Even though the title of this blog states that this day I rode on horses I have to say that this is not all that we did. My horseback riding lesson began at 3:00 (we showed up an hour early because Aggie had forgotten to tell us that the time had changed), before that I did a ton of schoolwork because we're now reaching the last three weeks of the grading period and I have to make sure that I'm caught up. As I did this Ahmee slept, and knit. We ate lunch in the apartment and then we went off to my horseback riding lesson where we waiting in the barnyard for my instructor. After waiting about half an hour Poppy and I went and asked Aggie what was going on. She was so upset that she hadn't told us about the time change, she must have apologized at least 15 times. We told her it was no problem over and over again and then we went back to the horses. The sun was shining and it was a gorgeous day. Even though I only had my glasses on (remember my eye had bothered me the night before-I took my contacts out to allow my hurt eye to heal), I could tell that it was gorgeous out.
When Andrea arrived he introduced himself as my instructor and took me to get my helmet and to saddle up the horse. As we walked I told him about my eyes, how I could only see about 5-6 feet with my glasses on, and how often I'd ridden. He said that my eyes were no problem (which they weren't-I just can't make out details of things), and he said that my horse Ghost was a beginners horse so I would be fine.
We went out to the small, circular arena where Andrea instructed me to walk Ghost around it a couple times, showed me how to mount, how to sit, how to go, how to turn, etc., and then had us go around the small circle several times walking, then several times trotting. Later Poppy described Andrea as a drill sargent. The reason why he did this is that Andrea would say, "Now shorten the rains to trot! Up! Up! Up! Up!"
The 'up' part Andrea was talking about was how when the horse goes into the trot you need to stand and then sit in the saddle. I did this with one hand holding the reins, both hands holding the reins, and then with no hands holding the reins. I'm really glad that when Ghost got startled once that I was holding on with both hands. When this happened I felt Ghost lurch beneath me and I felt as if we were jumping. Whatever startled Ghost didn't startle me at all, and luckily Ghost didn't make me jump too much at all.
Before we finished Andrea showed me how to go into jumping position: stand up and stay up with your hands on the horses neck. It was hard to keep my balance to do this, but later I got it.
Andrea said that I was an very good rider, and that instead of 4 lessons I would probably only need 2 or 3. We scheduled another lesson for the next morning at 10 o' clock.
For the rest of the day I did what I'd done before: I worked on schoolwork.
No comments:
Post a Comment