Lesson #203: Seeing the Curve

Saturday's early morning lesson had me working on more jumping but with +ADW. Similar, to the Thursday lesson but two friends joined to watch the lesson because I'm hoping (fingers crossed!!) that at least one of them would decide to take up lessons too. I'm not normally a particularly social person and I enjoy yoga because I can go at my pace and know that I'm my own competitor, but sometimes do find that riding can be a wee bit lonely. ADW rides with me but let's face it, he isn't as "into it" as I (and some of you!) are. So it's nice when adult students join classes--that's what my current Thursday nights are for!

Anyway, the lesson we do is a jumping lesson with J and we spend less time than recently, on the flat. Ariel has been a bit pokey and one of the things I struggle with is picking up the canter when I ask. Sometimes Ariel flat out refuses to move even though I've told her to; it takes a more severe method of reinforcement in those cases. We get right into the jumping. I take a jump (red) on the diagonal but close to the rail and have trouble 'seeing' the ride-in. I don't ride the corner as deep as I should and sometimes come in at a much more gradual curve which leads me to be more handsy.

Totally not drawn to scale... hahaha...

There is still a struggle to get the ride-in just right but it isn't miserable and so we do move onwards to adding more jumps to the course until I ride all the jumps in the arena. I try my best to sit back up once I get through a jump because I have literally ridden more and more forward as the course goes on and as we all know, getting your centre of gravity forward and up is a great way to set yourself up to land on your face.

I didn't mention yet... that ADW is now cantering multiple jumps too!! He's riding a steady gelding who's a great teacher!