Trust in the horse.... having a horse you can trust, is vital. As much as Bay was acting up yesterday, I am not afraid of him. I know he has a limit in how bad he'll be. He may startle and jump, blow and shy from things, which are misbehaviors I wouldn't want ecurbh to have to confront, I know he won't ~try~ to throw me. I can push him, he won't rear, he won't buck, he won't turn tail and run. He just might jitter and dance. So while I have my own fears when he acts up, it's relative. I fear more for him hurting himself by tripping when he ~isn't~ paying attention that when he is hyper alert.
I guess that is my biggest problem with riding. I don't trust any horse completely. I don't believe that most horses are deliberatly mean, trying to throw a rider off. But just their nature, keeps me from trusting even the most supposedly "kid Broke" horse. I think that comes from 6 years of Belle:). That is one thing I hope I can make some progress on at this clinic. I've been told it is a huge confidence builder. I'm OK on trails but not in arenas.
I'm really working on keeping postive thoughts....The other day when I went to the arena in town, a weak point in my barrel racing reared it's ugly head.
I was told right before I started working seriously with Rusty and Harley on barrels that when you first start a horse on barrels to keep your pattern short. The important thing about barrels is the turns Keeping the pattern short helps keep the horse slower and concentrating on the turns. So here at home my pattern is small. When we went to Bixby, the pattern was stretched out, it's alot bigger arena then mine. OHMYGOSH. All those wide spaces between the barrels freaked me out, and I've been thinking about them ever since, altho I've run in that arena for fun lots of times. Just not recently. So I'm spreading my pattern out here as much as I can today....I know none of that makes sense, I've done it just for fun there with the bigger pattern and did fine, now when I'm serious about wanting to do it right....our minds do strange things to us.
Becky