Cob Jockey

I spent a couple of days last week in the Detroit area for work, which meant Kristen was not too far out of the way on my drive home.  I had stopped at her place for dinner a few months before, and gotten to meet her boys, but this time she said we could ride.

Her (boarding) barn is stunning, but I took this particular photo for my trainer, who has always wanted rubber block flooring.  Turns out you can't sweep it and they have an aisle vacuum to clean it!  Maybe she doesn't want it after all...

I am always grateful to anyone who lets me ride their horses, because I know I'm not a naturally good rider.  I didn't start riding until pretty late compared to most people, and had serious fear issues with the canter for a long time.

No but seriously, haha.  The motto of my riding career.

Riding one pony all the time is like a security blanket for me, but it also means we acclimate to each others quirks instead of solving them.  Riding other horses is both a bit intimidating and eye opening for me.


Enter my teacher for the evening, the famous Mr. P.  It's not hard to see why Kristen calls him her furry soulmate.  He gives you the feeling you could do anything on him.  He's got so many buttons, it was amazing.

We figured each other out at the walk and trot, and were having a lot of fun.  I tried to be especially conscious of keeping my hands light and elbows forward.  Then Kristen suggested I canter him.  He has the best canter, but...I couldn't bring him back down to the trot.  I wasn't getting run away with, but he was forward and clearly, something about my seat said "go" while the rest of my body and voice said "whoa".  Sigh.

Kristen's barn.  So pretty.

Kristen tried to make me feel better by saying there's another woman at her barn (who I met a few minutes later) who has the same effect on him, as a result of riding a warmblood all the time who needed a hotter seat.  But I still felt bad, this is not the first time I've been called out for this.

- Dillon, 2010.  Also a senior citizen, also a been-there-done-that heart of gold, but I made him rush jumps.  And he never rushes jumps.
- My trainer, every so often: "Connor really doesn't respond well to tension in the seat, I think he feels trapped."
- Nancy K, last summer: "Something about the way you sit makes him rush.  Try sitting on him the way you would at the end of a lesson, when you're done."

Unrelated, but my rental car for this trip had a shifter that was buttons on the radio, and it drove me crazy.

Connor does require a hotter seat, but like I said earlier, we deal with and acclimate to each other , so it's not always obvious to me that I haven't fixed that problem of having too hot of a seat.  But it was obvious on Phoenix.  Especially when Kristen got on him bareback after me and he loped off like a cowpony and stopped on a dime with just a "whoa".  Seeing her on him REALLY drove it home that something about the way I sit is not right, and nicely bookended what had really become a lesson for me.

Soulmates

Since then, I've played with finding the tension in my seat on my own in rides, and spent a lot of time texting my trainer about it.  She said it more nicely, but basically said, "Duh, we've been over this before," and talked about the mechanics of my driving seat.  She also said she was glad I got the opportunity to ride Phoenix and figure that out, and that she wants to get me on more horses later this summer.

So, I am both honored and grateful to Kristen for letting me ride her furry soulmate, who is definitely a once in a lifetime horse.  And I am grateful to Mr. P for putting up with my poor riding and effectively giving me a riding lesson.  Hopefully I can continue to keep that ride in the back of my mind and put it into practice on Connor.

I have written, in the moment, about how my riding has changed over the past five months, but I haven't taken a step back to really think about it until today.


Since April (the month Connor was in partial training), the way I ride has changed quite a bit.  I've learned what it means to ride him with my seat in a way I've never known before.  The whole way I approach the alignment of his body and why he's going badly when he's going badly and how to fix it has changed.



My default reaction to Connor being inverted (read: llama mode) right now (emphasis on 'right now') is:
1) Apply inside upper thigh to saddle to encourage correct bend/upright spinal processes.
2) Apply outside leg back to keep croup from traveling out even further than it probably already is.
3) Ask outside shoulder to step in front of his croup with and outside rein half-halt.
4) Ask jaw to soften with fingers of inside rein.


My default reaction has never been to start with my seat before, as much as I'd like to say that it has been.  But it is now, and it's making a big difference in how quickly I can get him on my aids at the beginning of a ride.  Just thinking "thighs!" on him causes him to lower his head and lift his back.  It surprises me every time it works, but it does.

The CWD is a surprisingly good Dressage saddle with the stirrups almost all the way out.

The other part of that is until Jean Luc told me to put my stirrups on 3 (I always flatted on 7 in the past), I was never physically able to GET my thighs on him.  So chalk that up to another thing I got out of that clinic - my effectiveness with my seat was pretty hampered before that change.

Now that seat is somewhat sort of almost ingrained as a default aid, we're now working on my core.  But that's a story for another post...