At last!

At last yesterday I got to ride, and it was a ge-lor-y-yus afternoon with no wind and a bright blue sky.


Radar and I had a lovely hack, just about in time because it was clear to me that he has lost a fair bit of fitness since we last hunted.  He was happy, as forward as he always is, and we enjoyed the countryside and the fresh air.

Then I took Ace out on a shorter hack, because the arena was a bit too frozen for me to think that he would be safe on it if he did one of his sudden spins  that he can be partial to :-)   He was very good. Probably better than he has ever been on a hack. He even produced "that" trot which he did last week on the arena. Now I have to say that is nerve-wracking on the road, because he is powering forwards and if he decided to spin at his shadow he'd come down. The alternative, though, is to stifle his glorious paces, and I don't want to do that, so I just kept a firm contact and carried on. I'm hacking out in the air jacket for just that reason, to give me the confidence to ride him forwards to prevent him spooking. As it was, he barely spooked at all, except once at a bunch of sheep who were all crowding around one of those feeders that farmers put a whole big round bale into. It was fair enough though, two sheep had got into the top of it, and thirty were milling round the sides and it did look very peculiar.

Jazz is now my official superstar. The one I can trust to work safely even if the arena surface is far from perfect. I had only a circle in the middle of about 25 metres in size to work on, the rest was frozen underneath with a slippery layer of melting snow on the top. I did a couple of circles of trot on each rein, then asked him to lengthen in a thin strip of clear area 35 metres long. He did, immediately. I turned a 5m half circle and did the same back in the other direction, again getting proper lengthening. I popped him into canter and brought the circle down and got about a 5m circle on the left rein, but on the right I swear I got two strides of canter pirouette or something very, very close to it. Then I asked for a half pass down the 30m strip to a flying chage and came straight back on the other rein to the same in reverse. He got both changes with the lightest of aids and I had a grin on my face wider than the Mersey (for you Americans the Mersey would be a stream , for us it's a biiig river with a famous song written about the ferry :-) .   That was just in the time most horses would take to warm up, but he'd done all I wanted so I brought  him in and gave him his tea.

It's another lovely day again today but everywhere is frozen and unsafe at the moment where the snow has melted and then frozen again overnight. I'm hoping the arena melts in the sun by this afternoon, I want to get some serious work into Ace now that he is growing up. I must measure him, he seems to be huge!

C