I wear your granddad's clothes.

We've still plugging along in the sandbox. Things have been going really well. I am so proud of Hampton for being such a good sport as I fumble through teaching him 2nd and pieces of 3rd level. But ... we can't have good days every day! Right? Maybe Steffen Peters does?

Today's lesson was not bad. It just wasn't as good as we have been all week. It was COLD and WINDY. Both of us started out cold, stiff and a bit cranky. If I had been working alone, I would have spent 10-15 minutes just trotting forward and doing figure 8s or something just to let our muscles warm up. But, my instructor, J, put us right to work practicing some test elements.

We did NOT, under any circumstances, look like this.

There was sucking back. Bucking. Flinging of the head (his and mine haha). More sucking back. Crookedness. Bucking. Pig rooting. Threats to rear. Cussing. Bracing in the neck. There were moments when I thought "Oh my God, we would not even be able to do a training level test like this. Am I in over my head?"

Oh this is more like it!

But sure enough .... 20 minutes into the lesson both of us FINALLY got warm and all that crappy behavior vanished. It's too bad, which left us with just 25 more minutes to actually work on the test and not just keeping the horse under me. He just takes a long time to warm up - especially in this weather. He's a big horse. I should have realized this sooner and just asked to work on lengthenings or something forward that uses a lot of energy to warm us up. Ah well. No damage was done but certainly not a confidence builder a week before a show. Sheesh!