Cob Jockey

Somebody hit me if I try to put anything other than this Baucher in this horse's mouth:

Photo by Paul Wood Photography

I know he goes really well in it.  But every so often I feel the need to experiment either on purpose, or accidentally when I forget the Baucher in my dishwasher.

I even showed in his KK Ultra French link loose ring at the food poisoning show (accident - poor planning) and I regretted it. In the Baucher I feel like I can whisper.  In the loose ring, I feel like I'm shouting in the wind - and that effect was magnified at the show.

In a fit of wild experimentation, after new BO described my bit collection hanging in my locker as "extensive" (I have five?), I even tried my old pony's copper single jointed D ring on him.  THAT was so bad I actually jumped off partway into my warmup to put something, anything else on him.

"Extensive" bit collection?

While I wish he could go in the loose ring, I can't deny that there's something about the Baucher.  He relaxes into it and focuses better with it.  Maybe he's a fixed sides kind of guy.  Maybe it's the tiny bit of leverage.  Either way, it's time to accept that!

And on that note, if anyone is interested in a verrrry lightly used Neue Schule Verbindend in 5.25" size, drop me a line.

After feeling down about my show on Saturday and an ok ride on Sunday, I was ready for my lesson Thursday to be some "yeah okay you do know how to ride" redemption.  But...it wasn't.

Pre lesson selfies

I don't know what got into Connor, but he was in one of those moods where he wants to powerwalk everywhere while putting his figurative hands over his ears and yelling "LA LA LA LA LA".  Any attempts to get him straight were met with "NO!", and any attempts to get him to slow down were just flat ignored.

Water dancing.  PC: my mom

PC: My mom

Time for a paradigm shift, my little friend! PC: My mom

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.

Couple quick thoughts...if you couldn't tell by my total lack of commenting lately, I'm buried and will be until late October.  Promise I am reading your blogs still.  Here are some quick thoughts!

First off, I am so glad that I have a tactile, all-consuming hobby like horses to come back to when I can hardly get my brain off of work like right now (new phone system, phones and numbers for 455 county employees in 10 buildings next month - eek).  I probably would have worked til 9 tonight if I didn't have a fuzzy reason to leave work.

Okay, three fuzzy reasons.  My first picture with all three of them!

Second, we schooled Dressage tonight and I could definitely tell that the last month has been jumping in an elevator, but encouragingly, all the Dressage/loose ring snaffle buttons do appear to still be there, which was a little surprising.  I for sure need my Thursday lesson to make the Dressage pony fully reappear, though. I see lots of bending and lateral work in our immediate future.

Third...barn wolves.

Collectively they are the worst barn dogs ever.  The big one can't be off leash because he'd run away, and the little one can't be off leash because she'd run to me.

But they're bored at home, so to the barn they go!

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.

One of the first things Austen commented on when she surprised me by making my Connor binder cover for 2014 was that he is wearing a different bit in almost every picture:


Which if you know us is actually funny, because we have switched bits very infrequently - maybe once every 8 months - since I've had him.  Our goal has always been to have him go in a loose ring French link snaffle, but based on what he needed at various times, that has changed.  Using the above cover as a guide:

Top center: August 2011, Welsh show: I hadn't even considered owning Connor yet, that's his breeder's bridle and D ring snaffle!

Bottom left:  June 2012, Dressage show.  I had had him for 7 months, and he was going in the Sprenger KK Ultra loose ring French link snaffle for the previous three months or so.  It was borrowed from my trainer as Nick had lost his job so I couldn't afford to buy one at the time, but I later bought one from Aimee.

Upper right (March 2013, clinic) and center (May 2013, GDHT): We were having a hard time turning left, so he's in a french link full cheek snaffle to help with steering, at the suggestion of semi-resident clinician CJF.

Bottom right: (August 2013, clinic): My trainer has a few clients going in the french link Baucher, so we gave that a try when she thought I needed a tiny bit more leverage and the full cheek was no longer necessary for turning assistance.  Our first lesson trialing it was crazy good.

Upper left:  (September 2013, lesson): After we had focused on straightness for a while and our Dressage work really started to progress, I decided to try the loose ring KK Ultra French link again.  The results were downright amazing, and he's been in it ever since.  We've come full circle!

Hopefully we can stay in the loose ring, it seems to suit him, but I'm not opposed to using other bits as training tools in the future.

(Stay tuned for an awesome CONTEST kicking off tomorrow!)

Lately, a lot of our focus has been on Connor's bend - or typical lack thereof.  I'm finding that I actually don't use the inside rein enough, or insistently enough.  This feels strange for someone whose entire riding career has been a series of discoveries that inside-leg-outside-rein is where the magic happens.  So I'm thinking, alright, if I have to ask this insistently in his loose ring, maybe I'll try the french-link Baucher we rode in for the second half of last year and see if that helps my cause, since it's got fixed sides:

Modeling his Baucher last summer...minutes before he got his tongue over the bit for the first and only time in his life.  In Dressage.  Wheels Himself ended up leapfrogging the field from second to last after Dressage to second in our division because we were one of two pairs to have no time penalties on XC.  In Starter.  I still find this hilarious.

I have never been so wrong in my life!  Of course, it could have been the dump truck right next to us dropping a ton of sand down the length of the track that runs alongside the outdoor (the only thing that bothered him was the air brakes), or the fact that we were in the outdoor for the first time since November, or the fact that it was 65 degrees for the first time since probably even earlier, but even when I had his attention his mouth never softened and he never mouthed the bit.

Back to the loose ring, and our very next ride was not quite on my aids, but with a soft mouth.  And our next lesson was on the aids and awesome.  (We're in that phase of learning something new where my rides on my own lag 2-3 weeks behind my lesson rides.  It'll come.)  So, lesson learned: right now, he needs me to ride well more than he needs a bit change.

Sign of spring in Indiana: still light out at 7:45pm.

Sign of spring in Indiana: muddy pony.

Nicku's post about her personal struggles, and Lauren and Aimee's posts about being a good blogger, and Amy's post about not being a good blogger (totally disagree with you, by the way!) made me want to share this: I have been depressed lately.  Well and truly depressed, not-sure-if-there's-anything-to-smile-about depressed, can't-remember-what-day-it-is depressed.  I've never felt this way before.  I thought it would get better when Nick got a job, but I still find myself randomly crying for almost no reason once or twice a day, even though I have so much to be happy about.

Smile, stupid human!

And I would love to say that I can leave it at the arena gate, but the truth is, nobody truly can do that - even if your problems aren't on your mind, they're going to change the way you perceive and react to things.  Connor and I went through a rough patch during my depression, which made it that much harder to deal with hours of stalls on Sundays when you're wondering what you're even doing here.

Just in the past couple days, though, things have started to brighten a bit.  My awesome boss recognized that I'm struggling with our demanding job that is more like a 24/7 lifestyle, and ordered me to take next week off and spend a ton of time at the barn (seriously an awesome boss) - I love my job and have never taken a whole week off in my entire career, so I will probably be anxious to get back to it after next week.

My trainer also helped explain and push me through the rough patch.  She pointed out that my lessons for the past month have all been about my position in the saddle, which has improved a ton and is close to being internalized.  But training and riding are not linear pursuits, and other things had to slide while we worked on my position, with the understanding that we'll pick them back up later.

Those gorgeous red trees shed all their leaves overnight!

She told me not to freak out about it, and ended up helping me put it all together into a great lesson on Thursday, and then today I had a positively incredible ride in the 60 degree sunshine.  Every step was harmonious and we were both happy, and he was light in my hands and working over his back.  I did switch from the french link baucher to the KK loose ring, and he seemed to respond well both to that change and me stepping up and riding like I know what I'm doing.

So, deep breath, pause, everything's going to be okay.  And I promise to get back to being a better blogger soon.