Lessons: Day 3

My favorite horse so far, Kaseem (also known as Seemo), was my horse for the first two lessons today. My second horse was Bonnie. She is 23 years old, and still going strong! Here is a photo of her:

In another post, I talked about work on the lunge line. Sometimes the horses are worked by themselves with no rider. Other times, we are on the horse and Kris has us do lots of exercises to help us ride better. I took a photo of Kris working with Montana (his 12 year old owner, Selma, was here for camp this week) on the lunge line so you could see what it looks like: 

Today's lessons were filled with practice, practice, and more practice. One thing I have learned is that people who say that riding horses is only exercise for the horse are very wrong! Riding--at least riding correctly--takes a lot of effort on the part of the rider. There is mental effort because at all times you must be concentrating and focused on what you are doing, what the horse is doing, and what your trainer is telling you. There is also physical effort because all parts of your body are working hard to ride properly and tell your horse what you want it to do. I did a lot of trotting with posting today. Already, I can post the trot much, much longer than I could at the beginning of the week, which I am really happy about. We also started working on cantering a little today too. It's faster than trotting. I'll talk about that more tomorrow because I know Kris will be having me do more work on it during tomorrow's lessons. Until next time...happy trails!