Winter's tale

Tia is fine today. The leg is tight and the foot is cool. She's not quite sound in trot but she did some really nice walk work. I had her long and swinging, and while she was doing it I was musing on how much she has changed in 11 months.When I bought her she wouldn’t stand still to be mounted and now she is rock solid. Her walk was tense and short and now it’s long and languid. She wouldn’t stop to get off and now she has a lovely halt. And her lateral work today was lovely, especially the travers, which had a superb bend in it. She was a good girl.

Jazz – well he did well until I asked for a little walk to canter. I know that he can do it because I saw him do it with Ran’s stable jockey. But he doesn’t like to do it on a right lead. In fact at one point he counter cantered a 10 metre bend in perfect balance. VERY impressive for a 4 year old, but not what we wanted, thankyou!

He was being quite boisterous in his resistance to cantering left, so I stopped and thought it through. I reasoned that he is coming up to 5, the "worst year" for behaviour. And that he uses his strength to try and bully me when he doesn’t want to do something. And that if I didn’t get on top of this now, he could get the better of me this spring when he has new grass in his belly. So I decided to keep going. Every time he used his strength to evade the aid by rushing or turning, I stopped him, however much rein power that took. Then I set him back into a nice walk, and asked again. If he gave me the wrong lead, I stopped him gently if I could. I got to a point where he wasn’t rushing off but he wasn’t taking canter either and I realised I was wriggling around trying to get him to "go". So I said to myself "this is his problem, not yours. Sit quiet and still, with your weight to the inside, put the aid on gently and if he doesn’t take it, tap him gently with the whip". Well, after about six more tries, that worked and we got some lovely balance walk/canter transitions with a few strides of canter and down again.

There are some interesting things about schooling Jazz. He clearly doesn’t find much that we do physically difficult. What he does find difficult is the mental effort of trying to listen for what my next instruction might be. I do lots of quick-change stuff (so that he doesn't have to concentrate for ages when no instructions are arriving) and I give him a break every 15 minutes at least because of this. On the stretching front, he will now stick his nose on the floor right out in front of him if you release the reins in walk after 15 minutes of work. I’ve no idea why he wants to do it now when he didn’t 3 months ago, but I figure it must mean that we have been doing the right things with him meanwhile.

Zippy had an all-over groom today and was a sweetie. The work I did dropping his heels recently has paid off, and his feet now slope outwards from the coronet to the floor like they should, instead of being almost straight like they were – just a matter of getting the angles right. I plan to sit on him soon, he's getting stronger all the time. A few days ago he was standing with all four feet pointed slightly outwards and now he is straight.

It has snowed tonight and they are all transfixed by it – and VERY suspicious of walking on it. Surely Tia’s seen snow before at nearly 8? But she’s the worst! It was lovely, and quite funny, watching them puff and blow and get excited about it. Just like a bunch of 3 year old children :-)

C