Barn Chores in the AM

I started volunteering down the street from my office at a therapeutic riding barn. Once a week, 7-9am I do whatever they need:

• Bring horses out to paddocks
• Collect and re-fill hay nets
• Top off water buckets, sift out any hay
• Soak hay, beet pulp, alfalfa for those who need it
• Muck paddocks and stalls
• Turn on outdoor ring's sprinklers and water flower beds
• Wash out one horse's mouth
• Clean up aisle
• Take recycling to curb

It's funny that, were I younger, I'd be doing this at a barn as a working student, to pay of rides. As it is, I'm fully employed and don't really need to earn my way. It's so important to give back to barns like this that I know have very thin operating margins, and need all the help they can get. We're very careful about how we muck stalls and clean water buckets (don't dump them every day) because water is so expensive in the town the barn is in.

My supervisor retired around age 50 from managing barns of some pretty famous riders, as well as a successful career in Sales. You have never seen someone muck a stall with such efficiency and precision!

It would be great to actually be around during the riding lessons to help out, I've heard it's pretty magical.

At around 8:55, I cruise to the office, use the shower in the gym (lucky to have those!) and get to my desk by 9:30. I feel pretty great from the manual labor and time with animals - the feeling lasts pretty much the rest of the day!

I would be honored to ride the pony

One thing I love about my instructor is her ability to challenge students with different abilities in a group lesson. My friend who is a beginner to riding at 32, joined myself and a high-school aged student who has been riding for 3-4 years. The two of them were on Tony and Calvin, who are considered school masters.

I was on a 13hh 5-year-old pony with loads of natural talent and a former propensity to do the dirty-stop-and-spin. He has been under extensive training after other students have refused to get on him. I can't say he scares me. I wrap my legs around him and I'm not going anywhere.

He did teach me to stop bad behavior faster, though. The minute I could feel him starting to back up instead of go forward, I had to turn him out of it before he backed right into one of his friends. I wasn't able to get him to stay straight heading towards the first jump. He was so wiggly! But once we popped over a cross rail I could tell he would be fun to jump higher. And heading to the second jump I noticed the impulsion straightened him out. I'm not sure if that's cheating - I should be able to keep his body straight at any point, but it certainly made the jump nicer. Though he's got a narrow barrel, he's pretty solidly built, so I don't feel too big for him.

I'm excited to get on him again and work on my steering challenges. It's fun to be contributing to the saddle time to get him ready for the younger riders. Naturally, before I had even gotten on him my instructor had cantered him around the ring a solid amount of time to make him tired to make him ready for me. But I still feel like I'm moving up the chain!

Turn on the haunches

"Did you feel his legs cross over under you?!"

Um yes...kind of?

In a private on Saturday I worked on turn on the haunches. We trotted on the rail and then changed reins by turning towards the wall. If I didn't pulse properly with my leg and half halts, we lost momentum or got stuck. I got it some what, but we need to keep trying to smooth it out. And maybe more importantly, I need to recognize what the right movement feels like: The horse's hind legs crossing under him.

We also worked on spiraling in at the trot. The focus here was on not leaning. I don't intentionally lean in, the horse does, so I have to overcompensate by leaning out to keep our balance. It feels like I'm overdoing it but I'm assured it looks correct. And I'm beginning to feel it's correct.

Angelina's first dressage eureka - feel is everything.

After that half of the lesson, we worked on collection in front of jumps. We always work on this. Perhaps we always will. Linda, my instructor likes to point out what I've probably said here many times, in different ways:

When I am on a straight path to the jump...

...and the horse is straight...

...and I half-halt to collect him and have a good rhythm...

...and I hold him off until I squeeze at the base of the jump...

...and I don't fall on top of him, or get ahead or behind...

...and sit up after...

...he does a beautiful jump that he could do over a cross-rail or over 3'3" AND he lands on the correct lead.

Building up the course

My lessons for the past few months have been focused on the very basics of jumping:

Path: Straightening the horse out once you're on your line to the jump (Path)

Pace & Power: Getting the rhythm right - not letting the horse get strung out on speed, between or after jumps. This means I'm still very often heading to a jump at the trot, then regulating the canter, or even going back down to a trot between jumps. Sometimes I'm supposed to do this and still mess up a bit

Position: I think I am more able than every to have the right position over jumps, but with all the other things going, I flop around a bit. For example, I can be focused on half-halts to get the horse under control between jumps so he doesn't take the long distance, but then my body ends up behind the motion when he does take off at the base.

All these things aren't quite there (maybe they'll never be perfect), but yesterday I realized how much progress I've made when we started building up to a course.

I was with the advanced students who can jump 3ft up, but we focused on what was basically an 18" course with a couple 2ft jumps as the final line. The course had a lot of turns, but my horse was a bit more of a school master than than theirs, so it was a level playing field. One had to ask a younger horse for flying changes clearly, while another was moving a horse up a level from the baby jumps.

I was surprised that I survived doing the course. One time I goofed a bit and the horse got strung out on the last jump, but all in all I pulled it off. There were turns I wouldn't have gotten in the past, and I felt less flustered in between jumps, like I actually had time to re-organize. 

Adventures in automatic release

In my lesson this weekend we worked on the automatic release by over-exaggerating it: Opening up the reins while pushing them forward. Over-exaggeration should be a general part of learning anything new in riding, or breaking habits, because it ALWAYS works for me. It makes doing things the right way feel in the realm of 'normal'.

I was getting pretty good at this auto release business and then I surprised myself by having another thing click: Keeping my leg on over jumps. It's hard! It works muscles I don't usually work. I should know this by now, but the body works in mysterious ways.

We also practiced having a tiny opening in the rein over the jump to clue the horse into where we were going next. But with Tony, if you give him an inch, he'll take a mile (and a hard right) so it was more valuable to focus on being straight and then asking for the turn after all 4 feet are on the ground. Some day I will have a strong enough leg to control all that, since I know jumper turns can require planning ahead.

Keeping my leg on over the jump made me feel organized upon landing, so my horse didn't do a sharp turn like he normally does. He waited until I gave him an opening by easing leg pressure. Actually, I eased leg pressure and opened the rein a centimeter and he took it. So now I just have to 'think' about turning, and he'll do a smoother turn.

My hope is that this leg on and auto release combo sticks as the jumps go up. We got up to 2'9", but it took a lot of concentration and I think if there was another jump to turn to, it would have been a wee bit messy.

That being said, I still get a little excited when I see the jump go up to 2'9" but it doesn't fully phase me any more. Because I'm so focused on working on different things, I don't notice if it feels different from 2' any more.

Straight Up

Haven't posted in a while, but that's because it feels like I've been trying to learn the same things lately.

Get a good rhythm before the jumps through half-halts.

Give good release all the way through landing.

Sit up, leg on to keep him straight after the jump.

That last one still eludes me. I guess I'm just not organized after a jump yet to pull it off.

And I've been riding a horse with a hard mouth so when I got on a horse who was opposite, I was pulling too much on his mouth. He was feeling good and breaking into a canter and I wasn't gently enough bringing him back. It was bad. I ended up switching with another student who had more experience with him.

Maybe winter is all about shaking out those lingering issues. 

We've entered cavaletti hell

All my previous posts have basically been about how cavalettis are making me the rider I want to be.

Well, right now they are my personal hell.

My instructor put ground poles and raised poles on a semi circle and I've replayed this in my head several times and still don't quite know how to do it. Here's footage of the disaster I was this past Sunday:

Sorry, I know someone blocks the camera at the end, but I think there's only so much if this you would want to look at anyways.

Most of the time, Tony just wanted to run out, because the strides were so weird, so at least I got to work on keeping him to the bending line. That was a challenge for me in and of itself.

There are so many things to think about with this exercise.  I think I should just stay in a light seat because otherwise I get behind the motion, so that's one thing to try next time.

It also goes by so quickly that I don't have time to think about whether we look good. But here are the 3 things that I think I could immediately do to improve:

1. I guess I could start with having a good rhythm. That's always a good thing, right??

2. And obviously keep him to the center of the poles, which has a lot to do with me learning how much leg to use.

3. And, relatedly to how much leg, half halting properly so I'm not just pulling him one way or other, or letting him escape through a sloppy loose rein.

Other than this exercise, we improved a lot as partners in terms of transitions. Tony gets stronger with more and more jumping, but I was getting better at bringing him down to a walk from a canter. I could even bring him to a halt which used to feel impossible for me. And he even backs easily. Trying weird exercises feels a lot better when you know you are ultimately in control.