This has proven to be the biggest training challenge for me so far with this mare. On her own, whether that be at pasture, in the roundpen, free lunging, etc, she almost always picks up the correct lead, or will swap to the correct lead. She'll do flying lead changes on her own, for crying out loud. But to get her to pick up the proper lead tracking left was close to impossible. It just NEVER happened. She always wants to be counterbent tracking left anyway, so I knew it was mostly a dominant/weak side issue and a lack of proper straightness. We've been working on that, doing lots of changes of direction, playing with bend while ground driving, doing some suppling lateral work in hand, running lots of transitions in the gaits themselves (big trot to working trot, for example...she doesn't do collected yet), etc. But nothing seemed to be working; she always INSISTED upon picking up the right lead no matter what direction she was tracking.
Today, upon the recommendation of the BO, who is a very experienced carriage driver and knows worlds about long lining, we tried something different. I worked her on a 15-20 meter circle to start, near C, tracking left. As she hit C and started to head towards H, I'd straighten her almost as if I was going to run her into the wall and then, at the last moment, bring her back to true bend and ask for the canter. The idea, essentially, is this: she has to pick up left lead canter. If she picks up the right, she's either going to run into the wall or have a very messy up transition in which case she's going to get yanked right back down to the trot. It took her a few minutes of failing before she figured out what I was looking for. It was a glorious moment: by no means the smoothest transition, but she got the lead and I gushed with praise as she cantered around me for several circles before I brought her back to the walk and dropped the long lines to pat her madly. I was going to let her off at that, but I decided to go back and get one more, just to make sure it wasn't a fluke. She picked it up without hesitation again, and so we called it done for the day.
We'll see if she remembers this lesson tomorrow, but knowing her, she's too smart to just forget something like that. I wouldn't be surprised if she takes a few tries to get it again, but once she's consistently picking it up correctly with the assistance of the arena wall, we're going to *gulp* try it with no support! My little girl's moving up in the world...!
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