Revelations at the walk

Last week, my dear idiotic mare put her back leg through a fence. LUCKILY the damage was minimal compared to what it very easily could have been - rather than shredding and stitches and open gaping wounds, we had mainly bruising and swelling to deal with. A week later and she is sound at the walk, and the swelling seems to go down with a bit of exercise. So I popped the saddle on last night for a 15 minute wander.

It would have been a lovely night to go for a quiet hack - but, alas, the joys of living in a "Rural Residential" zoning, where you take your life into your own hands at the hands of speeding truck drivers by leaving the front gate! I settled for some arena work.

When all you can do is walk, and you don't really want to push a swollen hock with anything lateral or the like, there is LOTS of time to pay attention to things like POSTURE!

It was quite a revelation, playing with and pushing my basic posture at the walk. Slightly tweaking things when I concentrated on individual muscles, paying attention to how things felt when I changed them, and to how Lou noticed.

Upshot was, although my intention was to wander around on a loose rein getting the blood flowing to a swollen hock, that I sat astride the most glorious forward, fluid, silken walk.... I HAD to shorten my reins to meet the frame she rounded into... it was the most fun you can have at a walk, and it seemed awfully unfair that we couldn't test out an upward transition! I'm disproportionately excited about getting on my horse for a walk around the arena tonight!