Just one of those days

In the middle of a week projected to have lovely sunny warm weather, the one day of rain fell, of course, on one of my barn days. Oh well.

On Tuesday, Alyssa, Robert and I finished off the wood pile project yesterday, which made Robert happy. I moved some more stuff out of the trailer, and I rode Colonel.

He was a wild animal. I quickly realized that just letting him trot without messing with him was not going to be an option. We tried to work on transitions. I've discovered that we've made the dubious progress from pulling on the reins to bracing against the reins. One implication of this is that if I raise my hands I can hollow him out quicker than anything else I know to do. Bummer. It still works to stop him, but I'm trying to reserve it for emergencies.

I think we were out there for an hour. I experimented with lots of different things to try to help him understand what I wanted, and to try to get him to actually do it. Going away from the barn he was pretty OK. Going towards the barn he's the most hard mouthed SOB I hope I'll ever ride.

The thing I like to bear in mind about hard mouthed horses is that a hard mouth is a state of mind. You don't (hopefully) look inside their mouths and find scar tissue that renders them unable to feel what you're asking for. The way I see it its probably one or a combination of some of the following:

• He doesn't understand what I'm asking
• He doesn't respect what I'm asking
• He cant do what I'm asking (or thinks he cant)
  
• His mind is just so shot that he doesn't even realize I'm asking

Unfortunately a stronger bit wont fix any of these problems for me. Wouldn't that be nice? Anyway, I think maybe all of these things are issues to some degree. Particularly that he may not quite get it, and that he thinks he cant. Going towards the barn it may be either a respect or a mind is totally blown kind of thing.

I know he understands the leading reins. I'm pretty sure he understands the direct rein of opposition for asking for a downward transition, he just doesn't want to transition downward. I think he really has basically no idea what the indirect reins of opposition are trying to tell him. He also doesn't get the whole "slow down" concept, or maybe just doesn't respect it.

In the canter I think he believes that there are two ways to do things. Either use my hands to support his front end, or put his head way down, go fast, lean like crazy in the turns. I think the reason I get such nice unauthorized canters is that at the time, I'm trying to get him to slow down, and the whole time he's cantering, I'm asking him to stop. He uses that to help balance himself on his hind end, and voila, a sane yet out of control canter.

Clearly more experimentation is called for.