Who Are You and What Have You Done With Rogo?

Remember all my agonizing and navel gazing around Rogo's energy level? Well duh. If I'm fortunate enough to still be riding and blogging about Rogo next year, please remind me that small indoors in the winter, or heat in the summer make him less than energetic. Today neither of those conditions came into play. He was forward, forward, forward - Yeah! Oh what fun.
Because it's still fairly wet in the ring, I thought I'd do a little hack. He'd only done this twice, last fall. When I went to bring him in from the pasture he was so silly - racing around, etc., etc., so I knew a hack wasn't a great idea. I jumped on in the ring and we had a great time. We did a lot of walking - leg yield, shoulder in, free walk, small circles keeping rhythm, etc. He was VERY forward so I asked for a shoulder fore in trot to the right - he aced it. Yeah! Then I asked for the same in left. Not as good. He wanted to barge forward and not bend. He had been even, finally, before our short lay off, but clearly the right is more flexible again. No biggy. We'll work on that. We did lots of leg yield each way in walk and it went well. With the ground wet and the pressure off to do more, it seemed simple.
Then we did 20m trot circles both ways and then added in canter. He wanted to take off at a gallop down the long side every time we hit that part of the circle, so we did trot canter trot transitions on the circle and that worked well. I don't want to give the impression he was wild - his canter was elevated yet controlled when we were on a circle. It's just that he wanted to go large and gallop. I can't say I blame him and I certainly didn't punish him, but I made him respond to transitions and steering, which he did nicely.
After riding we finished with some clicker training stretches. All in all a fun and productive day with my sweetie. It's still coolish and wet here, so each ride has to be squeezed in between rain storms. I treasure them all.