I cantered Tarma into a wall during our last dressage lesson, but it was still considered improvement. Or, as my dressage trainer said, “Pleasently surprising”, which I’m totally putting on my resume now. I’m not entirely sure where I picked up my “I can’t canter in the arena” anxiety but man does it being up all the emotions for both Tarma and I. As you can clearly see in the video below, I do more wrong than right in getting her set up to canter, and then as soon as she hits it I’m clutching her too tight and she gets mad about my mixed signals (as she should.)

The one time we did alright I forgot to have a plan or turn to look where we needed to go so we just…ran. Into. A. Wall. Even though this is far, far away from show worthy, it’s still an improvement from not being able to canter at all, nor did I get scared or down about it, just laughed, pointed out where I went wrong and tried again. Tarma and I are not the easiest pair for this pursuit, she picks up on everything and makes her own decisions for how to handle things that may be opposite what I’m trying to tell her but my body and emotions don’t lie. Example: “Tarma, let’s canter!” I say, as I’m holding her face and thinking “But the waaaaaall!” So Tarma goes “Welp, cantering is out, best I can do is my super trot.” As soon as I decided we weren’t going to canter anymore, we both took a deep breath and she connected again and stopped anticipating the “let’s go fast but not” cycle that made her mad. A year ago she would have held onto this cycle of stress and it all would have been a mess, but we’re both much better at relaxing and taking pauses, coming back down from the stressful moments.

Through these lessons I know we’re getting stronger for the endurance trail, but I’m also enjoying the improvement in the movements themselves. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to ask Tarma to move her shoulders and sidepass and slow down, all things we couldn’t do six months ago. In pursuit of being well rounded, I’ve been dabbling with the idea of adding a few Western Dressage shows to our rotation. I don’t think I could be happy with English Dressage (mainly the dress code), but Western Dressage is more practically focused, and Tarma appreciates purpose to what I ask of her. I also want to return to ETS, but so much of what we’re working on in our dressage lessons feeds into that, like sidepassing and slowing down and thinking through the weird things the human asks, and making sure my asks are clear and supportive.