Cob Jockey

Castleberry's Regalia

BO used a blade to clear the track so the horses could get through it safely, and the resulting mountains of snow on the sides went above Connor's knees.

Making friends with my husband (and his licorice) in April 2014.

"NAH NAH NAH NAH NAAAAHHH NAH!"

Scale drawing.  The orange paddock is where he was supposed to be, the blue squiggle (which is just a no-man's land that made sense when Connor's field housed a stallion) is where we kept finding him every morning.

Oh yeah, constant whinnying at shows annoys me too.  But that can only improve by showing more, right?  On to 2015!

1. What size horse do you prefer to ride?

Me sized!



2. Do you school in tall boots or half chaps and paddock boots?



3. What do you do with your ribbons after shows?
We eventers get so few ribbons that I actually find it manageable to display them.  The four that I have earned hang on 4 picture frames in my dining room.

4. Do you ride/board at a large show barn or a small private barn?
Somewhere in the middle.  I would call us a medium sized relaxed show barn with a handful of boarders and a handful of lesson students.  We work hard, but we also don't have any crazies or bad eggs in the group.  It's a great vibe.

Two of my teammates and I at the KHP

5. Have you seen a horse give birth?
Twice, and they're both great stories that I can't believe I haven't blogged about.  Once on the Thoroughbred farm in high school, and once alone when Connor's breeder had to go out of town to care for her dad.

6. What is your favorite breed?
Welsh Cob, duh.  :-)

A face only a mother everyone could love.

7. Favorite tack brand?
I guess I will have to start saying CWD in the end of January!

Can't wait...

8. Would you ever buy used tack?
I almost only buy used tack, with very few exceptions.

 9. Ever been on a carriage ride?
I don't think so, actually.

10. How often do you go to the tack store?
Once every couple of years when I'm in the Cincinnati area, I go to The Tack Trunk.  Unless you count Rolex, which pretty much counts as a tack store.  Heck, the Tack Trunk comes to Rolex.

Of all of the gifts I gave this year, I was most excited about my mom's, which were both horse themed.  I started ordering them back in October, so it was a long time to wait!

Her first gift was a subway art-style sign with the names of all of her favorite racehorses from Etsy seller Vinyl Crafts.  Here is a link to the original.

I sent the owner, Becky, a message asking if I could substitute three of the racehorse names on the example for three of my mom's favorites, and she replied 'yes' almost immediately.  She was great to work with!  Being custom, it did take 6 weeks to get to me, but I ordered it early enough that it didn't matter - just a word of caution if you order one yourselves.  Here is the finished product:

The letters are very crisp in real life, my cell phone didn't do it justice.

Her other gift involved more work on my end!  I got her one of Enter at A, LLC's Memory Bracelets with hair from her horse, Little Red.  While she was showering over Thanksgiving, I dashed out to cut some of his hair off for the bracelet.  Poor guy had no idea why I was out there.

He's a legitimate senior citizen these days at 24!

I knew I wanted it to be in Secretariat's colors somehow, so I worked with the owner, Kim, who steered me against using white leather with blue padding due to quality control issues with colored leather.  I ended up going with her recommendation of royal blue padding, dark havana leather and white stitching to bring in both of Secretariat's silk colors.

A pile of Christmas bracelets before shipping, my mom's is in the middle.

I also asked that Kim use a blend of mane and tail hair, since the mane hair I got looked more like Secretariat's shimmering golden chestnut, but I couldn't get enough of it without my mom noticing a huge chunk out of Red's mane!  As a result it lays differently than the other memory bracelets, but I like it - looks like a braid of Little Red's hair with Secretariat's wrapped around it:

I briefly thought about finding her actual Secretariat hairs (plucked from his brush during a Claiborne Farms tour) and having those woven into it too, but wisely decided against it.

I hope all of your Christmases were fantastic!  Connor cleaned up in my Christmas gifts, but that's a subject for another day!

Let's talk about the biggest achievements your horse has accomplished.  I'm not talking about you as a rider - I want to know what your ponykins has done to make you proud.  Is there a glorious satin collection, did he/she figure out some dressage movement that took months to learn, or are is it just a great day when your butt stays in the saddle?  

Like Bekka, the canter is absolutely Connor and I's greatest achievement.


The Welsh Cob is a breed bred specifically to pull wagons with a trot big enough to keep up with a full-sized war horse, while still being small and thrifty.  Translation: good at trotting on the forehand.  Bad at cantering and shifting weight back.

Flat canter in October of 2011.

Same day as the above picture, but really pulling himself with his front end here. (That said, I love this picture of us, from before I owned him!)

We've done 5 or so clinics with Cathy Jones-Forsberg since May of 2012, so she's known us since the beginning of our partnership, and at our last one in September of 2014, she had this to say on his canter:

"His canter is phenomenal, so much better.  He didn't have a canter when I first met you (May of 2012), he was the king of trantering.  It's a testament to [you and trainer] that you have made so much progress with his canter, because it's a lot easier to improve a trot than a canter.  He's a lot stronger in his body, and has a lot more "tools behind" to create that compact canter."

Cathy clinic, September 2014

It's still a work in progress, but I'm so proud of how far it has come.  It used to be flat, and runny and strung out, with his legs trailing behind him and his weight on his forehand.  Now, I am able to put it together.  I had to learn a lot about impulsion and getting him to shift his weight back, and he had to get a lot stronger.


With a better canter, we not only get a better canter, we get better jumps as well.  It's the gift that gives in all 3 phases of eventing.

Merry Christmas from CobJockey and Connor!

I'm so behind!


Last week, we talked about our babies.  This week, let's talk about our greenies.  Who trained your horse?  Is your ponykins still in the process of figuring out this whole monkey-on-my-back thing, did you send off for thirty or sixty or ninety days, or did you buy a horse with all the bells and whistles?  Who has helped your horse become what he or she is today?

As I said in my first The Owls Approve Blog Hop, Connor flunked out of the driving barn for being too hot to be a lady's driving horse.  I can only imagine how they came to that conclusion, after having been on his back for several scrambly spooks.  His spooking breakdown is like 90% spooks-in-place (cat crouch spooks), and 10% teleportation, where you suddenly regain control of him and go "How the heck did we get over here?" That, in a cart?  No thank you!

But, he got a really good basic education both under saddle and I assume in harness from them.  When I got him, he had basically the equivalent of 60 days on him, and had then been in a field for about 9 months.

Our first, uh, "jump" - taken before I owned him.

Since then, it's been my trainer training him through me.  That is to say, I ride, and she is able to essentially explain to me what she would be doing with her aids if she were the one riding him.  Not everyone can teach in that way, and I'm grateful that she can.

Sometimes things go so sideways that she can't figure out what's going on, and then she'll ask to ride him.  She's probably been on him a total of 10-15 rides, including a clinic, in 3 years.

He got a few trainer rides while I was in California this summer.

I don't exactly know when a horse stops being green, but my gut says it's been within the last 12 months, when we finally figured out straightness and I started to get control of individual body parts.  The making of the horse has been a fun adventure, and one I could not have undertaken without my trainer!

In the comments of my RIP GDHT post, Abigail said she enjoyed hearing about our first event, and that she'd like to read more of our early show recaps.  I've decided to replace my show results page (in the top navigation bar) with this.  Being able to read the posts that I wrote during the shows means a whole lot more than just seeing what place we finished.  The numbers only say so much in the journey of a green horse.

Photo by Gingereventer Photography

My crazy work schedule meant a missed lesson this week, which we made up on Sunday.  In daylight.  In the open field across the street.  HALLELUJAH!

Moment of brutal honesty: I didn't even attempt to clean the leg he puts on the ground in order to eat grass under the fence in turnout.  It was a muddy trainwreck.

My trainer asked if I wanted to borrow Louie's saddle (big drafty paint X guy, we've borrowed it in the past) and also ride in my jump bridle to change things up a little.  I am so glad I said yes, because if I hadn't, I probably would have been a lawn dart.  Connor was hyper.  I asked for the canter in warmup and got a squeal.  A squeal!  A quiet little pony sized squeal.  What does he think he is, a racehorse?!

It's an event saddle made in England, and is definitely the most British piece of tack I've ever seen.

We got to work with my trainer, and in the first five minutes, Connor completely lost his shit over the following things occurring more or less simultaneously:
- Neighbor kid playing basketball about 400m away
- Bare patch of dirt in the grass
- Shadow of jump standard being cast on the ground (to be fair, it was the first sunny day in three weeks here.  He probably forgot what shadows are).

He jumped in the air, threw his head in my lap and scrambled backwards/sideways, and then got even more scared by his own spooking.  Oh boy.  So we started at the walk, and ended up having an extremely productive lesson, surprisingly.

"What, me, scare myself spooking?  Doesn't sound likely."

One of the biggest things we've learned recently is that I hold too much with the outside rein in both directions, so he can't lengthen the outside of his body to move it around the inside.  When I think about a soft outside elbow with my outside hand a bit forward, he's able to bend a lot better.

Today's lesson was a lot about doing the following things on a circle:
1) encourage him to lengthen the outside of his body with a soft outside elbow and an outside half halt, then
2) encourage him to bend around my inside leg, using my inside rein to guide him, making sure that my hips are straight but my shoulders are bending, to put him in shoulder fore on the circle

She had me focus on one point per quarter of the circle to plan ahead for his bend, so that it was more consistent.  The result was that he was soft and bendy in both directions, including the left, although it was harder that direction.




At the end she asked me if I had any questions.  I did.  "Is it okay to like riding him better in a bit with more leverage than the snaffle?  I feel like I am a bad person for preferring the way he goes in the elevator, but it's like I have to whisper when he's wearing it, and I have to shout in the loose ring."

She said, no, it's fine, and she actually wants me to ride in the elevator for a little while because we're retraining both my and his sense of feel.  He likes to lay on my hands (and when he does over terrain, he trips) and this is a tool to help us not do that.  I rode with very little contact today, and she said he looked better than she'd seen in months.

All in all, a really productive lesson.  Way to channel that excess energy into good work, little buddy.