"He'll have an awesome medium"

Do you remember me telilng you about the above comment from a GP rider/judge who a friend of mine also has lessons with? I wondered at the time, when Jazz could only just about produce a couple of vaguely lengthened strides, how on earth she formed that view, that one day his medium trot would be "awesome". I still don't understand how she knew, but the combination of the hock injections, the glucosamine/MSM daily medication and a top notch surface to ride on and it's clear that she is right. Jazz is fast on the way to producing said "awesome" medium trot.

Interestingly, he does it better on the 30m side than the 40m side, as if having "enough" but not too much space makes him sit down and punch out his front feet more, before checking back to collected trot for the corner. Best of all is that he is clearly excited by discovering this new ability and sits in collected trot begging for the instruction to extend, and when he gets it he really goes for it. We have a true medium now, which I am working on for clearer rythmn and better balance. Once I have that I will ask for more for extension. This is  stunning work, a good 25% better than he was doing a month ago.

Ace was quieter again today than he was yesterday, so he is coming back to an equilibrium after all the upset of having the arena built. We did some pretty good trot leg yield in preparation for elementary tests next spring. He is having some trouble with a forward walk/trot transition, where he tends not to properly commit himself to going forward. I went into big circles in the middle of the arena to get it there, and when he did finally cotton on to what I needed, the trot was shockingly good quality. Elevated, forward, seeking the contact equally into both reins, with a big punch in every stride. Again, about a 20% improvement on anything that he was capable of before the new arena went in.

Talking of the arena, SH fixed a tow-hook to the sit-upon lawnmower that he bought himself last year and I used it to tow the grader and grade the surface for the first time. It was almost as much fun as riding. The rubber seemed to me to be thicker in some areas than others, so I spent an hour wheelbarrowing thick bits to thinner bits before it all gets trodden in and it's too late to do it. We have also painted the kicker boards dark green and sprayed the white limestone drainage green too, to prevent it being obvious how much bigger in size it is when people on the main road look down at the house.

If I have less to say tomorrow I'll tell you the latest on Radar and bitting, because the cherry roller was not the end of our problems! We had a great hack today though, a ride that has always taken me about 90 minutes to do on every other horse I have done it on. Radar did it for the first time today and we were back in 65 in spite of the fact that I felt we had taken it in quite a relaxed fashion :-)

C

 ps It's surprising what you can get used to and count as normal, isn't it? A friend of mine was watching the video of Jazz working on the new arena, the one with Buttie in. She commented on Jazz attempting to run through my hands across the diagonal. Then he stopped at the gateway and when asked to move on, refused. This is normal for him. He ignored a nudge with the spurs completely, again normal. I flicked him with the whip and he lashed out a hind leg; normal. I clipped him with the whip for doing that (still with hand on reins) and he kicked out with both hind legs; normal. I cracked him for doing that and he bucked; normal. I whacked him, hand off reins now, and he walked on nicely, guess what? -  normal. This is just such normal Jazz that I had not even realised it was odd until I heard my friend exclaiming what a bad boy he is :-)