She Stretches!!

Had a lovely ride with Rhapsody today. Nice because instructor D was there and she isn't so sure Rhapsody is all that great so I was hoping we would look halfway decent!

I tried something new today. I've been riding on a very light contact but last time Rhapsody went totally inverted on me, stuck her head in the air like a demented llama, forgot what "forward" meant, and I learned just what "hollow" feels like! It was awful! Today I went looking for the martingale but couldn't find it. So I purposely put a little loop in the reins and focused on my posture. I tried to only touch her mouth for steering or when she tried to break gaits, and focused on keeping my upper body tall and my shoulders back and down. We did a long walk warm-up and then moved into trot, trying to stay out of the way of instructor D's lesson. I posted steadily and tried to post my "hips through my hands," and when she sped up I tried to keep the image of riding as fast as she could move, so I wasn't tempted to touch the reins to slow her down.

The first bit was okay but nothing special. We did a couple big circles and some diagonal lines and finally were able to use the whole arena. And WAH-LAH!  I had THIS!





Well okay not really but that's what it felt like compared to what I had last time! And she kept it up! She just kept stretching down and down and down over and over, both directions.  At trot.  She has never stretched down at trot before. I praised her lavishly every time and it was just like she realized, Hey, this feels good, I should try it again! And again! And again!

We did two or three laps of the arena in mostly-all-stretchy-ish trot. She would pull her head up a bit to look at spooky things, then drop her nose down again. And this with nothing special. No martingale, no neck stretcher, no nothing. I had her on a simple full-cheek snaffle and the Western saddle. That's all. It was awesome! After all that I asked her to walk, then stop (she's also starting to get the seat signals for down transitions, yay!), hopped off, and gave her lots of scratches and pets. She earned her grain tonight! What a good girl!