Warm It Up Kris!

I'm about to! Warm it up Kris-'cause that's what I was born to do!

Sorry...for whatever reason I have a plethora of random hip-hop lines (all from the 90's, sometimes 80's) in my brain, and they come out occasionally. This edition brought to you by Kris Kross. You're welcome.

This post is more for me than anything, and those lines of genius above really do relate, I promise. I rode Miles today and it was nice and cool, just perfect. He's still being fussy about bugs, which are basically non-existent at this point, so I was done indulging him. He was sprayed to the gills, he had his fly bonnet on-enough with the stomping and head swishing. I put him to work pretty quickly after mounting, with no lunging. He was sluggish and totally ADD. I thought, what the hell, I KNOW it takes this horse a long time to warm up some days, whether it's physically or mentally or both. So, I let him be less than forward (within reason). I let his head turn this way and that, as long as his body stayed on the rail. When he lowered his head and started listening, we'd do a circle. In the meantime, I focused on me-elbows, hands, heels, looking UP (something I think I've gotten bad about), shoulders, all of it.

Our first canter depart sucked hard-he swerved like a tool at a random object next to the arena we had passed 10 times that day already. I put him in a circle and we picked up the canter again, did a couple more circles, and went back to the trot.

Ahhhhh, and there was my boy. Finally forward, ready to work, connected to my hand, listening to my leg, all of it. I let him walk on a loose rein to give us both a break, and when I picked the contact up again he gave me a nice swinging walk (something that is very hard for him and that I haven't devoted nearly enough time to). I squeezed and there was the nice trot again-a little rushy at first, it became lovely and easy to post quite quickly (funny how that works). We did some circles and changes of direction, all while I avoided the very hard and very deep parts of the arena just to try to keep our awesome rhythm going, and it seemed to work.

All in all, considering this was our second real ride in awhile, I was a very, very happy girl. I like that even when he's being less than great to ride, he's SAFE, and that's the time I can use to work on my own issues (of which I have many). And what do you know, the better I ride, and the looser his muscles become, the better our ride as a whole becomes. Funny, that:)

He was SO adorable afterward too. I can tell when we've really connected sometimes by the way Miles interacts with me when I get off. He remains engaged and interested, instead of just glad to be done and go back to the barn.

I finally got to see Buck the movie this weekend, and one of his big lines (which you all have probably already heard) is that our horses are our mirrors. We don't always like what we see.

Dang if it isn't the very best feeling when you do, though.