Have you often wondered why we do this day after day for five minutes in the ring. I have several times. But today, I had an Aha moment after my lesson. It was such a great feeling I said to myself “THIS IS WHY I RIDE!”
It was a beautiful day 25* outside it was just Jan and I training. I had the ring to myself and we were working on everything from the PSG and planning to run through the test but as we were warming up we got carried away with perfecting everything. Vitall rose into himself. We did this fantastic pirouette excersise of coming onto the diagonal really collecting on the spot where the pirouette would be for a few strides then coming out slowly going forward to a flying change doing this a few times either side. Then we took that and did the highly collected steps and turned that into a working pirouette. The feeling was effortless I just sat there, held him with my legs and gave in the hand and just simply turned… it truly felt like ballet.
Then we worked on the changes which have been a struggle for a few days now. Vitall has the hang of tempis now and he has started to get a bit tense and run in between the changes and not keep a consistent tempo. Today, though, that was not the case. He was right on my aids and each change came natural and in balance.
The trot work took the cake for me. We worked on short very cadenced passage steps into half steps thus improving his natural cadence for “normal trot”. It felt so light underneath me. It was like we were floating in each step. We were working on keeping the passage trot on a 8m volte then changing his trot back to normal. That made his trot even stronger with expression and the Volte to half pass was effortless. It’s these moments in riding that makes dressage what it is. It is the feeling of you get that is so rewarding no matter what score you get or what anyone else says its when you and your horse feel on top of the world. Which today I did.
