All of the things.

I am finding that there are definite pros and cons to boarding but I will go into more detail on those in another post.  My life has been filled with lessons, dressage and jumping, schooling and the cake was Saturday XC schooling.  Steady has been getting steadily better and better.  The leaser has been learning him and seems to be getting along well.  I have a feeling this year is going to be the best yet.  In short I am sold on biomechanics dressage.  It is the most detailed training method I have ever experienced and gets real results.  But that too will be in another post or series of posts.  So much going on and not having Steady at home has made for a huge challange of balancing my time and responsibilities.  Blogging has had to take the back seat.  It is kinda sad because there is so much to say but I just can't.  I am trying to type out notes after lessons and even that is hard.  I will just give a quick summary of the goings on of The Dude and I.  Here are a few pictures of the place he is temporarily residing. (I hate calling it his home because his home is with me)

My adorable Macy walking Steady into the barn.

He is in pasture 4 with 4 other geldings.  It is about a 4 acre beautiful rolling, green pasture surrounded by woods and trails.  But it is a long ass walk out there to get him ;)

Pasture 3

Steady walking back out to his buddies after a nice ride.  This is his pasture that he spends about 12 hours every day in.

My lovely big guy!

After several lessons in biomechanics I finally got some of the best movement out of Steady I have ever had.  It was 5 strides of pure awesomeness.  Yep, I said 5 strides.  It may not seem like much but to me it means that we finally started to put all the pieces together and that more is to come. 

Here is a random picture of my brother, husband and daughter.  My brother downed a 40ft maple in our yard.  But the relevance here is that, do you see that huge limb?  Yeah that is going in my field as a XC jump!  I will defintely post when it is finished.

We worked on simple changes last Thursday, successfully!  Big stuff considering the explosions I would get just a few weeks ago even asking for the canter.

My 8 year old snapped this during our ride.

Saturday my friend and I went XC schooling.  It was quite awesome!  Especially considering that last minute XC schooling was something I have never done.  Steady really struggled when my friend (C) would canter off to jump a few jumps.  The race in him has definitely not disappeared.  That was a little frustrating.  But we jumped ditches, up banks, down banks and all sorts of other stuff.  Nothing over Novice height simply because he was too hot.  So we became focused on not running off afterwards over even the tiniest things.  He got better and I had to remind myself it was his first time out this year and not get too frustrated.  I was unsure how he would handle things since it had been quite some time since he had seen any of it.  Nothing I presented him to was an issue at all.  He would seriously jump anything I put in front of him.  I wish I could have put more in front of him but I had to scale back because, though the jump was there, the control was not.  So I took it down a notch.  He seriously wanted to jump SO badly.  All of the jumps, all of them.  I was cantering around just concentrating on getting a nice rhythm, with control and steering.  I came down a lane that there was a massive stairstep jump.  I would say the thing was every bit of 4 ft.  We were coming at it on the back side.  I was concentrating on getting Steady's canter nice and I felt the slightest movement and knew he had locked onto that jump!  OMG Steady, we are NOT jumping, just canter.  I made my first attempt about 10 strides out to deter him.  I pulled him of a bit and thought that would do it.   5 strides out I felt it again.  Shit Steady, NO!  I attempted to pull him off again with NO luck.  2 strides out I pulled an OH SHIT NO and yanked him off of it and we breezed by it with only about a foot away from the edge.  Never have I felt that much determination on a horses part to jump something, never.

Needless to say I decided not to go down that lane again.  We went out into a more open space to canter a bit.  I swear to you that every damn jump we were even remotely facing in the direction of became all Steady could think about.  It could have been 70 feet away but I could feel him lock onto it so we would turn to find we were 30 ft away from another and he instantly locked onto it.  After about the 4th time I decided walking was our best bet at that point.  When we came back after that jaunt I asked my friend to get on and she showed me a few exercises to help get his mind off of the jumps.  It really worked and it was great for me to be able to see how she did it.  Though the jumping obsession he oddly developed out there was not what I wanted nor was I comfortable with, it did speak volumes as to whether or not Steady likes his job.  That horse is the bomb diggity and if only his rider could get her shit together the sky is seriously the limit with him.