October 25, 2006: Lesson Learned, To My Chagrin

Several lessons, actually. One is that when Quila shows a sudden and/or unexpected change in behavior, rather than getting upset with her and/or our partnership, I really should know by now to give her the benefit of the doubt. Yes, she has been whacko in the past, and a year-and-a-half ago, behavior such as she’d exhibited at the show might have been par for the course, but we’d worked our way past that. She knows what’s expected of her now, trusts me, and tries hard--the rushing isn’t an attempt to get it over with quickly, before she gets into trouble (it used to feel like she went into a panic and just couldn’t think straight so was just trying to rush through it, throwing out whatever she could think of as quickly as she could without taking the time to listen to my aids). Since the show, after her masseuse returned, she got much better to ride though--really, quite a dramatic improvement--and her issues localized to her poll. I had the vet look at her last week, and we had what in medicine I would call a “positive chandelier sign”--she reared when she was touched there. Oh, my! Inflammation of the atlanto-occipital joint. She’s since been injected, and is better, but the surrounding soft-tissue soreness lingers (from holding/protecting herself). Yesterday’s ride was rough, buted her last night... today was better, but still not great. We’ll just have to work through this. She’s trying, though. And she had extra massages last week, and will again this week, and possibly next. They help A LOT... Barbara, her masseuse, has a wonderfully healing touch.

Professor Facet had more to teach me today, too. First, he said, “Thank you for riding Quila first...” since I wasn’t so stiff. It was FAR easier to ride him into the bridle and get his lovely, powerful trot, and to package that energy into something I could put to use... practicing transitions. And in working on the canter/trot/canter transitions, I discovered that my outside leg does matter to a classically trained horse. Once I ask for the canter (or even before, really), Quila doesn’t really care what the heck the outside leg is doing. I realized that she cues off the inside leg and the seatbone, and I could be an amputee, have two outside legs, or be dancing a jig with the outside leg for all it mattered to her... Facet cares, though, and he cares deeply. If the outside leg stays back, firmly back, he will canter (he doesn’t cue off it, but he needs it in addition to the cue). If I put it back to ask, but don’t hold it there (which I have a tendency to do when asking for the right lead canter), he decides that I must be a fickle female and have changed my mind about cantering, and the energy that was about to lift me into canter fizzles into nothingness. Jürgen yelled at me today for letting my outside leg come forward in the canter depart once, so I began to pay attention... and sure enough, now that I’ve fixed:
a) my errant right seat bone that sometimes floated in space
b) my errant left shoulder that wanted to lag behind, I now need to pay attention to
c) my errant left leg that wants to do its own thing in the right lead canter.

It would seem that if I can keep those body parts under control, however, I can get the right lead canter depart at will now, from either walk or trot, and that I can continue in canter for as long as I like. Yippee! Another lesson or two of packaging Facet’s powerful trot like I did today, and proving that I’ve managed his canter, and I’ll be on to working on things he WANTS to do... like shoulder-in, travers and the other stuff I’ve been itching to do. He’s been itching to do it, too... Today, I turned up center-line and angled back towards B to change rein, and he was SURE we were going to do half pass. He stayed bent for me, and was all set to do it, then I felt him sigh... “Oh, darn... those aren’t half pass aids are they? Fine. We’ll do more regular trot then.” The only reason I’d ridden that line is that all the other “change rein” patterns were getting old, and it seemed like a perfectly reasonable way to add a change in the routine. I hadn’t meant to get his hopes up.