Absolutely beautiful outside today. I decided that I would ride outside.

Frankie seemed all business today while getting groomed and tacked up. I was happy because I don’t think I was up for fighting with his ADD today.

The outdoor it was. I wanted to work on straightness, halts, and lengthening at the trot.

Frankie was ready to go. The flies were bad so he didn’t want to walk and I couldn’t blame him. So up into the trot almost immediately. I went off the rail today. Mainly to work on straightness, but also because the rail was so dug out.

The first go around was a wiggly mess. But, it improved dramatically with a little more leg. Then I started working on halts. I could get him to halt straight, not brace, but not square. Good enough. I just can’t bring myself to pick at it.

Now to some lengthening. I only worked on lengthening across the diagonal. He was really good going left to right, soft, relaxed and giving a big, strong lengthening stride. Also coming back nicely when asked. But for some reason going right to left he was awful. Tense, inverted and just going faster not lengthening. So I worked continually in the bad direction until we had a decent improvement. It still wasn’t as good, but acceptable.

The canter started amazing. Then it was just okay. Going to the left he kept throwing his haunches in. It was weird, when I would ask for the canter he would bow into my leg, still picking up the canter when asked, just drifting/bowing to the outside. I got a little pissed about it. I’m sure working off the rail was causing some of this, but he still shouldn’t be doing that. So, I finally got him to stop doing that by asking for him to dramatically move away from my outside leg before the transition. After doing that about 4 times he stayed straight. Then while cantering he kept throwing his haunches in, again to the left. Grrr. I bent him to the inside and pushed him forward two times around the ring. He finally stopped that.

Went to the right and he was a dream. Perfect. Straight. Round. Relaxed. GREAT CANTER!

To finish it off I took him down to the trot, trotted down the center line (or close to it because of the jumps) and asked for a halt and it was straight, soft, and PERFECTLY SQUARE!!

Good boy.

Then I did something stupid. I decided to go into the indoor and run through the test once just to see if anything I worked on transferred over. We did it. It was okay. Not bad at all, just not good. About equivalent to our test at Great Vista. A few not so great things, but all in all, not bad.

I wasn’t really happy with ending on that so I thought I would run through Training test B. Great idea…that is if I remembered it. About halfway through I realized I didn’t remember the rest of the test. Frankie felt me question myself and fell apart.

Grr.

Okay, now I had to run through test A one more time just to end on something decent. It was really good, well about 80% was really good, the other 20% was okay, with a crappy halt. Screw it, I shouldn’t have pushed it anyway.

Working too much on the same stuff gets old and most importantly when it’s good, it’s not good enough. We need some more exercises. I just don’t want to throw too much new, different things at him since he often reacts with tension. Since we have a bunch of events coming up I rather be bored and relaxed than interested and tense.

Ride time: 50 minutes