Tonight when I got to the barn, next to my name on the list was a blank. I went up to the riding ring and my instructor said that I should continue riding Kilo, since it would be easier for now. Because of the snow, we could only use the small ring, so it was just easier to ride a horse that I already knew a little bit about.
Anyway, by the time I went back down to the barn I was a little bit behind everyone else in the tacking up process, so I tried to go faster. Of course, Kilo was being grumpy as usual and kept trying to bite me whenever I even looked at him the wrong way. I just had to do everything really slowly and carefully, and when my instructor came down from her previous lesson she helped me. She basically has to do the whole saddle part because Kilo gets extra bite-y near his legs and stomach, which I'm fine with. She told me that if you just watch Kilo's head the whole time, he won't bite as much since he thinks he's going to get caught (which he will).
Once in the ring, I realized it was going to be very tricky to navigate in such a small area with four other horses and riders. It was hard to try and walk at a good pace without getting too close to another horse. After a while we were all spaced out pretty good, and when we started the figure-eights it was easier because we could turn in different directions at the intersection. After warming-up our instructor had us do an exercise where we would ask our horses to walk faster on one long side of the ring, then just relax until we came to that long side again. All of our horses were pretty happy with this exercise. The one horse, Chester, who had spooked last week, was the calmest I'd ever seen him. All of the horses looked so relaxed and it was relaxing for me too.
After a while, we did the same sort of exercise except this time, when we came to the one long side we had to ask our horses to walk almost fast enough to trot, but then relax right before they actually trotted. Kilo did surprisingly well with this - he was actually listening to me and doing what I asked. After we did that exercise, we did the same thing but with trotting. Then we just had to trot until we caught up with the horse in front of us, so basically taking turns. Kilo was very responsive with this as well.
As I said before, I was really happy with Kilo tonight, other than the issues he had while tacking up. He didn't even do a huge stumble like he's done the past two weeks! Overall it was a good lesson, and I'm definitely looking forward to next week's.
Also, something I didn't mention earlier was that one of the horses in the lesson was apparently sick. He's a new horse, so I hadn't seen him before, and I don't even think he had a name. Anyway, they said he might have had something called strangles, which is apparently contagious because when I was leaving my lesson horses were being moved so their stalls could be disinfected and things like that. One of the ladies who rode with me was going to another barn afterwards, and she had to change her gloves and wash her hands really good to avoid spreading the sickness. Just thought that was an interesting side note!
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