Day Three - Benefiting from Lessons Learned

Lying in bed last night, I was thinking about the first day of evaluation and what I had learned that I could take into the second day to make it better. The thing that really jumped out at me was that because I was so concerned about starting the evaluations at the time John Barr said they were to start, I hadn't taken the time I needed to warm Sonny up. This was a problem in both sessions but particularly during the afternoon's riding session where Sonny was much more forward than usual and as a result, I didn't have the confidence that I needed to canter. So my strategy going into day two was to take whatever time I needed to warm Sonny up, even if it meant I didn't get to some of the evaluation tasks. In my mind, doing fewer tasks better would be better than doing more tasks not so well.
Day two was all about liberty (playing with Sonny on the ground without a halter and lead line) and finesse (riding with contact, or the more traditional English style riding). I've only been doing liberty with Sonny for the past six months and I haven't even started studying finesse so my expectation for these sessions weren't all that high but I was really surprised by how well we did.
In the morning's session, I was helped by starting with some of the easier liberty tasks. At the first station I went to, I had to get Sonny to stand on a tarp for seven seconds and then I had to put the tarp on his back and have him stand still for seven seconds. He performed beautifully and that gave me confidence for going on to the other tasks. There were several times that I stopped short of the standard for level four because I was afraid that Sonny would choose to leave me if I pushed him too hard. Most of the time, those decisions meant that I wasn't as far away from him as the standard required when doing the task but I still felt it was the right decision and the evaluators were very supportive. We didn't manage to canter in the circle and he didn't jump the barrels although he did squeeze between them when I created a small space but at least he didn't leave me during those tasks. He also had trouble maintaining gait in the circle and I could only get him to walk with me when we played the "stick to me" game (level four standard would be walk, trot and canter which I am still working to get with him on line) but all in all, we did well.

The afternoon session didn't start out very well. The afternoon was stinking hot and humid and it took me a long time to saddle Sonny so I had just gotten out to the field when the tasks were scheduled to start. But I was sticking to my "get a good warm up" strategy and I just rode off into a corner and started to ride. Our warm up didn't go perfectly but after about 20 minutes, I deemed us ready to go and went to my first assigned station. Finesse riding is all about precision so the first task was to get Sonny to put each of his feet, one at a time, on a small plastic disc in the ring. I managed to get Sonny to put both of his front feet on the disc but I couldn't really his rear feet and I don't think I got him to place them correctly. At the second station we were to do three canter to walk transitions. This was something I hadn't managed to do the first day when were doing the freestyle riding and I really wanted to complete this task today, but the evaluator was bringing three students into the small round pen at the same time and as I watched her I could just feel my anxiety level riding. So rather than give in to my nerves, I asked the evaluator if I could go into the ring alone to perform this particular test because I was a little bit nervous. She was very supportive and as a result, Sonny gave me three beautiful canter departures and we performed the canter to walk transitions with only a little stumble in one of them. That was a real confidence booster for me and we did most of the rest of the tasks reasonably well.
So overall, I would say my strategy had been reasonably successful. That isn't to say there weren't things that I could have done better but at least I didn't feel as anxious and as a result, Sonny was a lot more relaxed as well.
Tomorrow we begin the actual course work. I already know that one area I want to focus on is our squeeze game because Sonny is not showing much confidence when faced with getting in the trailer or jumping anything. I'm looking forward to learning new things and