and fluidly like he should, with his whole body in alignment.  But if she asks him to step the other way, where he would have to look with his right eye to see where he was to go, it's harder for him.  He'll either turn his head so he can see his way with his left eye, or he'll literally just not look and hope he gets it right.  My trainer worked him with that change of direction exercise for like, half an hour, and not once did he look out of that right eye.

Another thing that tipped my trainer off about this was that she got to go watch some high level show jumping.  One of the horses there only has one eye.  On turns to jumps that, normally, he'd be looking for out of the eye that he doesn't have, he had to turn his head quite far in order to see the jump, and my trainer recognized this was something that Twister was doing.  Only Twister has a working eye that he can look out of! 

So, my trainer has started working with this. She can't do much in the saddle, but on the ground she can do more.  So she's started asking him to turn his forehand so that he has to look with his right eye, but she'll be right next to him, and she'll gently cup her hand over his left eye so he can't see out of it (or she might use the flag to cover up that eye).  And she just keep as him to turn with that eye covered, and thus he can't look with that left eye.  This forces him to start looking out of that right eye, and she'll reward him once he starts doing so.

In fact, right as she was demonstrating this, she asked him to turn his forehand without covering his left eye, and he chose to look out of that right eye.  So she immediately rewarded him for that by taking him out of the arena and tying him up at the hitching post for a break.