This is my Brain on Drugs

We had a lesson this morning. I've been feeling progressively better every day, and I'm down to only taking dayquil 1-2 times in any 24 hour period. Excellent.

It's brisk and the sun is coming up as Cuna and I trot and canter around the arena. He's forward and sound and feels great. I am balanced over my feet and in an awesome position. I get winded easily, but that's ok.

As we canter off to jump our first exercise, I am stuck by how balanced and 'with' my horse I feel. Oh yeah. Can't touch this. He chips in to every jump, but since I didn't jump up his neck, I figured we were golden. Honestly, I was surprised to see the look on Steph's face as she asked, "Soooo when was the last time you jumped?"

"Last time you saw us... two weeks ago?"

"Let's try putting some leg on. He might not be that forgiving next time around."

Oops.

I could not seem to remember a course for anything, but I did finally get my leg on and my reins short and kept my brain calm around a super tight rollback turn to a 2'9" vertical, so that was good. Maybe not as good as I thought it was, but good.

On the last exercise, I needed to focus on jumping the center of the jumps instead of letting him drift right. It was difficult because after every jump, Cuna just accelerated into the corner, which I was trying not to anticipate.

This horse. Amazing.

After we raced around semi-straight over the center of the verticals, Steph stopped us. "You can't seem to keep your leg on and hold a contact today (hence the rocketing post-jump). You did get him straight over that last fence, but then you almost fell off the right side and he caught you. I think that's good for today."

Oh my.

Really. I'm not usually like this. I actually can ride a straight line over a low vertical with my leg on and hold a contact, just not while on cold medication.

The flip side is that I still feel completely awesome about how I rode. Totally rockin'. Maybe I should take cold medication every time I want to feel competent.