Cob Jockey

Connor's breeder told me last night that it makes her sad to visit this blog and not see any updates.  And I am not one to make people sad!  So I'm going to do my best to keep going.

I haven't had a proper Dressage lesson in about a month, so last week for my lesson I came out guns blazing in Dressage tack, ready for a biomechanics beatdown...and then my favorite barn rat said, "Hey, I think she's teaching XC lessons in the big field tonight."

Cue fastest tack change ever - XC vest, breastplate, saddle, girth, bridle, and fly bonnet.  Favorite barn rat was impressed.

Favorite barn rat multitasking by keeping Connor entertained (he's licking her hand) and texting while I was in the bathroom.

The lesson started out - no joke - with me breezing my Welsh Cob around the field like a racehorse, bridged reins and all, until he got tired.  He came out with so much energy, there was no way the lesson was going to be productive unless I took some of the edge off.  In my warmup, when I asked for a canter depart, he bucked so hard my neck snapped, which has never happened before.

(Found out later he'd been in all day due to heavy rain. Don't blame the little guy a bit.)

It really took five or so minutes of cantering and galloping before he stopped accelerating anytime he got the chance.  Toward the end, he really flattened out into a true ground covering gallop, which delighted my trainer, who says the canter and gallop will always be his weakest gaits and he needs to figure it out for himself and get comfortable in those gaits more often.

The best part about all that was, he was at his worst and I still never felt unsafe.  On a lot of horses, that would have been a lunging situation.


We ended up having the BEST lesson!  The highlights were:
1. Getting a true collected canter, for a long period of time, that enabled me to take the up bank, do a tight rollback in the direction of whatever lead he landed on, back to the upbank.  With a bigger canter, that would not have been possible.
2. Cantering the down bank for both of our first times ever - and it felt so smooth compared to trotting it!
3. Cantering the faux ditch for both of our first times ever, and that also felt smooth.
4. Cantering the down bank and doing a less severe but pretty small rollback immediately to canter the ditch - and not even blinking.

I came out of that lesson beaming.  Every moment I ever questioned that horse being an eventer melted away.  Sure, we have been working on those things for years, and I'm sure he'll find lions under down banks at other facilities, and I'll have to keep my guard up forever, but he CAN do these things without scrambling.

What a good boy!  Bigtime bath for the sweaty guy after all that cantering and jumping:

First up!  The Blogger TPR Challenge blog hop closes in 14 hours.  Get on it!  So far L. Williams is winning the gift card...because she is the only entrant.  Womp womp.

Second up - you may notice it's been a week since I last blogged.  My life has changed in ways I both predicted and could never have predicted in the last two weeks, (no, not pregnant).  The only part I can share right now is that we're couch surfing/living out of a suitcase with friends because we sold our old house before getting the keys to the new one (hopefully today), which is all kinds of fun with two big hairy shedding dogs with separation anxiety.

Anyway.

Horse related:

We did on-property XC schooling yesterday.  At home, we have multiple banks, ditches, a corner, logs, trakheners, stone walls, and other things, all no higher than novice, which is pretty cool.

September 2014 Cathy clinic.  Baby corner in the background, the jump we're over is adjustable height.

The good: he jumped a faux ditch almost without hesitation on the first try.  We did a ton of that at our XC schooling in late April, so that makes sense.  He was brave and game and quiet over most things, except for a head flipping incident after a log midway through a course, but I think I caused that by going to the reins too quickly to rate him.

The less good: he lost his mind at a pile of 3 railroad ties that may have been a foot high that I asked him to go over mid-course.  Like, it took me a minute to get him over that, and he could have stepped over it no problem.  My trainer said it was the location - next to one of the banks, in a little depression.

More from last summer, no pics were taken yesterday.

I tried hard to focus on staying quiet and relaxed like our last jump field lesson, but there's a fine line between enough leg to keep him committed and quiet and relaxed.  I'm still feeling it out.  Our only refusal, though, was at the logs and at the down bank (which we haven't done in nearly a year), and the only thing he crazy over jumped was when we put a stadium fence over the faux ditch.


Overall, though, I was happy.  Most jumps were quiet and brave and in a good rhythm.  Should get the keys to the new house today, so I'm not sure what this week will look like for the pony!

Sunday ended up being crazy.  I had volunteered to fill in for stalls that weekend long before I knew it was our last chance to go XC schooling before Penny Oaks, so I got up at 5:30 to get to the barn by 7 and race through feeding/turnout/stalls before the trailer left at 10 for the 3 hour drive to Twin Towers in Ohio.

Trailering ended up being...interesting...but that's a story for another day.

Connor, for the first time, knew we were going XC.  He was forward, forward, forward and feeling frisky.



I actually warmed up in the permanent Dressage ring just to give him some visual boundaries.


We started over some tiny logs on the ground, first one at the trot, then a long line of 2 at the canter, and he took off galloping on the other side of this 10 inch log.  It was not mean spirited, he was ears up, truly happy to be out there.  And maybe a little overstimulated, who knows.  He was feisty the entire day, though it became a more manageable feisty after the first half hour.

As we finished up a line on the (shorter, steeper) other side of this hill at a strong canter, I gave him some leg and he attacked the hill at a gallop.  We both had so much fun!

He definitely needed the XC reminder, but so did I.  BN looked huge to my eye out there until we got our groove going.  XC fences are definitely intimidating if you're not used to seeing them.



We had a few runouts, but I learned something from every single one.  My trainer was spot on with her assessments of everything, including when I was slightly intimidated by a fence and Connor told on me.  Takeaways:

- I need an aggressive canter on XC, it can't be too quiet.  It also can't be too fast or too flat even though it is aggressive.
- If I am intimidated by a fence, he's going to be intimidated.
- Leg around him and on him hard. (Which is SO much easier to do in my new saddle!)
- My back needs to be tight, I can't let him fling me around.  (When my back is where it should be, I can feel the back of my vest.)

One of the coolest parts of the day happened at the ditch, which we've only schooled on one previous XC outing.  (Ditches are really hard for horses because they don't have good downward depth perception.  When they jump them the first couple of times, they often dolphin jump them out of fear/lack of understanding of how to jump it, and they scare/hurt themselves.  Also, ditches are "never comfortable for the rider."  All of that according to my trainer.)

He initially refused it, but decided to go through with it and jump it much more quickly than I thought he would.  You can see in the video the moment he changed his mind and decided to take it.

Videos?  Yes, videos!

Water to log, and me with my hands way too high at the end:



Runout and then a good fence to end on:

"HEY BLOGLAND!"

We have sort of an unwritten rule at our barn that no one goes to an event without having XC schooled in the week before: at least/especially at the lower levels.  With Jump Start being NEXT WEEKEND, that meant we were going XC schooling this weekend.  Enter Bea Hive Ranch:

#nofilter.  Does it get any better than this?

That house, oh my god, that house.  It overlooks about 70 acres of XC schooling and a pasture, and the house itself is stunning.

None of us had been there before, making it a perfect show prep venue, since the horses would be facing brand new obstacles in a new environment.  I have no pictures, so you'll just have to take my word for it.  These things happened:

- We survived our first ditch!  He jumped it the first time and my poor riding scared him, so the second time he was less inclined to go over.  By the end he was jumping it reliably, though.
- He never peeked or hesitated at anything I asked him to jump.  The only things that felt awkward were the bad strides.
- My Intec vest hit the back of my saddle and threw me forward after a 2'3 rolltop.  Time for a new/better fitting one?

Gorgeous day.

One thing I did notice is that schooling my new level's fences is intimidating because my brain hasn't really caught up to the fact that I'm beginner novice yet.  Much of the day went like this: "Jen, take the water complex, then circle back to that house."

Water complex

House

My brain: "That house looks huge!" My mouth: "Okay!"

I wasn't scared, just keenly aware of the height, until we actually jumped the first couple of BN height things and then my brain adjusted to the new height and I stopped thinking about it.

The best part of the day, though, was Connor stepping down off of a down bank like a normal horse instead of creeping to the edge, checking for lions and then leaping off it like a deer like normal.  I wish I had video.  He was like "Ho, hum, business as usual for this champion event pony," and I was like "Whose horse is this?!"  because he has never taken a down bank so casually, ever.  Not even once.

Not surprisingly, down banks aren't nearly as difficult to ride when your horse doesn't try to long jump off of them.  Who knew?

I wouldn't let Connor graze as we handwalked the horses back to the trailer after watering them, so he took a chunk out of this ornamental grass.  "So there!"

Finally, woman!

It's in the middle of nowhere, Indiana, and the middle of nowhere, Indiana is the most beautiful place in the world in September.

I think next weekend should be very successful, at least where XC is concerned.

I asked for an extra lesson this week, since we hadn't jumped BN height in so long, I couldn't remember what it felt like.

Also, Yak shaving Welsh Cob mane pulling.

He plays with his tongue when he gets bored.

A strange animal.

 I expected to be afraid, and I wasn't, and I expected not to have an eye for the bigger fences, but I did.  The biggest takeaway from the arena work is that my job is to ride his hind legs to the fence.  I should feel him push forward into the bridle from the hind end when I put my leg on, ears up.  If I don't, there's no connection.  The one fence we took with no connection, he had a rail at.  (Also, ride the placing pole and not the jump behind it, but that's beside the point, sort of.)

The fences we jumped yesterday were much bigger than we've jumped recently, and a lessoner commented that they may have even been bigger than BN's 2'7.  They did look really big.  "I don't know," I said, "I never ask or measure as a general rule.  I don't want to know the numbers, just how they feel."

After that, we walked out into the field where she had laid out some lumber in the shallow depression that our ditch is built into, just in case #7 ends up being a ditch instead of a drop:

Up for debate.  Pretty sure it's a drop, but we wanted to be prepared one way or another anyway.

On the far left was a single piece of lumber, in the middle was two bigger pieces a foot apart from each other, with a diagonal piece over them, much like our real ditch is built but without the actual ditch.  The ditch itself was on the far right.  Baby ditch training!

This was a big learning moment for both of us.  He was NOT going to go over that single piece of lumber, so help him.  I learned:

- Not to commit with my shoulders
- That the best way to approach things like that with Connor is in the Dressagiest sitting trot I can muster, giving him a moderately long rein so he can look at it, but not so much that he puts his head all the way down.  We need more impulsion than a walk, but that slow level of speed and high level of control that I can get in the sitting trot.
- That I need to approach the fence squeezing him like a tube of toothpaste, and EQUALLY on both sides.  If I do that, he goes over it and straight.  After he'd done the middle one quietly a few times, he took a flyer out of nowhere and I let my guard down, and almost came off when he darted left on the other side.

"You cannot get complacent on this type of thing!" my trainer said.  "He'll do strange things out of nowhere, I know that [referring to her experience on him in the XC clinic in March].  You have to anticipate that.  Leg on him, shoulders back."

We didn't do the ditch (I wasn't wearing my vest and didn't feel comfortable - last weekend was on my mind), but I feel confident that I know better how to present him to both the ditch and the drop now.