Armchair ride

I had a really lovely little hack with Armchair, oh I am sorry, I mean Radar :-)   He is a wonderful hack these days, so relaxed but forward at the same time. It's the first time he's been out for about a month I think, and he really enjoyed himself.

Ace was a superstar. I decided to do transitions on the arena edge. I knew he would spook at the barrels when it got more difficult, but I set out to ignore the spooks and continue with the transitions. The strategy is to get him to keep  listening to me even when he is intending to spook.  It is also an exercise he needs to correct one of his problems, which is anticipation once you have repeated an exercise a couple of times.

So first of all we did walk 10m trot 30m walk 10m, with the transitions exactly at the 10m markers, not before and not after. That went very well. I found the best approach with the barrels was to  keep his head looking at them and let his body swing out if he insisted. If I tried to stop him looking at them or moving his body away from them, he upped the evasion a notch higher.

Then we repeated the exercise with trot 20m and canter 30m, again ------   rig
ht o  - you have no idea how difficult it is to type this with two  kittens rolling on your keyboard :-)  -------  right on the markers.

We finished with 10m circles in trot and spiralling in to 10m circles in canter and he
really tried hard and got some beautiful bend without losing the activity of the pace. He's also now able to get very deep into his corners, and all the transitions were in response to the lightest aids. Except for canter left, when he was thinking more or the barrels than me to start with and I had to flick him with the whip to bring his mind back to his work. But he did bring his mind back to me, and that was brilliant.

I promise some video soon now the weather is OK to ask SH to stand outside and take it. Unfortunately it's also now OK to change tyres on vehicles and get the lorry MOT ready, so I'll have to find a moment to tear him away from that.

C.