"Dressage" Lesson on 4/14/07

I planned to have a dressage lesson, but I have been having a lot of problems with trot poles, and we ended up working on those instead. Last week, Bob said that it would be good to strengthen his back to work him over the trot poles a couple of times a week, even on the lunge line. Mid-week I lunged Mercury with a trot pole at 12 and 6, and it was a disaster. He dragged his feet over them and would knock them out of the holders OR he'd leap them from 5 feet out. It was agonizing. Then on Friday I lunged him with two poles end to end (so he couldn't run around them) just on one end and it was equally bad. Earlier in the week I had ridden him over three poles on the ground at 3' apart, and it was so bad I only tried it twice.
I saw Bob mid-week and he told me it was probably the rider's fault, and I thought "no way", but sure enough, he was right.
And it was a pretty simple solution: we weren't going fast enough. It took a while to catch on, and what I ultimately had to do was ride a 2-point (in my dressage saddle) with my reins bridged, so other than controlling his speed and pointing him at the middle of the poles, I basically stayed out of the way. Once we got the correct speed (which is about 17 steps down the long side of the arena), he just glided right over them.
There were a couple good take home lessons from this. One is that he just doesn't know. I keep forgetting and expecting more from him than he knows how to do. He gets frustrated, and I do too. He just didn't understand what I wanted him to do. Second is how many things that seem little I do wrong, and how something I do wrong somewhere else (don't make him work hard enough on the lunge line) can affect something that seems unrelated to me. For example, when he finally does the big, moving trot, I can barely post it. It throws my whole body out of whack and I boing around on my toes with my upper body flopping around like a noodle.
We worked our way up to 6 poles in a row, about 3' apart, and he might touch a couple of them, but he did really well compared to the difficult week.