Our First Pony Club Clinic
Cupid and I went and fancy pranced today, or attempted to. The Pony Club arranged a clinic with one of the local professionals and because I joined as an adult member we were allowed to attend! Despite being the greenest in the ring and the ones with very little formal training, I’m proud of my little mare and how she tried for me!
Our day started at 6:30 where I woke up and regretted life. It was the weekend, I should be relaxing and not going to embarrass myself at a clinic. After laying in bed for a few minutes I finally got the motivation to get up and get ready for the day.
The ponies were awake and excited to see me. Then Cupid realized that along with the feed buckets I was holding my grooming supplies. Little Miss Sassypants seemed very proud of her decision to lay down last night and become one with her pee spots. Grey horses are always the best to get presentation ready! After 30 minutes of working on the stains I decided to call it quits and hope the tack covered the remaining “color”. Spoiler, it didn’t completely but we survived.
Getting Cupid onto the trailer was an experience. At the initial attempt she decided to duck her head, turn tail and run. Nothing like watching your horse run from the trailer into the neighbors back yard. After catching the little monster we put her chain on and with some convincing, mostly from my trainer, we got her loaded and headed over to the facilities.
We successfully completed our first Pony Club safety check, as an adult it’s interesting to say the least. Someone comes over and checks all your tack and safety equipment, then clears you to mount your horse. From there I hopped on and went to go walk around while waiting on the clinician. She arrived and there was a quick Q&A with all the riders where we covered the background experience of our horses, our experience level, and what our goals were. I’m fairly sure that answering that my goal for Cupid is just to solidify our foundation was not the right answer but it is the honest truth.
We took a pathway to the dressage arena, then started the lesson. During the clinic we covered lots of trot work, including transitions and half halts. It was fascinating hearing how this clinician viewed half halts, less of a halt/preparation for the next movement and more of a rebalancing act, and I think Cupid actually responded extremely well to her method. It involved much more use of the corners than I’m used to and took a bit of work to get used to but I’m really looking forward to using it more during our rides!
While our trot work was fairly decent, just needed a lot of motivation, our canter work left a lot to be desired. For the first lap I unfortunately didn’t maintain our communication and we quickly lost implusion and broke gait. Our second lap was much better on Cupids part but I was still a hot mess. I worked on maintaining my outside leg and unfortunately collapsed my shoulders forward which threw Cupid off. With some work I did get better, but this is clearly one of the big things I need to work on.
Overall, I loved the clinic and can’t wait to work with this trainer again. She was extremely positive about Cupid and our lack of experience, and she broke everything down into understandable details regarding the how and why of what I needed to do as a rider. My biggest takeaway is that I need to remember that Cupid is a large pony with short legs, when lessoning with larger horses I can’t compare her to horses with larger legs and she’ll never feel like a larger horse. She’s my little grey monster pony who tries her heart out for me with every move she makes.
Finally, sorry for the lack of pictures. They just didn’t happen today.