Cob Jockey

It's here!

And...the story isn't over yet.

Because what about my saddle fitting journey could be easy?

The good news? It's here and beautiful.

The bad news? It's missing a couple of key features we discussed that I won't budge on, like serge panels and both billets coming off the waist of the saddle.

Now, normally with a situation like this I wouldn't post about it til it's done and over with, and I know what the full story is, but since I posted it was coming this week I feel like you guys deserve an update. That said, I'm going to encourage you all to suspend your outrage until we all - myself included - know exactly what happened and why, because I don't yet.

Going to swap out that pink rhinestone, but otherwise, this is exactly what I asked for.

I've texted the saddle fitter, but she has a very valid and legit reason for being delayed in checking into it, so it may be a couple days before we talk. GP trainer was incredulous that those features would be left off, and says in all her years of working with Patrick this is the first mistake she's seen. She also said they have a track record of doing whatever it takes to make the saddle owners happy, and she's not at all concerned that they won't fix it.

I did ride in it last night in my lesson, and the flap length is perfect (14") and the balance is perfect. The blocks are not right at all, but - eyyyyyyyyyyyy - they're Velcro! So we're just going to order a shorter set.

Definitely should have checked what blocks it was coming with by default, these are waaaaaaaaaaaaay too big, lol.

Connor wasn't super happy in it, but I'm not fussed about that yet because I think with a billet change and some flocking adjustments he will be. Mary thinks it needs the flocking reduced in the waist - it's on the same tree as the loaner, which he loves, but the loaner has a lot less flocking in the waist area. It's a similar problem to the Trilogy, and we all know how he felt about that.

Mary came down on a weeknight to my lesson with a bottle of wine because she knew I shed some tears over this and she is The Best Friend. And then she cooled him out bareback for me while I drank my sorrows away.

So, while I wish this was a happy ending, we're not quite there yet. And, you know, since I'm only going to be riding my horse once a week for the next few months, if it does have to go back to England, I'm not upset about it. It's just one more entertaining chapter in my terrible, horrible, no good very bad saddle hunt!

Last night around 8pm, I got a text from one of my fellow co-op members. "Hey, thought you'd want to know Connor is breathing unusually hard as he eats his hay tonight. I've also heard him cough and sneeze a couple times too. He looks normal otherwise."

I went straight out there of course, and found a totally normal horse that was breathing slightly fast, and had his nostrils flared ever so slightly more than normal. But he nickered at me when he saw me (which he always does, except that time he colicked) and the issue was generally so subtle, I was impressed that barnmate noticed it at all (this is why this co-op works!)

Camo Hank, in his natural environment

I watched him drink and pee. I pulled him out of his stall and checked for dehydration (no), temperature (normal), lameness (no), and a digital pulse (no). Next I threw him on the lunge line, where he was, again, absolutely normal in terms of movement and reaction to stimuli. I got his heart rate up, and still, he never coughed or sneezed.

That was about the time I was like well, I need to bring his respiration rate down regardless, so I'm going to give him a long, cold bath. And within a few minutes, his nostrils and respiration rate both went back to normal and stayed there.

So...he was just hot? 3 hours after coming in for the night? It IS unusually warm here right now, with highs in the mid 80s. I'd normally have clipped him by now, but our Welsh show is being held quite late this year, in mid-October, and I can't clip him til after that. The coughing and sneezing my barnmate heard could have been related, or it also could have been a coincidence precipitated by the farm next to us beginning their fall corn harvest yesterday. 

I don't get to see many morning sunrises out here since I'm the night crew, but this one was spectacular!

I went out this morning to take his temp, just to make sure this isn't a respiratory illness he picked up at the show, and he was normal and so was his temp. So I'm going to go out in the middle of the day to bring him in before it gets too hot every day until the weather breaks. The perks of living close with a flexible job.

He better stay healthy, both because I love him and because...my saddle arrives on Wednesday!

What a show yesterday ended up being! 

It had everything - highs, lows, comedy, tragedy - and a couple of good lessons along the way.

We were stabled next to NK, whom I hadn't seen since I stopped riding with her 2 years ago (for no reason other than she's closer to me, but more difficult to get to than CGP).

If you remember, my whole goal for this show was to do it for fun, and because we qualified for championships, because why not? The weather ended up being amazing - highs in the low to mid 70s underneath those perfect late-September Indiana skies. My barnmate brought her coming 3 y/o as a non-compete just to see the sights and stay overnight off the property for the first time ever.

Sunday morning dawned clear, cold and panic-inducing, as I realized that I did not, in fact, have enough waxed thread to make it through to the last show of the season. I took a deep breath and calculated that if I did fewer, larger braids and only started the thread near the end of the braid instead of the top, I MIGHT make it. And worst case I could leave the forelock down and pretend he was a stallion. 

I ended up using every. Last. Millimeter. Of thread.

Shitty, shitty braids, lol.

Connor was bothered by those braids for the first time ever for some reason, and kept using a hind foot to scratch them out, which of course was worst case scenario for braids that had a lot less structural integrity than they normally do, but they did live.

Horses that try to scratch their braids out get tied to the wall, and are not happy about it.

But this isn't a blog about braiding, this is a blog about riding. We had two tests on Sunday, which I never do with this horse, but again, we were there 100% for fun. We rode 2-3 for the Imperio Trophy at 9am and then again for the 2-3 AA championship at 11am. Both tests, being championship rides, could be ridden with spurs but I could not carry a whip after warm-up.

Barnmate is such a badass. After lunging and warming up in an unused arena to check her steering and brakes, she walked her baby horse all the way around the warm-up ring, in this bosal hackamore, and he never put a foot wrong or screamed once. On a colt she bred and backed herself. Very impressed!

For the Imperio 2-3, he was quite behind my leg. I had gone for relaxation in warm-up and never really gotten him quite jazzed up enough for a test without a whip. It was a steady, workmanlike test with one big error when he broke in the second canter serpentine and then I picked up the wrong lead because OMG I can never remember which lead we're on when he breaks in a serpentine! Then I had to fix it in order to do the simple change.

But it didn't feel that bad, so I was surprised to see our lowest score of the season by a lot, a 57%.

Back at the stalls, I was hemming and hawing about whether to scratch the 2-3 championship ride. The idea of legging him through that a second time was exhausting. I actually made a pros and cons list (there were literally no cons, aside from potentially bruising my pride in front of the local IDS crowd), talked to Austen about it, and then the deciding factor was watching a video one of my former eventing teammates took of my first ride. I left a LOT of stupid points on the table, and I knew I could at least do better in accuracy.

Just, meh.

So I pulled a tired, confused Connor out of his stall, gave myself a 10 minute warmup that largely consisted of transitions between gaits backed up with spurs then whip if he didn't react to my leg in time, and headed in.

I took this GIF just to show off how my disco ball of a browband blinded the entire crowd, lol. Although fun fact, in the inconsistency of the angle, you can see me fighting to stay over his right side as he continually fights to tip my hip upward and off of him

We f***** brought it.

This scored an 8.0. Right in front of the judge. I'm so proud.

Every movement, I went for more, but tactfully, since I didn't have a ton of horse and being too aggressive would have led to him breaking gait, not giving me more impulsion. More angle, more bend, more lengthening, more stretch. Was it perfect? Absolutely not. Was it a thousand percent improved from the Imperio ride? You bet.

Position has gone to shit here but my horse is bringing it.

When they announced my score over the intercom of 63.4%, for an improvement of 6% from the same test two hours prior, I was ecstatic. And when they announced we won the championship class, I was stunned. I've left this show crying twice in the past, completely lost on the path of Dressage, so to come home with a blue ribbon (well, I'll receive it at the banquet in November) was just so sweet.

Speaking of the poor announcer, they announced breeder and breeding at this show, and she did an admirable job of trying to read Connor's dam's name (*Bwlchllan Bessie) the first time, but the second time, she took the easy route out with "...and out of a Derwen Desert Express daughter". I cracked up.

The biggest win of this whole show? We did the whole thing in the thin, 3 piece Myler, the bit he goes best in but also the absolute easiest for him to get his tongue over, which often happened in the warm-up ring at shows in the past. It's one thing that he hasn't been trying to get his tongue over at home, but to do it in a show? It's truly a comment on my hands improving.

I love you, buddy <3

And with that, we are truly done with Second!

This is way too much thought and effort for the Friday of one of the toughest weeks of work I've had in a long time. But I'm too emotionally invested in this USEF amateur rule stuff to let this sit til next week. So let's do it!

On Wednesday, the USEF held a second webinar on the 5 proposed changes to the USEF amateur rule. (To see the highlights of the first one and to learn about all 5 rules in detail, see my post here.)  The purpose of this one was to go over the results of the survey they held over the last month asking for the public's opinion on the rule.

To start: they got almost 10,000 responses! I don't know what the usual response level to a USEF survey is, but they seemed shocked and delighted to get that many, so I'm guessing it's nowhere near 10,000. 

I'm happy (and kinda shocked) to report that Dressage brought it and took the top spot:

Sorry for the crappy screenshots, I was at the barn waiting on my virtual lesson to start.

And even the Welsh people showed up, with 31 respondents:

The TL;DR here is that people generally had no issue with the things I thought might be controversial, and they had issues with the things I think are no brainers. Let's start with Proposal 1, which allows amateurs to be paid for grooming, lunging, tacking horses, etc. By the way, everything in P1 is ALREADY LEGAL (up to the $300 limit) except lunging, so this one isn't a huge change, and was the most well-supported out of all the changes.

Proposal 2, which would allow amateurs to teach up-down lessons with a laundry list of guardrails around it, was much less clearly supported.

And this gets even more interesting when you drill down into which disciplines did/did not support this one. Bet you thought H/J would hate it the most, right? Surprise!

The H/J people may have complained the loudest about this one, but the Dressage folks were the most evenly divided in terms of yes/no. You'll note that the breed disciplines covered on that slide were actually strongly in favor of it, and as a result, they are going to submit this proposal to the rules committee stating that this rule will only go into effect for certain breed organizations that want it, and the disciplines (USDF, USHJA etc) will look at how that works out for those breed orgs in 2022 and then make a decision for themselves.

I'm split on this one. On the one hand, I love this rule. I like that they're admitting amateurs have a lot to teach the next generation, and that teaching up/down lessons doesn't make you a GP rider, and that there's a not insignificant number of AAs that show open so that they can earn the money it takes to show at all. On the other hand, I think it's cool that they listened to their members and they're allowing different groups to show under different rules. More of that, please.

Next up, my pet rule, the social media ambassador rule. This one is complex in a way that makes sense to me, as someone who has lived this life and went pro (and then AA again) over it. I think they nailed the differences between a sponsored athlete, a brand ambassador and an influencer. As a reminder:

Just to clarify, because I've seen a lot of people get lit up about this for the wrong reasons, you CAN wear maker's marks (like the giant Fairfax plaque on my new bridle), or barn logos (a polo shirt with GP trainer's logo on it) at shows, you just cannot also be accepting renumeration to do so.

This one passed but not by nearly as much as I think it should have. I really don't get the negativity here, unless it's just jealousy or not understanding how brand ambassadorship works.  How on earth are you more okay with AAs making money for working with horses directly, but not okay with someone sitting behind a keyboard making money and staying an amateur? If this rule is all about leveling the playing field for non-pros, I really do not understand why the votes went the way they did here. I am not a better rider because I accepted some free boots a few years ago.

(I will not blame Boomers, I will not blame Boomers)

The last one to "pass" (not that the survey was a vote) was the one that will allow anyone under the age of 25 to try being a pro after they age out of juniors and then if they don't like it, go back to being an AA without the current one year waiting period. Straightforward, and got broad support:

Those four will be put to the extraordinary rules committee this December for the 2022 season. If they get approved, they will also have to (and plan to) strike the $300 limit entirely:

The only one that is entirely on hold is the rule moving the age limit for juniors up to 21. See my previous post for the absolutely hysterical H/J peoples' comments on how this will affect parents' ability to use their daughter's big eq horse "investment" to pay for college. Which is apparently 1. A Thing and 2. A Common Thing, or at least they made it sound like it was. As a risk-averse investor, let me tell you how that makes me feel, lol.

Anyway, this one brought out a lot of hand-wringing from people. I, personally, voted for it. Whatever we can do to keep kids in the sport through one of the toughest periods of their lives to stay in it, let's do it. But it's on hold for this year and will not be presented to the committee.

I wish they've have broken these out by discipline because this one really would have been dominated by the H/J folks for sure.

If you didn't get to take the survey but you want your voice to be heard on this topic, there will be a public comment period between these rules being added to the extraordinary rule change list and the vote that will happen in December, so keep an eye out for that (and I'll try to share it if I see it). Unlike the survey, you will have to be a USEF member in order to comment.

What are your thoughts on these rules?

One of the things I love about my GP trainer is that she's just as fascinated with biomechanics as she is with winning classes (you know, that whole Mary Wanless thing). With the season basically over and just a month left before he goes to her for training, she's enthusiastically dove into my request to focus only on biomechanics for now.

Two lessons ago, last week, it was the posting trot. She identified that my left lower leg was kicking forward in the posting trot, and my right one didn't have enough internal rotation, which meant I didn't really have my right thigh on him, and I had more of the back of my calf on the horse than the side. In other words, that old weak right glute med problem that I had thought I solved. And she also pointed out that this was just as or possibly more important than my crooked pelvis discovery. A week of playing with that later, and I can say she is definitely not wrong about that.

After a week of focusing on that both in and out of the saddle (and one very tired right glute med later!), last night's lesson was sitting trot. I picked it up, and she was like okay, we gotta fix this.

My phone is full of pictures of this browband in different lights because it's so damn pretty!

I've never found Connor's trot hard to sit, but I also was annoyed by the "lack of swing through the back" comments we got a couple times this year, and I know I have a tendency to come down onto the saddle harder than he probably prefers, especially when I'm nervous in the show ring!

First she pointed out that my torso was leaned back behind the vertical a bit, and every time that happened, my hands immediately and excessively started bouncing up and down. Torso on the the vertical, hands still. "When you're leaned back, the energy goes out your shoulder blades rather than out of the top of your head and the bottoms of your feet like it should."

She had me play with this by asking me to exaggerate leaning back behind the vertical with my hands in front of me to see what it did to them. You should try this at home, I looked like a cartoon character playing the piano, my hands moved so much, lol.

What, me, lean back? PC: my mom

Once I had internalized "leaning forward" (sitting straight) enough, she had me stand up in the saddle at the walk. "See how hard that is? You need to put your pelvis forward so it's over your center of gravity and then kneel into your knees. Your spur should point out behind you, not angled toward his belly."

She did her best at explaining this to me, but it wasn't until I was sitting the trot a few minutes later and she said again "the energy should go out the top of your head and the bottoms of your feet" that suddenly it all clicked. Actually, a lot of things clicked, going back to Kate and Megan's lesson and Mary Wanless saying "don't crush my hand" with her hand between my boot and the stirrup tread. I can't even describe it well, but the foot thing, as soon as she said that, I felt like a transformer that clicked into "the good sitting trot place". 

The energy is definitely going out my shoulder blades here, and of course my shock absorbers are totally neutralized, look at where my feet are! Although I'll be a little kind to myself and remind everyone this was my first real ride in this saddle, and my leathers were a hole too short.

I wouldn't have told you before that I didn't have enough weight in my stirrups (but lol see previous photo!) because I never lose them, and it's not like I jammed my foot into them when she said that, but by thinking about the energy coming out of bottoms of my feet and the tops of my head, I felt my legs lengthen a smidge and I put maybe 5% more weight into my irons, and suddenly my whole body felt like a tense yet elastic rubber band that was easily able to absorb the motion of the sitting trot, without my butt leaving the saddle at all.

"I've never used that cue before!" she said. "Well I'm glad you did, something about it just totally clicked," I said.

May...have done a thing. More to come, lol

Connor, for his part, thoroughly enjoyed being a virtual lunge lesson pony and trotted around like a good boy the whole night, but REALLY started to swing through his back when I got it. We got our first "Wowwwwwwww" in weeks from her.

At the end, we worked on encouraging him to bend and flex a little bit more while maintaining my new position, which was about as complex as I could have probably handled in the moment. "See, when your position is like this, everything else becomes a lot more effortless," she said. "I don't want to do anything more, this is a good place to get to and gives you good homework."

It's a good feeling when you can't wait to do your homework!