The Weekend Edition: lesson recap and XC viewing

So this past weekend started off with an ice cream social at work. The upper management handed out ice cream bars (it’s-its, Drumsticks, Reeses bars, Magnums, etc) to show their appreciation for the work everyone does so that was pretty cool. I however did not take part as I’m trying to be less fluffy; I had a bowl of watermelon cubes instead. If there’s one thing I hate about my job though, its all the damn free food that they give out. 

Mmmmm…..ice cream…

On Thursday at Cross Fit I had a PR of a 120lbs back squat which was pretty awesome. Whoo! 

No, seriously…where’s the tequila?!

However, leg day made my lesson that night a bit more trying since my legs felt a bit noodly, but we ended up having a great lesson. A lot of what we are working on is building Spot’s overall strength and really sticking our circle dimensions as Spot doesn’t like traveling straight all the time. We have been working on bringing her shoulders over her hind end, especially on her left lead, because she naturally swings her shoulders out and ends up being over bent in the neck. This means that I need to have a  more solid outside rein to bring her shoulders straight. Having cones set up to mark the circle tangent points has really helped us and Trainer was quite impressed with the progress we’ve made in the 2 weeks since we saw her last. Our canter is finally becoming more round and our gaits are so much more even! I’ve been counting our strides/steps in each quarter of the circle at the trot and canter and they match at both gaits! We are aiming for 5 strides in each quarter. We’re hitting our circle points that are along the wall, but our points away from the wall are still a bit wide so we slowly have to bring those in. 

The smaller blue dots are where I’m hitting the circle now, so I need to march those in ~2 feet more to be on the circle. I’m hitting the green dots perfectly which makes sense bc I get support from the wall.

Who knew a circle could be so difficult!! 

We also worked on our leg yield and walk pirouette. Spot is not a fan of the lateral movement and she gets a bit hot and frustrated if we really school it, so we’ve had to work at it in bite size pieces. The walk pirouette has gotten a lot softer and the size of our pirouette circle is smaller and more consistent. Yay! Our leg yield is coming along but I end up getting stiff during the movement bc I’m trying to micromanage every thing instead of feeling the movement and being relaxed but its getting there. 

On Saturday the Hubs (I’m going to call him A from now on) and I went out to an Event show in our area so he could watch some real live XC. 

My fav jump on the course

The XC course doubles as a Combined Driving course sometimes.

He has been taking consistent riding lessons for about a year now and he’s interested in jumping and XC.  To be completely honest, XC scares the beejezus out of me but A is a crazy good mountain biker so I think the jumps and tricky lines appeal to him. I asked him what he thought as Training Level went by and he said “Looks pretty fun…the course could use more banked corners though.” 😛 

I finally got pictures of my tack so I’ll be joining in on Auf der Autobahn’s Tack Blog Hop here tomorrow!