A Strange Twist on a Romance Novel

Yes...that is what I intended the title of this blog entry to be, because it describes EXACTLY what my ride was like this afternoon.

I took Prin out, played for 20 minutes or so on the ground to get her moving and breathing. What's really neat is that she's finding that rhythm SO MUCH EASIER now, and her movement and body is reflecting it! I was watching her muscles today, thinking "Has she ALWAYS had that much definition in her back?", and listening to her breathing, she settled in and started to actually stretch down after only about 5 laps or so, which is great. Her flexibility is also slowly improving, and it almost seemed like her playdrive was up, too. YAY fitness! She'll be so much easier to develop in those higher levels when she can actually HANDLE what I'm asking for.

Next, I decided we were going to go on one of our long trots. So, we went trotting out, probably a mile or so, quite a distance from the farm out into the Dusek's chopped corn fields, and things were just going GREAT. Prin was round, powerful, and engaged, she felt light as a feather, and like she could do anything I threw at her (but I didn't, I just wanted a nice, rhythmic trot) Anyway, about a mile out, I realized that my girth wasn't tight enough (saddle started to slip a bit), so I hopped off, adjusted, and could not, for the LIFE of me, get myself back in the saddle. And of course at that instant, it starts to RAIN. I don't mean a little bit of rain--oh no, I mean, torrential, tempist-like, freezing cold DOWNPOUR.

I don't know how I did it, but I did manage to scramble back onto my horse(adrenaline makes a lot of things possible). I upped prin into a canter at first, realized we were getting nowhere, and so I just let her have her head. We ran FLAT OUT home, and really the only way to describe it is that it was exhilerating! The rain, the dramatic sky, the horse who, by the way, is moving CORRECTLY in gallop (this is NEW), and is therefore like riding a thoroughbred race horse, and of course the feeling of going fast. Everything sort of joined together, and we just ran. Prin's breathing was in time with her feet, we were both soaked, hair flying out behind us, and what was really neat was that I never felt out of control ONCE. We were just running.

Yes. It is a scene, right out of a romance novel, minus the attractive man that should have appeared somewhere in the scene. But that's okay. We both had fun, and my saddle got a good loving out of it, too. So everyone came out happy, and it was just a neat experience, to have everything just sort of synchronize. Perhaps this was a tiny taste into what we're all striving for in true unity.