Day Sixteen - Pushing Too Hard

Sonny ran away from me on Sunday. I had been asking him to jump a log. He was moving with exuberance and jumping with a lot of elevation. and I was really excited by the change in him from our first day at the Parelli Center when I could hardly get him to step over a log. I wondered if I could incorporate jumping the log into a circling game so I asked him to circle me at a trot and them moved the circle so he had to jump the log. He did it twice and then looked over at me. I probably should have stopped but I was so pleased with the way he was going that I got greet and asked him to continue. But Sonny had had enough and he said, "I'm out of here" in the only way he could. He took off.. It happened so quickly that I couldn't hold onto the lead line and the next thing I knew, he was galloping toward the hills.
Trudging across the playground after him, I knew that I had pushed him too hard and caused the run away. Sonny is a pretty confident horse but he can get unconfident when he is learning something new and for the past two weeks, a lot of what we had been doing was new. At home we work on one new thing at a time until we have mastered it, but here at Fast Track, we see something new almost every day. As a result, I had been pushing Sonny pretty hard and it was beginning to show in our relationship.
When I finally caught up to Sonny, he looked at me as if to say, "Oh, are you here too?" and then he came right over to me. Horses live in the moment and they can be very forgiving but I knew that if I wanted to maintain our relationship, I was going to have to be careful about how much pressure I was putting on Sonny during our sessions.
So this morning, I was determined to put our relationship first when I got Sonny ready for our time together. Things started our reasonably well. I took Sonny over to the trailer and loaded him from the fender. This elicited a "nice job" from one of the coaches and I was feeling pretty good when I took Sonny to one of the round pens to play. I wanted to try playing a circling game with an object to see if I could be a little more provocative for Sonny. The idea I had was to put a barrel about three feet from the rail and see if I could teach Sonny how to stop at the barrel when I asked. He seemed to be getting the idea, so I decided to add a second barrel but while I was positioning the barrel, he took off again. Of course, he couldn't really go far but he clearly didn't want to stay with me. Was I putting too much pressure on him? I'm not really sure but I did think that I need to put still more effort into maintaining our relationship.
To prepare for our afternoon session of precision riding, our coaches had the class create and chalk out a 20 meter by 40 meter precision pen and then led us through a series of walking simulations without horses. The session ran long and our lunch time was cut short so that we could get our horses out to the arena. Because we didn't have much time to get our horses ready, I was late getting Sonny out to the arena and when I did get there, he was upset by some new equipment that was in the area. I actually had to get off of him and walk him around so he could look at things. By the time I was able to remount, we had missed most of the first of the four focus groups and I could tell that I was feeling a little frustrated. Knowing that Sonny would be able to feel my frustration, I took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on maintaining my connection with him.
All in all the past two days have been enlightening for me. As much as I want to learn all I can while I am here at the Parelli Center, the most important thing to me is to make sure that my relationship with Sonny remains solid. For then rest of our time here, I am going to work hard at putting our relationship first. If I do that, I'm sure the rest