Cob Jockey

As I walked back up to my barn from the outdoor arena on Saturday, my barnmate asked, "How was your ride?" I laughed with delight as I said "I bet you could hear me yelling 'Holy s***' and 'OMG!' and 'What a good pony!' from here!"

Last week's lesson is proving to be absolutely pivotal. In the rides since, I start the ride out doing the HI/HO on a 20m circle, establishing control of (and awareness of) the hind legs, as well as rebutting every attempt he makes to initiate both movements with the right fore. This requires me to pay attention to the inside leg and maintain enough contact with the outside rein (without pulling). We continue to get closer and closer to being able to do this without the front feet changing course.

Meatloaf visited the outdoor with me for the first time. No she's not pooping, I just caught her mid-sit apparently.

We spend less and less time each ride establishing both, and then we move on to other things, and when we move onto those other things, they're just...there. Is this the reason I've always found this horse so hard to ride? Straightness?

My trainer woke me up with a text at 7:25 yesterday morning.  I automatically assumed my horse was injured/dead/colicking, because that's what you do when you wake up to a text from your trainer!  But he was fine, she just wanted to tell me that she wanted to get on him first in my lesson that night.

The sky as my lesson was beginning.  My days of outdoor lessons are so numbered.

She had put a trainer ride on him the day before in the kimberwicke, which she says she "loves" him in.  She told me from the moment that she got on him, he not want to walk straight between her aids, so she made especially sure to sit straight, not get tipped, and encourage him to stay within the boundaries.

Sniffle.  I am not L. Williams and I hate the dark, and moving from this big gorgeous ring to the indoor.  #firstworldproblems

She also said that his biggest straightness problem right now, (swinging the hindquarters to the outside and the right shoulder to the inside while on the right rein) is fixed by asking for more bend with a lot of inside thigh and knee and asking the right hind to step forward instead of to the right, and also not blocking him on the right with a closed hip.

Have I mentioned how unafraid I am of putting bad riding photos out there?  Haha.  Oh boy. PC: My mom

When I got on after her, I could feel how straight he was, and shortly I felt him devolve into less straight.  Using my right thigh like she did helped a ton, but when we asked for the counterbent left circle, he acted like he couldn't get off his right side.

"Something is going on here that I can't see that is making him want to stay over to the right with you," she mused, "Wait, there you go!  He's doing it right now, what changed?"

"I shifted my weight to the left seatbone," I said.  He almost immediately gave me what I was asking for.

"Okay, that makes sense..."

Uh, like, Exhibit A for everything that is wrong with us right now, in my humble and uneducated opinion. PC: My mom

The consensus right now is that my weight was on the right, so his weight was on the right, when I was asking him to move it left but not really letting him.  I also started using quicker rein aids, which helped control the shoulder.

Basically from that moment he began standing up underneath me and giving me the ride I hope to get on Saturday.  She said right now, the counterbent left circle is like my litmus test: if he can do it, he's straight or on the way to becoming straight.  If he can't, something is wrong.  And that something is likely my position.

PC: my mom

I was especially grateful for that lesson, because my trainer was next on the waitlist for an area rated event, her first time competing in years, and she removed herself from the waitlist partially so that we could have this lesson before championships on Saturday.  She's still going to coach at the event, but not ride.  I felt equal parts bad and grateful when she said that, and am more determined than ever to retain the lesson I just had long enough to have a good warmup on Saturday!

Check it out, the end of the rainbow is the manure pile. Hmm...

Style points for having the world's most gorgeous pony?  Also, getting this picture took me holding an entire jar of treats.

It was raining in this picture, which I hoped to capture, but it didn't work out.  Gorgeous evening, anyway.

My last couple of lessons have been focused on the alignment of Connor's body.  She's teaching it to me in a strange way, and we're getting things done, but it's not something I would have thought of on my own.  I'm hoping maybe this helps some of you, although it probably just applies to me and my Gumby horse.

Dressage in the CWD for no reason other than I missed it.

He likes to carry his hindquarters to the outside.  So in order to get him straight, she has me put his shoulders where his hindquarters want to go - to the outside.  It's not a way of thinking I'd ever come across myself - shoulder OUT all the time?  But it is, in effect, not at all shoulder out, it's "straight" because we're putting his shoulders in front of his hindquarters instead of vice versa.

Instead of moving his hindquarters in, she has me move his shoulder out while asking for inside bend and guarding his hindquarters from going even further out.  In one case, she told me to think leg yield with the front end and haunches in behind.  Not actually doing either of those two things, just thinking it.

The results are pretty amazing, I can instantly feel a change when I get him there.  I can get here easily when I'm riding him like that:

Because duh, straightness.

I told her that it's frustrating, because we can get there, but we can't get there quickly in the beginning of a ride.  She said "Well he's not exactly a hotblood who gets things quickly.  You'll just have to work with it."  Translation: Patience.

Next up: Jean Luc clinic tomorrow and Sunday!

We tried on his new Toklat pad, acquired for a completely reasonable $22 during Riding Warehouse's sale, and because I have no self control where anything dark purple is concerned.

I also stood around and admired his dapples. Wowowowow.


But we actually did get some riding done too.  I focused on keeping both legs on his sides.  The hardest thing about being bareback on him is that my calves hang ineffectively low on his comparatively narrow barrel, and I have to use my hip flexors to draw them up a bit so that they're against his sides.  That's hard, because the hip flexors are tiny little things that wear out quickly.

However, it made a big difference in his straightness and impulsion.  I'm willing to bet that I haven't been "riding each hind leg", especially since switching to bareback.  Because I'm still afraid of friction, we worked at the walk, bringing it back to my trainer's recommendation to halt straight "500 times" last winter, and back to the "halt from my seat on a square with shopping bag elbows" exercise from last summer.

Also somewhat amazingly, I did not get tossed when there was a graveside service in the cemetary across the street that featured over 100 cars and trucks, a several gun salute, and 75 motorcycles that appeared to rev their engines in a salute as well, despite the horses in their fields being on red alert.  Thank goodness Connor's gotten over his motorcycle thing...

Labeled once again, thanks Halter Tags.

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!

This guy...

The love of my life.

Normally I have the entire facility to myself for our Tuesday night rides, but recently we got a new boarder who also comes out on Tuesdays.  She's from Western Pleasure Land (it's a place) and is recently converting over to Dressage.  She was lunging her former WP horse in one end of the arena with lots of clucks.  Of course, hypersensitive Welsh Cob here reacted to each one like they were from me.  Made the first few minutes of the ride interesting.

I'm still feeling a little stuck on our own with Dressage, though not nearly as much as before.  Last night, I did a lot of leg yielding at the walk, focusing on opening up that left shoulder like we did in my lesson last week, and also 10m circles in the corner followed by a shallow serpentine down the long side.  I can feel when it all comes together for him, but I can't maintain it.

No lesson tomorrow (Happy Thanksgiving!), but we have a makeup one scheduled for Saturday.  I might go out early and clip him again before our lesson since it's supposed to be 60 degrees (!) and Connor with a half-regrown winter coat is going to act like he's moving through molasses if I don't.  I need some Magical Impulsion Dust, aka, clipped hair.

For everyone who has commented about caramels, we're going to do a test batch this weekend and they will be available next week!

We did some real work in our lesson last night!  If only anyone's hands were warm enough to properly use a camera, there might be pictures.  Oh well.

Quality photography right here.

We jumped!  And we worked on straightness, over the fences, so it felt like we were doing a little of what we've been working on in our Dressage lessons, which made me feel good.  Except his problems were completely opposite of what they are on the flat.  I shall explain, with the help of this complex Microsoft Paint drawing that took me hours seconds to make.



This exercise was various stages of ground poles, crossrails, and verticals up to 2'6 throughout the evening.  We started out jumping it off the left rein, so it was bounce bounce one stride, but we spent most of the evening on the right rein.

She noticed that off the left rein, he stayed on the left (correct) lead over the exercise, but off the right, he switched it in the middle and had to do a simple afterward to fix it.  Off the right, he also drifted left (outside) and was more over his left shoulder.

Suddenly this picture makes a lot more sense...

(Yes, that is the exact opposite problem we have been working through on the flat the last two weeks.  ???)

So she raised the jump cups on the right side of the first three fences and put one end of the pole in that and one end on the ground, with perpendicular guide poles between the one stride and first bounce, and also after the exercise to keep him in the middle.  The last fence was a vertical.  After a remedial canter leg yield to the right off the right, we took the exercise.

Interestingly, if the final vertical was 2'3 or lower AND I rode like an intelligent human being trying to create a straight horse (thinking about leg yielding him right through the turn to the exercise), he stayed on the right lead.  Hooray!  But if he felt uncomfortable at all, like jumping 2'6 out of a bounce, he switched to the left lead.

Opposite legs, but a good example of what we were talking about with scapula rotation and forelegs.

She explained that he probably doesn't feel like he can get that right shoulder up out of the way and rotated back enough to put that foot forward and land on it, so he switches to the left.  She also said she thinks this has been going on for a while, because when he didn't switch, it looked different to her.

He really did get the message, and after he went through without switching his lead twice in a row, we called it quits.

(Also, Connor was super sassy in the beginning - cantering like he was stuck in molasses and bunny bucking when I asked for more than that.  Halfway through I put my big girl pants on and pony kicked him into a buck, then a hand gallop down the long side.  I didn't have any problems after that.  I think he was more interested in the pile of hay in his stall than a lesson, but dude, life's not fair sometimes!)

Pile of hay in stall.  Also, time to clip again, whee!

Indestructible?  Well, so far the blanket is doing fine, but the binding is shredded into ribbons by the tail flap.  Also, I think he's in private turnout right now, so...?

I am so happy to report that last night's lesson was the best Dressage ride I've had since probably August!

We got dem Dressage skillz (again).

Crooked.

REALLY piling on the right, and me doing all the wrong things.

I think I felt something at the end of my ride today.  Remember my forward left shoulder, and straight left arm, which I have worked on to the right, like we're going in the below photo, but not so much yet to the left:



And Connor being less bendy to the left:

MOTORCYCLE!

"Being straight is hard, let's be crooked!"

Borrowed saddle pad, I think I need to find more pads in this shade of green.

"...friends?"

In the past, my trainer has only gotten on Connor when the wheels are falling off and she can't figure out why.  This time, I asked her to get on him for the opposite reason: because things are going well and she's soon going to be in Florida for 10 days, and I am in over my head in a good way.

"He feels REALLY good.  I mean, he's in true self-carriage right here," she said while leg yielding at the trot.

Due to the cold-weather-related lack of photos, here's a series of photos of us from 2011, before I owned him.

"I know," I said from the ground, "That's why I asked you to get on him.  I'm losing my ability to be critical, I don't know what to correct right now. I know I need to focus on the little things, but all I can think when I'm on him is 'Holy sh*t he feels amazing.'"



She laughed at that.  "It's the little things that will make you good."



The things I noticed:

- He's really tracking up at the walk and trot now.  For a horse with a longish back, this says so much.

Age 5

- The difference in Connor between my riding and her riding used to be depressingly huge.  Now, there are still differences, but they are smaller and less noticeable.

- My favorite: he's so focused and seriously into his job.  His ears were mostly fixed on my trainer, with regular flicks forward.  His eyes were soft, bright, and thoughtful.  He looks like a horse with a job that he understands and enjoys.  You could actually see him thinking about the puzzles presented, and responding to each aid.





The things she noticed:
- The left bend is a problem right now.  I need to focus on where my weight is distributed in the saddle, and to make sure I'm not letting him put more of himself under one seatbone than the other.

- She noticed that he moved her core and ribcage around more than the big horses, and told me I had to focus on being really strong in my core, not just to hold him together in the canter, but to keep him straight and even underneath me.  It was very obvious at the canter, if you compared the videos from last weekend to her riding, that the effect of a strong core made Connor more compressed and underneath himself than I had him in the videos.

- He moves in a straight line now, and the last time she got on him in late summer, he felt like he was going in four directions at once, none of them straight.

Baby's first jump, 2011.

- There's more, but I am so bad at remembering specifics...

The best part was that she was so happy with him.  She thanked me (!), and said that she had a lot of fun on him.  There was much happy chatter about how far he could go with his work ethic, movement and training.  Now to sell some tack and get some entries in - Amy, Heartland is first on the list!

I looked out the indoor window to see that heavy snow had started falling during my lesson yesterday.  And I thought, "Damn, this lesson is so good, I won't even mind if I get stuck in a ditch on the way home."

At least SOMEONE likes the snow.

(Spoiler alert:  Didn't end up in a ditch, but it did take me an hour to get home.)

When my lesson started, I recounted the tale of my Tuesday ride, describing it basically like I did in that post.  My trainer grinned teasingly, "So you rode from your inside leg and outside rein, interesting, tell me more..."  All jokes aside, she pronounced him "So much better!" and really got after me about keeping my hands level, which helped him go even straighter/better.  Straight is the key to EVERYTHING apparently, and once again, a big breakthrough is really just me learning to ride the inside leg to the outside rein again.  That's the millionth time that's happened since I started riding Dressage - you'd think I'd learn!

Yeah, there's a reason straightness is second from the top.  I also had impulsion today, which my trainer was much delighted with.

Again I was in the jump saddle, but this time we actually jumped.  She had a 6 stride line with two parallel poles in the middle to encourage straightness, a vertical in and a vertical out, and we alternated going straight through it with halting in the middle of it, backing a couple steps, and turning out of it.  I'm finding it a lot easier to stay over my leg and be centered no matter what kind of jump he gives me, but I'm struggling to let him struggle at times.  She wants me to let him think for himself and fail so he learns to self-adjust.

For me, she wanted me to work on closing my hip angle, staying in my heels, and having a lighter seat.  I sit too deeply and sit up too straight in the jump saddle; I ride in it like I ride in my Dressage saddle, and I need to be lighter and spend more time in two point.  It's the curse of the eventer, having to fully make that switch between phases.  We worked on keeping him round and regulating his pace while I was in two point, and he was such a good boy, moving between paces like I asked.

Homework for this week is to hang out in two point a lot, and do a lot of cantering.  I'm excited about the direction things are headed right now!

Stupid TuffRider pad.  It's a do-not-buy for several reasons.

Connor and I had a really good practice ride yesterday.  A really good ride.

My trainer may have been kidding about 500 halts before our next lesson, but she wasn't kidding that it was homework.  So after we established forward, then body control (a January goal!), I started asking for straight halts.

What I noticed is that he couldn't halt straight if he wasn't straight in the preceding gait.  So if his shoulder was popped at the walk, even so slightly that I wouldn't have noticed it a few months ago, he couldn't halt straight without me making some last second corrections.

To address that, in between halts I added the exercise from about a month ago in which she had me feel when his weight was on his inside shoulder, then use my inside leg to shift his weight and then my outside rein to catch that shift.  I also continued to throw in a stride of counterbend every so often.

Once he was traveling straight, we could halt square.  I felt a little stupid for not realizing it earlier, it seems so obvious now that if his weight is more on one leg than the other, he's going to halt like that too, with that leg parked out or that shoulder thrown around.  This is what she meant when she said we need to drill our basics.  He felt really, really good by the end of the ride, and I quit after he gave me like 10 uninterrupted minutes of really nice trot work, equal in both reins.

They have apparently been busy since Sunday, making a real stall out of the area that was once a stall, then was an aisleway, and now is a stall again.  They were nowhere near finished constructing it when I took this picture (pipe gate is definitely temporary, for example!), but I like it so far!  Talk about proximity to the indoor: the back "wall" of his stall is a sliding door, and the indoor is like 15 feet from that door.  We'll see what the final iteration ends up being!

Cob proof: tight bungie cord holding the gate closed, back wall is both latched and has a concrete cinder block in front of the door.  You shall not escape!

First lesson in three weeks, first time seeing my horse in 7 days.

WOO HOO!

Of course, I was not expecting to see him here when I got to the barn to feed this morning:

Not his stall.

"What is this...tack...I am wearing...?  Riding?  What is that?"

We are one horse over our limit until Tuesday, so Connor is in an area that was at one point a stall, and is now an aisleway.  Totally safe, and same floors as the stalls, just funny to see him there.  I like it!   I also like the Welsh Cob-proof gate latches they drew up: two chains and a lead rope.

After chores, I had a lesson.  She requested jump saddle, even though we spent the whole lesson doing Dressage.  We worked on getting him even in both reins with leg yield, where I needed more half-halts in the outside rein in order to ensure that he didn't get crooked, and to stop "pushing" him with the inside rein.  Next up was shoulder out and turns on the forehand, and during this she had me actually look down at my reins to see how unevenly I was using them.  Oops.

After aiming for crookedness (not really but you know what I mean) in the first half of the lesson, the second half was about straightness.  We went around on the quarter line and first did walk-halt-walk ad nauseum, with an extreme emphasis on straightness.

On the left rein, he liked to bring his shoulder right when we halt and when we walk off again, so it was my job to correct it.  When I tried to correct it using my legs, duh, his hindquarter went where I wanted his shoulder to go, because it's the reins that correct the shoulder, not the legs.

Of course, once I figured out which aids did what, I had to figure out how much aid I needed - sometimes I didn't do enough, sometimes I did too much and his shoulder went the opposite direction of where he was about to put it.  Sometimes I was too early, and most of the time my aids were too late.  Going back to the beginning of the lesson, he needed to be perfectly equal in both reins or else the halt wasn't straight.  Dressage, you are a funny and cruel mistress sometimes.

My trainer basically said that we're seeing a hole here in his very basic training, and that we need to focus on the details - practice, practice, practice until the details are perfect, because things like straightness in transitions make the hard stuff easier later.  500 times, she said.  "Homework!" she said.  This is how you get good.

And after things were going well at the walk, we did the same thing at the trot.  She tells me we'll do this at the canter too...but that's probably down the line a ways.

He wasn't sweaty, but he was completely exhausted afterward, deep down tired.  He napped in the warm sunshine in his field afterward.  Vacation is over, my pony friend!

Happy.

I think he's looking for spring. Indiana seems to have misplaced it.

I got my 'Wow' lesson, and it was the hardest walk lesson of our lives.

My trainer likes to save up training rides from my missed lessons and give him a pony boot camp when she feels we're stuck, or headed towards being stuck, or facing something like the clinic, so she rode him Wednesday and Thursday.  Turns out she felt the same things I did, only she A) properly identified what was going on and B) has the tools to fix it.  This is not a knock, it's an observation: I am terrible without a trainer.  The wheels just slowly start coming off and the pony slowly starts getting heavier and less responsive without lessons. Three weeks away was too much, thanks, work.

My observations were: I lost control of the shoulder, and he's carrying his nose to the right especially when going to the right.  Her observations were: he's arm-muscle destroyingly heavy, he's popping his shoulder to the right when going left, he's trying to take the left rein again, and while I fixed the forward issue she told me to work on last time, I sacrificed lightness for forward when I really want both.

To the left, she had me establish a real left bend, and was constantly reminding me that sometimes I was going to have to be pretty firm because I needed enough left rein to be able to correct the outside shoulder with the right rein without throwing him off.  Once she pointed it out, I could feel that the second we turned any corner, out went that shoulder.  So to the left, we did a square with that crazy (to me) left bend, a shoulder in on the sides, and a turn on the forehand to go around the corners.  She had me focus on keeping both hands slightly left (inside), keep my weight centered, stop bracing with my right leg/turn my toe and knee out, and focus on the timing of my aids.  Suddenly, there was my light, responsive, bit-chewing, slobbering suckerfish of a pony again.

To the right, his problems are different, so for this she had me think about a counterbend, when in reality I was just keeping him and his wayward jaw straight.  Again we did the square, but this time with a turn on the haunches for the turns, focusing on keeping him in that left rein and bringing the shoulder around.  Muscularly, he has more trouble staying correct to the right, so we didn't work quite as long here.

Finally, when he was going well, we trotted until he got heavy (sometimes 1/4 of a 20m circle!), re-established lightness at the walk, trotted until he got heavy, rinse, repeat.  Through it all she kept explaining and asking me questions, because she said unless I really understood WHY we were doing all this, it wouldn't really be effective in the long term.  I think I do, which is why I wanted to work through it in this (long, sorry) post.

I know it's hard without seeing him, but I am really interested in talking through this with people.  Thoughts?