It's been super hot and humid these past few days, so I've been taking it easy on maresy-poo. Wednesday, she was sweating just standing around in her stall, so I just took her out for a relaxing hack down the road. Of course, it turned into a not-so-relaxing hack when we got attacked by a swarm of deer flies on the way back to the barn, but thankfully miss mare is pretty laid back and just dealt with it through lots of head tossing and twitching. Poor baby. I think we both came back with lots and lots of bites. I had at least 6 little welts from those damn bugs.
Yesterday was another scorcher (it doesn't help that I can't get up to the barn until the hottest part of the day). We had the easiest flat school ever. Most of it was lateral work at the walk.
Today was a bit cooler, so we did a bit more. We did LOTS of transitions from walk to trot today. Why? Whether from the heat outside or from her being in heat, she has been the tiniest been snarky in her walk to trot transitions. She hits the walk and then says "ok, we're done!". When I ask for trot again, she responds by snarking at me for awhile before complying.
Now, I don't usually ride with a whip, because she doesn't usually need one. Today, I decided to carry the dressage whip so that if she snarked, I could very firmly tell her that wasn't acceptable. Our first walk to trot transition, I put my leg on and she said "I don't want to!" So I followed that up with a little tap of the whip. The response? "Mo-om! I REALLY don't want to!" So she got a nice firm swat, which got the answer I was looking for.
The second and third transition required on tap with the whip, and after that, she was suddenly perfectly compliant. We had lots of very nice walk trot transitions and some very nice halt trot transitions. The trot halt transitions were ugly and a half, but I'll blame myself for those. B is going to come up to give us some much needed help within the next few weeks... Can't wait for that!!
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