Friday July 25th

Finally after almost 3 weeks without a lesson I was able to get a lesson in!!!! I was so excited to finally get onto a horse again.
I took a private lesson and rode Balley, an Arabian, that is 21 years old but is still frisky for his age.

I have never ridden him before but he was alot of fun and am actually hoping to ride him again. He is much smaller than Sophie and is much more sensitive to the aids so that was actually nice for me. Didn't seem to sweat quite as much ;)
We started out with some leg yields, then trotting rectangles, then some figure 8's, which for some reason I really struggle with. I know what an 8 looks like in my head but when it comes to doing one on a horse I really have a hard time. Also worked on keeping Balley constantly turning and keeping a nice bend. I had a breakthrough and finally starting listening to my trainer when she said OPEN your OUTSIDE rein! Oh, you mean that outside rein??? So you want me to open my outside rein, keep my inside shoulder down, change diagonals in the middle of the 8, keep my ankles down, and pull my inside rein a little and post properly???? Oh is that it? Easy....
When I finally started doing that he started to bend a bit more easily and things looked a bit better.

Then on to some cantering... Balley pulls a bit forward when going into the canter so that took a few tries on my part to understand and give him some more rein. Once we got going he had a great canter, very smooth and light. My trainer said my canter looked great, very relaxed and that my hands were very soft. A great compliment in my book.

On another note, I am leaving my current job and going to start working at Bit of Britain late next month. I am going to take over some of the buying responsibility that John Nunn, the owner, currently takes care of and I will start doing some business analysis/planning for them. I am quite excited as I am hopefully going to be able to merge my passion for horses with my experience as a buyer. So as that job gets started I'll keep everyone up to date on that and maybe give some tips/advice/coming soon info on tack!

So I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that no storms hit us on Wednesday...