Cob Jockey

Sexy neck.

I'm back to flatting in the Micklem/loose ring combination.  You may recall, my trainer asked me to flat in the elevator for a while to help retrain my sense of feel, and because Connor went super awesome in it.  That lasted a while.

Then I started to feel like I wore out my welcome with it.  He wasn't very consistent in the contact, and started tossing his head.  So I got off mid-ride one night and put the reins on the elevator's loose ring ring.

He was heavy, of course, without the leverage to help me.  I looked in the windows as I rode past (they're a passable mirror) and I saw the same thing I always see: even with his head on or in front of the vertical, we just look backwards.  We are going fast, but not thinking forward.

Dressage was good here.  This looks forward.

I have a confession to make: my Dressage has felt stuck for about six months now.  It's been eating at me.  I love Dressage, and I feel like we should be farther than we are at this point, even though there's no reason for that feeling.  Green horse, more or less green rider, of course this is going to be a slow process.  We make steady progress thanks to a great trainer with the ability to train through teaching, but it's never going to be like putting him in full training.

Thinking backward.

All of my major breakthroughs have occurred with 1) positional improvements on my part, 2) being more aware of myself, 3) riding off of my seat.  The only reason we're not moving forward, literally and figuratively, is my inability to internalize this stuff.  Translation: I learn slow.

So I sat there in front of a window, bareback with my elevator-turned-loose-ring, and didn't want to be backwards anymore.  I made a conscious effort to do the following:
- Look up
- Feel more
- Half halt ALL THE TIME
- Feel like I'm pushing the bit forward
- Use my new understanding of how the outside rein should work to improve turns and circles
- Keep both legs on him at all times

I won't pretend like it fixed everything instantly, but it was a very different and very good ride from what I've gotten recently.  The work in the elevator did help both of our feel.  I can now whisper in the loose ring the same way I did in the elevator, and the half halts really kept him from getting heavy - I just had to do them constantly.  He went along in a long, relaxed but energetic outline.  It's a start.

Got to the barn last night, realized I forgot my Dressage bridle/bit at home, but couldn't school fences since there are still no fences in the indoor.  So I schooled Dressage in his jump bridle and bit, and he was awesome for the first 15 minutes, because I focused on that outside hind thing from the very beginning.

He was straight, REALLY pushing from behind, responsive to the slightest aid, mouthing the bit, my hands were soft, his lateral work was fantastic...until he started sticking his tongue out the side of his mouth.  The other woman riding in the indoor alerted me to it.  "He looks awesome, except for that tongue," she said.

Sigh.  This is Connor letting me know in no uncertain terms that that bit is too much leverage when he's really on my aids and thinking "DRESSAGE!" like that.  I didn't blame him, and also didn't want to start any bad habits, so I called it an early night.  He'd done all of the exercises from our last lesson really well until the tongue came out, so it's not like we were slacking.

(Of course, on my drive home I realized I could have just put my reins on the big ring and taken away the leverage action, but hey.  First time I've owned an elevator, give me a pass on that one!)

Afterward I took a phone call while brushing his coat until it gleamed.  Too bad that coat's going to be gone on Saturday.

Judging by the decrease in posts in my Feedly, I'm not the only one who has struggled to find time to post lately!  There's so much going on this summer.  A brief recap on what Connor and I have been up to:

(All photos on this post taken by Austen of Guinness on Tap.)

In General:
- My trainer wants things to come at him faster now - transitions, aids, simple changes, turns on course etc.  We spent so much time getting him through his "Where are my feet?" stage and then his "I know where my feet are but I can't get things from your aids to my feet fast enough," stage.  We could stay in our low-pressure state forever, but he's (finally) ready for us to mentally push him.  It feels good to know all the time going slow and not pressuring him was spent wisely, but also that we got through it.

Calm and happy, now if we could just keep those hind feet moving a fraction longer in the halt...

Dressage:
- We've been working on getting him to come through more with the inside shoulder, utilizing baby walk pirouettes.


- I made my bi-monthly mistaken attempt to see if maybe the Baucher would be an improvement over the loose ring for the flat.  It wasn't.  I'm like a kid that keeps touching the hot stove.  He didn't mouth the bit one single time that entire ride.  Running theory is that he doesn't like the thin/light mouth of that bit and prefers the more substantial KK loose ring and Metlab elevator (all three are french links).  Different bits for different stages, and we are through the Baucher stage, apparently.

(Sidenote: Trainer's amused words: "Why do you keep doing that?  You hate it every time you try it.  Put that thing away for good!")

- He bends off of my seat only really nicely now.  It feels like the top 4 inches of my thigh are making contact with the saddle in ways they never have before.

Jumping:
- We want to encourage him to jump more across the fences, rather than straight up and straight down, so we've been using oxers that gradually increase in width.  He's responded well to this.

Not one of the wide oxers I was talking about, this was just a baby oxer for our photoshoot with Austen.  My takeaway from this photo is that I need to work on getting my toes up, and I have done that since seeing these pictures.  Sidenote, it feels really good that my former chicken of a brain considers this height to be insignificant now.

- He's been making his own decisions at times in jump schools, and the decisions he makes are good ones.  This makes me happier than almost anything else.  Not only is he getting good at the physical jumping game, but he's understanding the questions and independently thinking about how best to jump things.

This was my decision, not his.  I asked him to add a stride, and, well, he obeyed.  You can almost see the question marks floating above his head.  Check out that takeoff point.  And he somehow magically didn't hit a rail.

- "He needs to be more comfortable and fit in the canter," she says, "60% of your practice rides need to be in the canter," she says.  I did not volunteer that maybe 5% of my practice rides are in the canter right now...but I do intend to follow her suggestions.  60% of a ride in canter is going to be Transition City, though!

Not my favorite, not his favorite, but that's exactly why we need to do a lot of it.

With BN at FRVPCHT (the alphabet soup event!) coming up soon, my trainer called a Sunday afternoon on-property XC lesson, partially to try out a proposed XC bit change - not for brakes, mine work fine, but to encourage effective half-halts and an open throatlatch:

TL;DR: It was a really successful experiment.

We used the ring directly underneath the snaffle ring, and it was still more leverage than I'd ever ridden him in before.  The best way to describe Connor's reaction to my engaging it was "immediate gerbil roll call".  I generally rode with a very light contact, but when I half-halted, he was an on-task, easily packaged, hind-end engaged XC machine.

Our best guess is that he feels really confident on XC after Penny Oaks, and that confidence plus this bit encouraging him to keep his head up and his throatlatch open meant he wasn't doing this anymore:

Checking for lions in July 2013; this brief pause is SO HARD to ride and I'm SO GLAD we might be through this stage!

The bit helped me get his hind end packaged underneath him before the fence in a way that is normally difficult for me to do, and as a result we had some great fences, even over scary looking things we'd never jumped before.  "Ultimately, it's up to him when to take off, but your job is to make sure the hind end is under him and engaged. Ride the hind legs!"

When I got him there on a good distance, all the fences were smooth as silk largely because he wasn't putting his nose down to the fence anymore - we think because he can see it further out when his head is up.  When I got him there on a bad distance, he saved my ass one way or another, and wasn't scared the next time we re-presented, we just fixed our previous mistake.

It went so much better than the loose ring or baucher that I ordered one of my own when I got home, but a two-ring instead of three - my trainer said I'd never need the third ring on Connor, and I tend to agree.

Also, today is hind leg shedding day?

Before today, I was pretty nervous about the move up, but I'm feeling much more ready after today.  We were communicating about and generally agreeing on distances, he was really locking on to the fences, and we just felt good together.  Good thing, since it's less than two weeks away!