Not losing hope yet

Tonight I went out to ride Kaswyn. He seemed very subdued while I groomed him, which, incidentally, took a very long time because he decided to roll in the mud. Both sides. I was lucky that he had his blanket on when he did it so that at least he had a clean section that was covered by the blanket. But his neck, face, and legs were crusted with mud. Crap, that reminds me - his halter was muddy too and I forgot to clean it. Damn, that's going to bug me.

Anyhow, I got on and did some trot work, which felt fine. Then we went to the canter and he didn't feel right. This has happened before, and my trainer suggested that maybe he was behind my leg - which means that he was hanging back and not cantering in an energetic way, making him disengaged and unconnected. So I pushed him into a bigger canter, then gradually brought him back to a slightly collected canter. This has worked well in the past and allowed us to do some really nice work.

This time it didn't work at all. He felt okay going to the right, but to the left he still felt uneven and wrong. I decided to stop at that, since it was difficult for me to tell if it was left front or left hind that was causing the problem and I didn't want to hurt him. Since he has arthritis in his left hind pastern, and the weather just got cooler yesterday, it could very well have been left hind. Or both front and hind on the left, but then I would have expected the trot work to have some issues. I'm stumped.

My trainer is going to ride him tomorrow and see what she thinks. We have a tenative lesson on Tuesday afternoon, depending on how she thinks he feels tomorrow. Maybe it was just one bad day. Crossing my fingers...