Cob Jockey

Ever since Disco came home, Mary has been dying to free jump him, but the holidays and the weather made that impossible until last night. And boy was it worth the wait.

 

Mary and I have free jumped enough non-Warmblood horses at this point that I know what to expect from the first time, even for horses that end up enjoying and having aptitude for jumping. They're uncertain, they don't know how to use their bodies, they jump weird. We give them a positive experience, but we don't push them, and it's not usually until the second or third time that they really start to figure it out and show us what they might be made of. 

Of course, with testosterone on our side, I also joked that I felt like Disco would have all the attitude of a 19 year old Tik Tok star as soon as he jumped his first fence, and, well.

Nobody tell him those were ground poles, he thinks he just won the Olympics, lol

He ate it up.

He sent himself around and around at first, ears up, kicking his heels up when he finished a line like "Did you see how awesome I am?"

Man I love stallions, lol

As the jumps went up, his enthusiasm continued. He had a rail or two as he made some green horse pace and judgment mistakes, but generally he was very aware of his feet. 

I was also somewhat stunned to see him actually move for the first time. Here I thought he wasn't capable of moving like this, but he's been playing me.

We don't normally put the third fence up to an oxer for a horse's first time through the chute, but Mary noted that he was not fazed at all by any of this, and he really seemed to be enjoying it even after all the fences were up to verticals, so she put the back rail up.

This was the first time he was ever impressed by something, but he still went over, and he showed us what those hindquarters are capable of.

Baby's first oxer!

 

We sent him over the oxer one more time so he could prove to himself that he could do it before taking the back rail down and letting him end on an easy, confidence building one:

Knowing I had a 3 day weekend last weekend with gorgeous weather for hauling, I opted to take an in-person lesson. I think it's well-established that I get a lot out of virtual lessons, but there are some things you just can't do virtually. And I knew I needed a left rein intervention.

Could not be happier with this rig after the addition of the Shocker Hitch

It was a good decision.

The best drinker. First thing he does no matter where we go or how long the trip is.

She asked what I wanted to work on. I said I've been feeling compelled to pull on the left rein, which I know probably means I'm not using enough left leg. Even when he's properly bent to the left, it's like he won't tuck the left wing of his mandible, and I feel the need to pull, and something just wasn't clicking.

Oh, and did I mention I showed up in a bareback pad without warning?

I almost can't bring myself to say this sentence, but I think he's starting to not like the CWD 100% for Dressage. And also, I knew what I wanted to work on and that I could feel that stuff more easily in the bareback pad than in a saddle anyway. And thirdly, there's nothing I can't do in the Brockamp and a pair of silicone full seats, so I knew it wouldn't limit my lesson to be bareback.

Start to finish, this was not a lesson we could've done virtually. First, she put her hands on him to see what was going on physically with the left side. 

She found that he was really stuck at the base of the neck, and did a few minutes of stretching. Not that she's a body worker, but as soon as we walked off, I could feel a difference not unlike after his favorite body worker puts his poll and neck back into place.

But even with his neck feeling better, something still wasn't right. "Can I get on him?" she said. "Please," I said. "This is so great, I don't even have to put boots on, and there are no stirrups to mess with!" (Sharing stirrups for 5'10-ish her and 5'1 me is...challenging). She fell in love with the Brockamp as soon as she sat down, and was thrilled to learn they come in teal.

Pretty quickly she identified that he was ignoring my left leg. She also said that as a result of that, he was constantly ping ponging between the two sides of my body in such a way that made me feel that I had to constantly answer him with rein movement, which led to inconsistent contact, which made the whole situation worse, especially in a straight bar bit like he goes in.

After a couple of intense minutes of reinstalling respect for leg aids and consistent contact, she got a way better left SI out of him than I ever have.

Not 5 minutes later, I got back on and had a completely different horse.

Worth the price of admission and $50 in gas

I still had a few things to polish. She pointed out part of my perennial left SI problem was that I was blocking him with the outside rein. I needed a more elastic, forward feel in the outside elbow in both directions, without giving the rein away. I also need to think collarbone forward pretty much all the time right now. Mary Wanless, I miss you.

But for the most part, I had thought this left SI problem was related to where I was sitting in the saddle, but that wasn't the case. It had a lot more to do with the horse not moving his ribcage over when I put my left leg on.

We only touched the canter a bit, which was fine with me because after she had him for two weeks last month, there is nothing I can do to screw his canter up. I may not improve it, but I can't make it worse. Unlike the walk and trot which I am perfectly capable of making worse.

My barnmate of 6 years stopped in her tracks and said "Wow, that's so uphill and nice!" when she saw his canter last week.

We did some SI in the canter, and she had me give forward to scratch his neck with the inside rein every so often to make sure I wasn't holding with that left rein.

Cooling out on the track. I wasn't kidding when I told her there's nothing I won't do in a pair of silicone full seats and the Brockamp.

All in all, it was a great lesson and a fantastic reminder that the 4 hour round trip over there IS still worth it, even with virtual lessons.

IEA is hosting their annual horse trial this weekend (with FOUR HUNDRED AND TWENTY ENTRIES y'all! Eventing is alive and well in Indiana) and since I'm the Hoosier Horse Park Hotel, I got a houseguest last night!

Holly of Party Pony Eventing crashed with me last night, so of course I had to get her on Connor. I think she's only the second third blogger that's ever ridden him besides Austen and Nicole, which doesn't sound right given as many bloggers as I've met (credit L. Williams), but we don't get many visitors to Indiana, haha.

I had been feeling lazy for my own ride before she got there, so I had put him in his Brockcamp bareback pad, and Holly was game to get on a strange horse bareback. You go girl, I definitely would've been too chicken for that!

As she got on, I said "I'm sorry for your wallet, you will want one of these bareback pads in about 5 seconds" and she was immediately like "Oh...oh yeah...I want one" haha

She rode him really well after I told her to shorten her reins several feet, lol. I don't know what it is about Connor, but every single educated rider I put on him starts out with too long of a rein. It has to be something about his neck proportions and being a pony when people are used to riding horses. Makes me feel better about the eight years it took me to learn to ride with short enough reins on him.

She's the third person that isn't me that's ridden him in the past two weeks, and it's just so much fun to see how well-trained he is, that people can get on and do the fun things with him. My barnmate in particular gets to feel feelings on Connor she's never felt on a horse before, and she's constantly amazed.

We wrapped up the evening with biking for margaritas and tacos, as one does on horse show weekends.

Good luck this weekend, Holly!

Sunset is up to 5:59pm here, which means if I bolt from my desk at 5pm sharp, change, drive 8 minutes to the barn, do the bare minimum of grooming and use a bareback pad, I have just enough time for a 20-30 minute ride outside. Which, by this point in the winter, we all desperately need.

 
The Brockcamp Spezial bareback pad continues to be one of my better investments and deserves a proper review at some point. On this night, the neighbors let their English Mastiffs loose and they ran at the fence toward Connor, which made him predictably jump, but I was sitting cool and sticky (haha) with my silicone full seats on the suede Brockcamp and was never in danger of being unseated.

With every week that goes by I have to rush this hack a little less. Come on sun, you can do it!

As you can probably tell by my lack of posting lately, I haven't had time to even see my horse recently, let alone ride.

For the first week of March, I was at my company's sales kickoff with 7,999 of my colleagues in Vegas.  Kickoff is the one time a year I get to meet co-workers in real life, and it was critically important to my career to introduce myself to as many people as possible, even if it was at midnight by the blackjack table.

(Who am I kidding, ESPECIALLY if it was at midnight by the blackjack table.  #techindustrylife)

Also #techindustrylife: they hired Imagine Dragons to play a private show, and I got pushed up to the front row by nice taller gentlemen who wanted to make sure I could see.

That led to getting almost no sleep all week, which led to my run-down immune system greeting a stomach bug with open arms starting Thursday night, which led to a hellish flight home on Friday, which led to epic jet lag on Saturday, which combined with daylight savings time making it a 4 hour time change instead of the usual 3 on Sunday made me feel just awful all weekend.


(But I'm not complaining about DST because YAY DAYLIGHT!)

Even though I still wasn't feeling great, I managed to drag myself out to the barn on Sunday, which was the first time I'd seen my horse in a week.  Have I mentioned lately how grateful I am for boarding care so good, I don't even have to check in while I'm traveling and everything is just fine?

So sleepy.  So cuddly.

Lifting the curry to groom him felt like an enormous, slow-motion task, so a productive ride wasn't happening.  But I figured just being on a horse would make me feel more like myself, so I tossed the bareback pad on, played the Cardinals spring training game radio broadcast, and we toodled.

As we toodled, I thought about how long it's taken to get this horse to this point: that even when I feel like crap with slow-mo reaction speed, and it's windy and the doors are banging against the indoor and he's not wearing a saddle, I can trust him to powerwalk on the buckle, neck rein, stop dead when I say 'whoa', and do it all cheerfully with his ears up the whole time.

Ears up!

It has taken a LONG. TIME. to get to this point.  But it means more to me than anything he could ever do in the show ring, because off and on for the rest of my career, I will have weeks like this one, where I haven't ridden consistently in weeks, showing seems like a distant memory, and I barely have the energy to unpack my suitcase.  Having a horse that cheerfully serves as a four legged couch when I need it and doesn't do anything stupid really, really matters to me. 

Thanks buddy, you're the best <3

I'm here to tell you that I had a jumping lesson bareback on Thursday.  Not only did I survive. but it was actually fun AND productive.

(Sidenote: I keep hearing how that makes me a badass and how "I could never do that."  Just a few years ago I used to be so terrified of being bareback that I once curled in the fetal position on  a showing third/schooling 4th mare while being lunged.  In college.  And I definitely have jumping hangups too.  So if I can do it, you can do it.  Although to be fair, we're basically talking about cavaletti height here...)

Mary brieless jumping the horse I curled into the fetal position on...

Anyway, so Thursday, my trainer was like, "I really would like to jump tonight.  Are you okay with that?"  I said, "Sure, I know you're not going to put them up to 3'3 or whatever," and she said, "No, I'm not that mean."

We ended up working on a line the whole lesson.  Crossrail, two stride, crossrail, with placing poles everywhere.  I have the same problem with him that A Gift Horse talked about with O this morning. He likes to check things out before takeoff:

July 2013

If he did that while I was jumping bareback, it was really hard to follow.  If he didn't, the jump flowed really smoothly and my position was great.  So I had the best success giving him a big half halt, still in the elevator bit, right as we entered the line.  It had the effect of 1) balancing him back to front and 2) encouraging him to stay up.

Thrilled about going to his lesson

As far as the rest of my position went bareback, she had me really focus on going into the line with my seat back and in a good position with my legs. Torturously, we also focused on not letting him think he was done after he successfully did a line, and she made me keep cantering, even though by the end of the line I was like "my thighs are seriously going to fall off of my body."

Finally, he gave me a clean flying lead change when I was trying to do a simple across the diagonal!  Except it was so smooth, and I had no idea what happened, my brain processed it as "Something I didn't understand happened, he must still be on the wrong lead" so I brought him back down!  He probably thinks he did the wrong thing, shame on me.  Trainer was surprised/impressed though.

This pony gives me the feeling that there's nothing I can't conquer while on his back, even if it makes me a little nervous: going BN for the first time, jumping 2'9 for the first time...


...jumping bareback for the first time on Sunday!

Yeah, it's not huge, and in fact, I almost lowered it before I started before I came down with a massive case of YOLO and just went for it.  I checked in with all of the concepts from our lesson on Saturday and then decided against drilling him again.  He worked hard physically, he clearly got the concepts, we haven't jumped in six weeks.

Where I parked him while I lowered the second element of the line to a ground line.  Also, if you're wondering why he looks like a Thelwell pony, I'm training his mane over with the help of his neck blanket and letting it grow out until my first spring outing, or my trainer can't take it anymore.

To everyone who is considering jumping bareback for the first time, just do it.  You will probably surprise yourself.  It won't surprise anyone who has seen pictures of me jumping with stirrups that I was way better at following him without stirrups.  It wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it would be.

And judging by the way his ears pricked every time he approached the line, I would say it was a good decision for both of us!

Dramatic reenaction of the pricked ears, but also, someone got creative with the Dressage cones.  If only we were on a beach and not in the land of -6 F this week...

Sigh.


I rode bareback and bridleless for the first time ever (!) on Saturday, and noticed the above mark while I was doing it.  Of course my initial reaction was to panic that it is an acquired leukoderma.  Spoiler alert, it is not.

After consulting with Mary, we deduced that it is likely a result of friction from my bareback pad slipping back during my lesson on Thursday for the following reasons:
1) I've never noticed it before, and I can see over his back, so it is likely new since Thursday.
2) Thursday was my second bareback ride.
3) He's clipped.
4) The pad slipped back during the lesson, and it's likely that the sewn-on handle was under my crotch during the ride.
5) As Mary said, "You're a flyweight, you have a good seat, and it was one ride.  It's way more likely to be friction than pressure."

The problem, now, is solving that problem.  He's not sore, and the white hairs will stay until he sheds out (unless I let it continue and kill the pigment cells - which I won't!), so I won't have a barometer to guide me and tell me if there is friction there or not.  I'm going to try various combinations of pads, including my half pad, to see what works.  If I can't figure it out, I'll figure out how to borrow a saddle.

It's always something!

PS - I am going to put these up on the blog this week!

This not-having-a-saddle thing is great.  You know what's really hard to do without a saddle?  Brace against your stirrups and make your horse crooked.  You know what my worst habits are?  Bracing against my stirrups and making my horse crooked.

I'm just going to break up this wall of text with pictures of Connor being cute, don't mind me...

My trainer asked how things were going at my lesson last night, and I said, "I'm sore, but he's straighter than ever!"  She, as usual, magically knew how to reinforce that straightness further, and had me bend-counterbend on a square in the middle of the ring without pulling on the reins until he was really listening to my seat, first at the walk and then at the trot.



When I'm bareback, either seatbone is on either side of his spine, and asking for bend feels like moving one seatbone and the top of my thigh closer to his spine than usual.  Her voice in my head from last summer: "Reins do not create the bend, the seat creates the bend!"

She also had me focus on aiming his chest straight at each wall once his shoulders were unlocked, which we differed in opinion on - he wanted to throw himself sideways down the short side and move straight on the long sides, but I said no (and almost came off once when we continued to "discuss" that right up to the wall, and he decided we were going one way while I wanted his shoulders in a different direction).


We moved on to bend-counterbend at the canter (picking up the canter has been the hardest without a saddle. I think my aids feel different to him, but I'm not sure how yet).  The last thing we did was a great exercise, which was:

- Trot down centerline, leg yield to wall at the opposite corner of the ring
- Pick up canter when you get to the wall
- Shallow loop down long side

The first time I did it, I made my loop too deep and Connor broke.  "That was...a bit too ambitious." But it got progressively better as I let go of the reins and focused on straightening him with my seat.  Toward the end, it felt like he was jumping into the canter in almost a leg yield in the second half of the shallow loop, and it was a really cool feeling.

4 CrossFit workouts and riding bareback all week...whew!

We had our first of many bareback rides tonight, an hour after my saddle went to the post office!

He looks confused.  Where is my saddle?

And you know, I'm pretty damn cheerful about having to ride without a saddle for two months.  If I wasn't, I would be trying a lot harder to find an interim saddle.  I never got a chance to be a kid racing around bareback, and now I get to - although it will be less racing and more "where is his spine in relation to my hip bone" sort of stuff.

Plus seriously, who can keep from giggling when they see this awesome thing?  I am pretty sure this is surplus fabric left over from a 1970's sofa manufacturer.  (Pony bareback pad, by Toklat.)

It's going to be a good two months!

Well, my December goals are pretty easy!  I am now saddleless!


I had unofficially accepted a lower offer only on the condition that the auction ended without a bid, like it seemed it would for the second time in a row, but someone bid at the last second and it sold for full price. *happydance*

The buyer's in for a cruel surprise, the box is a liar.  There's no County in there.  Also, Christmas decorations!

So December goals are:

1. Get good at riding bareback
2. Continue to train hard while riding bareback - because let's face it, my natural inclination when on a warm fuzzy  not fuzzy! pony in sub-freezing temperatures will be to toodle around with a quarter sheet for a while and then get off.
3. Don't fall off in the arena.
4. Don't fall off on the trails.
5. I still haven't fallen off of this pony yet - don't fall off anywhere.

The real question is, am I going to get bored enough by the end of January to attempt bareback poles/cavaletti/jumping?  And, is our two month stint without a saddle going to seriously put our training back?  What are we going to look like after I'm not able to brace against one stirrup or the other?  There are positives and negatives to riding bareback, but having a CWD that fits that my best friend can work on for me outweighs all of the negatives.

Patience...!

"I forgot my saddle at home, do you want me to go bareback or borrow a saddle?"

Bemused laughter.  "Umm...bareback, if that's okay with you."

"Sure."  (My sore muscles from CrossFit said no, my mouth said yes.)

I freakin love him.

It ended up being an awesome lesson, and I'll say our Dressage was better than it was Sunday, but we were focusing on lateral movements and total pony body control, so that makes sense.

The big exercise of the lesson was this:

To get warmed up for it, shoulder in, then 8m circle at each letter.

Then:

Shoulder in coming around the corner, two steps forward in shoulder in down the long diagonal, then with the horse's body at that same angle, move him back to the rail.  So the outside hind is the only thing that should hit the rail.

It was hard at first, but as he got softer and more on my aids, it got easier.  Once we had it both directions at the walk, then we did it at the trot.  We really had some mojo going then - especially when she told me to "ride my outside hip around the circle".  I think that also helped me weight that seatbone more, and I felt him come underneath me more evenly when that happened (very obvious without a saddle.)

Finally, we ended up with canter and yes, hand gallop bareback.  What!  I used to be such a chicken bareback.

Right now, our big goal is to hand off some of the responsibility for keeping the gait/impulsion/bend/whatever to Connor so that I don't have to micromanage as much anymore, and that's mostly what we did at the canter.  Time for him to take responsibility for his own body and get him more confirmed in this stuff so I'm free to do other things.  (That sounds like I'm handing off his training to him and leaving to watch TV or something.  Ha.  Totally not the case.)

He's been shedding for a while, but today he started SHEDDING.  Bye bye, summer coat.

And we ended with some best friends time, grazing in the dark on the last 80 degree day of the year.  So long, summer, it was nice knowing you.

I could look at that body all day.  So different from when I first got him.

Bad horse for sale photos: "LOOK HOW UPHILL MY HORSE IS, GUYS!"

Beautiful evening.