Nicole is officially back from her layup, and is fit enough to go back into fulltime work. I'm not pushing it as hard now, she gets 3 or so days a week off right now, just to keep her mentally happy.
The first couple weeks with her canter were just odd. The first time I rode her canter (the first time in 2 or so months), I was just lost. It felt completely different, with her hindend 100% under my butt (meaning she was tracking completely under herself) and about 1000 pounds of weight in my hand. Couple weeks (and a few "Wahoo! I'm back in work! Wait, crap! I'm back in work!" moments) later, and she's back to normal.
So I took her out for a test drive. For the first time in months, we did canter half passes and lead changes. Nicole was born knowing how to do a canter half pass, and she did them perfectly both directions each time, on a fairly steep diagonal. She held herself in perfect self-carriage the whole time. Not bad for a horse that a year ago was barely able to hold a decent canter.
The lead changes are the next project with her. It feels like now is the first time that she is truly ready to work on them. We've been doing this for 10 months or something, but she honestly wasn't ready before, except I didn't know that she wasn't ready, and I was getting sunshine blown up my butt by a trainer attempting to keep me interested in her training. Never one for the garden path of fantasy, it's annoying that I wasn't given proper information at the time, but the horse is no worse for the wear, except she had undue pressure put on her.
The difference between ready and not ready lies in self-carriage and throughness. Nicole is now able to hold herself without help, and requires only small changes in weight to produce throughness and self-carriage. Before this stage, she was like a 3 year old human - you tell them to do something (or not do something, as the case may be) and immediately you have to remind them again. I'd ask for throughness, then immediately she would need help again. Not a good breeding ground to introduce higher concepts.
The time I spent only riding Nikita has served me well. When riding Nicole at the trot, I now know what I'm looking for in order to produce a more uphill, cadenced collected trot with Nicole. I understand how to get Nicole to push into the bridle so her hindend comes more underneath her. Nicole's favorite trick is to either put too much pressure on the bridle (so the rider ends up holding her) or to suck back so the bridle becomes super light (and not correctly loaded) and not push correctly. We still aren't at the point where she's pushing 100% correctly into the bridle, but I'm also at a point where I'm not 100% sure how to train that into her. I'm still feeling my way through how to get from Point A to Point B.
I'm lucky I have Nikita, but I think I'm also lucky I have Nicole, who is forgiving and has a short memory for bad training and mistakes. I'm lucky I have Nicole who I know so well that I can learn to train these higher-level concepts without also having to navigate an unknown psyche. It's not that often that someone has the opportunity to have a horse like Nikita to learn to ride on and also to have a horse they know very well to learn to TRAIN on.
