Polo anyone?

I had a pretty successful training night. I rode Eli, the talkative horse in the barn that wants to be a chef or an astronomer. Eli is much more sensitive to commands than Pet, so I was able to really focus on my aid signals being correct. Laura had 4 poles on the ground as obstacles and we did quite a bit of going over these at the trot. Eli was doing a pretty good job of avoiding these, but with a little practice and assertion, we cleared this up. We again went canter each tme coming out of the obstacles. I seemed to get started well on these but wasn't closing my legs enough to keep him at the canter. Got this corrected too by the end of the night.

The fun tonight really started after the lesson. Virginia showed up to have Laura work on her near shot in polo. Virginia has 'opportunities' as far as getting more out of the tack to get these shots. This is harder than it seems since you really are leaning way over the side of the horse to do this. I watched for a while as she and Joan, another rider in the barn, did some drills to work on this. They were using foot mallets rather than full length ones to really force them to get out of their tack. Then...Laura suggested I try it out. The challenge in polo is that you have the reigns in one hand and a big mallet in the other. Thus, balance is really important and all the security I have during lessons as far as being well balanced were no longer there. So, I noticed that since I had some new things to focus on I wasn't able to over focus on the things that seem to keep troubling me in lessons: my feet being correct in the stirrup, looking ahead where I'm going rather than looking down and just paying too much attention to my balance (which usually manefested itself in that I am too tight and dependant in my tack). With polo, especially when I'm at the canter you have to do all these things, correctly, or you'll end up on the ground pretty quickly. So I think polo will be a great cross training for my jumping. I'll definitely become more confident in the saddle and in doing so be able to be more aggressive, which will be important in the pentathlon. Plus, polo is so much fun. I noticed my horse had much more energy and enthusiasm when playing polo. My guess is that it is because the horse now is as engaged in the sport as the rider. In lessons, the horse is simply doing what it is told to do, in polo it is as involved in the sport as you are...it knows that its after the ball too and is as competitive with other horses as you are with other players. I could learn to like this polo thing.

Talk to me Eli

Interesting night at the barn tonight. Laura had an animal communicator come into the barn the Friday before, so we all got to hear what the horses had on their mind. Suffice it to say, everyone was suspicious of a "horse communicator" but after the sessions, Laura was pretty convinced. Eli, the horse I rode tonight, was the talkative one I guess. Which definitely came through in my riding. According to the horse communicator, Eli wanted to be an Astronomer and/or a chef. Apparently, Eli is the one horse in the barn that eats anything he's given, so this fits him well. Eli also told the communicator that "he didn't need a bit in his mouth to teach these novices how to ride". This is definitely the attitude that we've all come to know with Eli, but once again I really felt it in the ride. It was almost as though Eli was commenting on my riding as we went along. His head was all over the place and he seemed to especially have a lot to say when I gave an unclear signal with my aids. I definitely learned a lot from Eli about balance though. As a former polo pony, he's much more sensitive to balance shifts and signals. He also was much more responsive to signals, particularly transitions from post to canter, than Pet. I look forward to riding him again.