Originally Posted 2/9/2019
The weather has been perfect this week, but everyday I planned to ride or work horses, something interrupted my plans. I decided that today, come what may, I was going to work my horses! I started with Mardi.
Mardi is my 13 year old (going on 3) OTTB mare. She is your stereotypical mare thoroughbred: opinionated, easily spooked, and far too athletic for her own good. By this I mean, she can contort her body more like an overgrown cat than any horse I’ve ever known. Needless to say, this can make for interesting times with her. One thing is for sure, she pushes me to be a better horsewoman all the time.
I am happy to report that she was exquisitely behaved during grooming (she loves to be groomed and it took a while as she was pretty dirty) and our work session. The groundwork consisted of walk, trot and canter, lots of direction changes (this helps keep her brain on me), hindquarter yielding, desensitization, and join up, all done at liberty. After the liberty work, we also worked on the lead with “drawing the hindquarters” (yielding hindquarters moves them away, drawing them brings them closer). We have worked this several times on the left side (for mounting purposes) and will travel haunches in when on the rail and will also swing fully around to me when asked. We discovered today, though, that the right side is a bit trickier, particularly due to my lack of coordination in that direction! We finished up our session with a nice hand walk in the grass and a snack.
Goals for next session: Relaxation (always!), drawing quarters to right, and not being buddy sour during turnout.