These Poles were Made for Cantering

Lexi. She is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. But perhaps there is the key...

Today's lesson involved trotting over a pole on the ground (once the trot was established and nice). She'd trot it fine and then TROTAWAYREALLYFAST. So we'd re-establish the trot and then come again. But when we cantered it, she fucked up real bad the first time and had to swap leads so she wouldn't fall down, but every time after that she was a star. I think that, like a lot of horses, cantering over stuff makes more sense to her than trotting over stuff.

So! Another for our list of first:

6. Cantering poles.

It's really fun to canter her these days, even though shit sometimes goes pear-shaped. I actually get to sit on her back, and sometimes the canter becomes veryverylight and there's tons of suspension, and I'm actually riding my horse. Mary added one more thing to the mix: when the outside shoulder comes back, it's time to ask for the downward transition. I got it sometimes and missed it others, but the fact that we can think about that right now is wayyy ahead of where we were a few weeks ago.

I swear, I need to kidnap a stranger to go to the barn with me and take pictures of my lessons. Maybe my mom can do it next week. I will bribe her with Reese's cups. Here's an old picture of her so you don't forget what she looks like.

Cantering?!

In Rocket news, she did a really stupid thing and scraped up her side yesterday. I'll get pics of that grossness later. It's nasty.

Oh, and one more cuteness: Lex got her teeth done yesterday while hay was being delivered and needed only a touch of dormosedan to get her nice and sleepy. The vet fell in love with her. If only there was an Olympic event in getting one's teeth done.

Another First: Lex the Trail Horse

This has been a very educational week for Lex. Let's recap:

1. First canter jump.
2. First line.
3. First field trip.
4. First time jumping in a ring with another horse in it.

And then today, she added
5. First trail ride.

I'm so proud of her. She isn't always a perfectly obedient little lady, but I wouldn't want her to be. She wasn't sure at all about the trail ride concept from the beginning. M went with us, but on her spookiest horse. As soon as he stepped into long grass, she was like, wut? But we moved along and she was fine until we got to the steep downhill rocky trail, at which point she flipped me the bird with both hooves and was all, "HORSES CAN'T DO THAT." But M's horse was already heading down and so I put my leg on (that never happens) and let the reins slip through my fingers and she worked her way down. Then we did a loop in the meadow, which Lex thought was slightly less torturous but she really wanted to pass M's horse and I wouldn't let her. I knew we couldn't run into his butt because he'd lose his mind and M would have been in my saddle with me, but I wanted Lex to have the visual barrier and not get her way about the pace. After the meadow loop, we went back up that same steep, rocky hill. Lexi was all, "This is SO. STEEP! I am going to DIE TODAY." I was all up in two point and holding mane and trying to stay out of her way. Meanwhile, M is in front of me in a dressage saddle and letting the horse carry her up the hill. It was hilarious.

I have a feeling that Lex will like the trail once she gets used to it. The terrain meant she actually had to use her butt instead of just lurching along like she does sometimes. She was a very good girl, and this kind of work will be good for her even if it seems like eating her broccoli right now. I'm supposed to end our rides by going for a walk around the property so she gets used to it. Especially because we may have a couple more firsts upcoming: a cross-country school on Sunday and a combined test the next weekend (local folks: it's not Sandstone, it's Morningside).

Getting the summer off right.

Cantering Jumps and a Field Trip

Well, one jump, but I'll take it. On Monday I was tacking up and a horse trailer pulled in--turns out Mary was going to give a lesson just as I was about to get on. Oops. But not to worry, the lesson lady and Mary are both awesome and thought it would be best for the lesson (and for Lex) if we went in at the same time. It worked out super great for me, because the lady warmed up over a pile of poles on the ground, and then one x, and then a line of cross rails, and Mary just pointed at stuff and told me to go over it, too.

Lex warmed up well in spite of the fact that Mary was still dragging the ring when I got on, and Lex gets weird about other horses walking up to the ring while we're riding. She wants to stop and stare. Might have been a bad decision, but today I just let her do it. Within a couple minutes, she was relaxed and ready to go back to work.

She was super good on the flat: very few discussions about rhythm or contact, and we practiced changing directions and putting her shoulders in the new outside rein. It was good to have to ride around another horse because I couldn't just get stuck on one circle or direction.

Lex cantered away from the pile of poles the first time we did it, but it was a reasonable canter. After that, she trotted away from those. She always cantered away from the cross rails, but never anything nuts. We just trotted into one or the other going out of the line so that she didn't have to do two at once, and I figured that's where we'd leave it, but then Mary told me to go ahead and trot into the line and ride the out also. I figured--correctly--that Lex would canter, so I just trotted in as slowly as we could manage and then the canter out was balanced and appropriate, not a runaway canter. We quit on that and I was super proud of her. This feels like progress!

On Tuesday I had an impromptu lesson in which we got BY FAR our best canter work yet. I could sit on her in the canter because she was balanced enough that there was something to sit on, and we could do circles and canter all the way around the ring and it was just so lovely, both leads. M encouraged me to find moments to let go and allow her to be in self-carriage, which Lex likes when she's balanced (but which she forgets when she's having a temper fit).

We gave her a break after that to walk around on a bit of a long rein. The plan was that I'd pick up a nice trot and hop over our cross rails again, but Lex had decided she'd had quite enough and had behaved and so she didn't need to play that game. She threw an absolute hissy fit, so the jumping plan was scrapped. Oh well. We got the trot back where it needed to be and let it go from there.

Tuesday afternoon, M was taking a couple horses to a Richard Lamb clinic, so we threw Lex on the trailer to let her eat grass at a new farm. She got really stressed out on the trailer, but got off the trailer fine. She was kind of up for about ten minutes, but once she realized they make grass at this farm too, she settled right in. Before too long, she was the most relaxed of the three horses we brought, and was nickering at M's geldings like she was reassuring them. It was great. I was very proud of her.

Now I'm off to go have a hack with M and hope that Lex doesn't decide that riding outside the ring is scary. Fingers crossed!

The Maryland Horse Trials

LISTEN. When you take two kids and their ponies plus two horses for M and the total twelve ride times are within a four hour window, things are gonna get hectic.

The short version is: everyone did well (except M's son, whose pony dumped him on XC because the kid hadn't put enough leg on, but still, bad pony). One of the kids won her division and I was proud of her because I was coaching her and she clearly takes riding very seriously.

The horse trials was at Loch Moy, a very nice facility in Maryland. It was unrated but you'd never know it: everything was very nice quality and they had about 500 horses there. I wasn't in love with the stadium course design for the elementary level, but all of our three elementary horses jumped around fine. The elementary xc course was great, and the novice course (which M rode one horse in) was nice but had a modern, technical feel to it.

At one point when M and I were walking her novice course, she turned to me and said, "I just really love eventing." Which is good, because this is how she makes her living, but I'm not sure I do. We shall see. I'm not opposed to trying Lex out in the lower levels and seeing what happens, but the part that was the most fun for me to watch and the part that looked most inviting was still the jumping.

Anyway, I'm a tired puppy today after running around like mad yesterday, but I'd really recommend taking horses to this horse trials if you're in the area. It was beautiful.

Anyone in this area going to Sandstone in a couple weeks? That might be Lex's showing debut in whatever is the lowest-level they have in the combined test.

Trotting is More Fun with Poles 2: Crossrail Boogaloo

Aaaaaaaaaugh I love my horse today, even though she is a Bad Witch on the ground and I always feel like I'm pretty close to getting a bite on the shoulder when I tighten her girth and she tries to kick me when I treat the (brand new) sweet itch on her belly. She can stay.

Old pics to break up wall of text!

Yesterday I just dumped a bunch of poles all around the ring and we trotted them. I probably only rode for 15-20 minutes because she was SO. GOOD. It was like, put poles in front of her and she goes, "OH! Now I get why you want me to be straight and not a turkey! Got it." She's actually easier to slow down when we trot over poles. Big pats, done for the day, especially since she's been ridden every day since Sunday.

Today's lesson was AWESOME. It started out on a good note, because there was a deer sleeping in the long grass next to the ring and we scared her walking buy, so she leapt up and sprung off into the woods. Lex went, "Huh?" and kinda took a couple sideways scoot steps, but then went back to walking on a loose rein, happy as a clam. I love love love that.

I used to ride her alone in a 40 acre field. Wut.

She's getting connected at the walk and trot more quickly, so today we worked on keeping her connected through the transition. This is going to be a work in progress. The way Mary said it was, "Right now she thinks she has to pull with her ears to trot, but she needs to lift her withers and push from behind." Lexi had a minor meltdown in the middle of the lesson, trotting right on a 10-15m circle. She just would NOT slow down, and I wasn't doing a good enough job of being bossy about it. I'll take responsibility for my part of it but Lex also needs to not flip me off when I use my aids correctly.

The CANTER today though, wow. The left lead was pretty good. Mary said she thought Lex was like, "I've been thinking about this!" and offered me a pretty soft canter early on. Mary reminded me to ride today's horse and not last week's horse and to let go at the canter more. Eyes on the ground, people. I can't say enough about the value in that. The magic happened in the right lead, where Lex was so balanced and soft that the canter had legit suspension. I couldn't stop grinning. That's a canter you can jump out of.

I thought we were gonna have another flatwork day, but then Mary knocked a couple verticals down to cross rails, probably 18", which is bigger than Lex has been asked to jump but I figured (correctly) that she wouldn't care. The goal was to get as many trot steps as possible on the way to the jump and make them slow, and it would be great if she trotted away. We did a good job getting there but rushed away a couple times. Mary had me think about landing in my feet and taking my leg OFF at the base. We can add leg at the base later, when she's more broke and the jumps are big enough that she couldn't walk over them. That made a huge difference, and the last jump we did she landed in a gorgeous quiet canter. On Mary's orders, I slowed her to a halt and then jumped off and made much of her. Lex really looked proud of herself. Mary: "Oh, this horse will be able to jump just fine."

This was her first jump, about a year ago.

She did say that the reason Lex sometimes taps the jump with her back toe is that she's not using her hind end to jump yet, either, so she's jumping pretty flat. That will get sorted out with time, just like the rest of it. Consistent good riding with Mary's help will get her where she needs to be.

Lexi gets the whole weekend off, because she got ridden six days in a row and Sunday I'm going to help Mary and her son at a schooling event. I can't wait!

Book Review: The Riding Horse Repair Manual

This blog's name is, in some ways, an homage to Reading Rainbow, and I haven't reviewed any books yet! Crazy. A conversation with Sprinkler Bandit gave me the idea to review Doug Payne's new book, The Riding Horse Repair Manual: Not the Horse You Want? Create Him from What You Have. The title is a leeeeeetle long, but I'm an academic and my book title is insane so I shan't throw stones.

In general, I'm a big fan of reading books about horse management and riding. There are many, many people in the world, some of whom are no longer alive, who know a lot more than I do about horses and riding. I'll never get to learn from them all in person, but they wrote things down! I think that reading is part of serious horsemanship because there is so much to learn. So when I heard a year ago that Doug Payne had a book in the works, I got super excited for it to come out. He's a rider I admire a lot because he can ride the trickiest horses out there and get them to excel to their fullest capabilities. He's probably best known as an eventer, and he rides at the **** level of that sport. But he's also excellent in the show jumping ring and in dressage, and his goal is to ride at the top of each of those sports. I don't see any reason why not. And believe me, eventing needs more good jumper riders.

Another thing I love about Doug is that he does the best helmet-cam videos. He narrates over them so you not only get a chance to see what a four star jump looks like from horseback, you get to hear what he was thinking as he went. So, so great. I watch them constantly.

I snapped his book up as soon as I could, and then I stood in line at Rolex to get it signed for no reason other than I'm a dork and I wanted to say thanks for all his work to educate people.

I read the book in about three days, cover to cover. I'm a very fast reader, but the book also moves the reader along well. Doug is a good writer and the photos are great. They're almost all pictures of him sitting on some horse doing something insane. I took the book to Mary because she was interested in it (and decided to order her own copy so I got mine back) and I mentioned the myriad lunatic photos and asked what she thought that day of shooting was like. She said, "Oh, Doug just rides that every day." I gotta tell you, I don't want it enough to sit all this stuff daily!

The book is organized well. Part 1: Getting Started deals with the basics of laying a foundation and how to start a green horse and evaluate a horse you're on. He also says many times throughout that amateur riders should have help in this process and that we sometimes need to check ourselves, because we might have a horse that is too much for us. If we're scared of our horses we won't be able to commit to training them better. He talks about one of the biggest roadblocks to becoming an accomplished rider is "not being objective about your skill set" (14).  He goes on:

Horses are about the most honest creatures you'll find, and they can see a "fake" without fail. As a rider, and a student of the sport, you should be objective and honest with yourself (and upfront with your instructor). Being honest about your riding will get you much farther--and faster--than trying to shortcut your way to the top. In any event, your shortcomings will be evident through the actions of your horse, so find your weaknesses, and fix them (14).

To this I say, AMEN, SISTER. I can't tell you how many times I've wished I could force a rider to be honest with herself about where she is in her ability. People often think they're better than they are, and this is a) annoying and b) dangerous. And sometimes people would be better if they were on a horse that was suitable to them, but they can't ride the horse they have so the horses and riders suffer. This is not the goal!

Part 2: Let the Games Begin, is in many ways the heart of the book. This is where he goes through a great many training and behavioral issues and various ways to work on them. The first chapter in this part sticks with his theme of riders being honest with themselves and is called "Before you Begin: Horse and Rider 'Self-Examination.'" He reminds the reader that "Problems you see in your horse are a reflection of your training. Stay objective and slightly removed from the situation; any emotional response will be counterproductive" (59). I would like this tattooed to my forehead, please. He encourages riders to ask themselves questions that I love because we really should all be asking them of ourselves all the time. Here, I'll do them now:

Can you handle this horse's problem(s)?
Right now, Lex's problems are rhythm and not wanting to accept the bit. I feel confident that I can handle these problems, as it is interesting but not AT ALL dangerous, and that I'm dealing with it better with Mary's eyes on the ground at least twice a week.

Do you have a personal goal in mind?
In the next couple weeks, I want to get Lex's contact more consistent, make the canter more relaxed, and start over jumps again. For the summer, I'd like to get Lex to some schooling shows in just about any (English) discipline. Her world needs to grow and we won't be able to show well in any discipline until she can relax at a horse show. Ultimately, I'd like to go as far in the jumper ring as she can, and we won't know how far that is until we get there. And because I don't think it's always a good idea to set goals around just one horse, I also want to go as far as I can in the jumpers, and someday I hope to own a horse with whom I can get to the top of the sport. I hope that horse is Lex but we'll see.

Are you mentally prepared to improve?
This seems like an odd question but I think it's a good one. I'd say yes, I'm mentally prepared to improve. Nothing about moving up the levels seems scary or intimidating because I know we're laying a good foundation with my horse and that by the time we're ready to move up to any given level, we will be confirmed.

Are you at the right barn?
YES. Absolutely. I could not be happier. I wish I could stay forever.

With your goal in mind and the environment ripe for improvement, is your horse truly able to reach that goal with you?
 Oh yeah. Lex is a better athlete than I am. If anything, I'll be holding her back.

Are you willing to make the best of the opportunity you have with your horse?
To be honest, I work extremely hard at my riding and horsemanship. I can't imagine turning down an opportunity to ride or show Lex or any other horse. And I have this incredible opportunity with Mary this summer (and maybe fall) that I don't want to pass up.

Do you know when it's time to go to a professional trainer for lessons?
Girl please. I'd take a lesson every day if I could.

What do you need to improve before dealing with the horse's specific problems?
I really need to work on keeping the pressure on Lex and not giving up too soon. I have been working on my right leg position and that's still happening. I, like everyone, seem to have problems with letting my reins get too long. When my reins are short enough, most of the rest of my position problems get sorted out.

Do you have the desire--and time--to dedicate to solving your horse's issues?
Yes to both in spades at the moment. I actually have time to be bringing along a few horses right now. I need to find some broke horses to ride.

Is fear limiting your potential?
Nah. It would be if I was trying to ride Advanced. Cross country jumps over 3'6" give me the willies. But I'm cool with any jump that'll fall down as long as I'm on a horse I feel good about.

In addition to rider honesty, the other theme of this chapter is that bitting isn't likely to solve your problems. Like every good horseman I know, he advocates using a plain snaffle at home for mouth-making work and then pulling out the big bits at shows if you need them (and some horses obviously never need them). Horses will get dull to whatever bit you're using, and you can only ratchet up the bit so many times. There are a few problems that bits might help with, but overall, Doug says going to a bigger bit first is going to create more issues than it solves. This section deals with contact issues, unruly outbursts, jumping problems, and more. It's a wealth of information.

Part 3: How it Can Work for You, How it Has Worked for Me, is kind of my favorite part. He talks about how to apply his philosophies broadly, and he talks about horses he has ridden. I loved reading those stories and it served as a good reminder that top horses usually are tricky. Perfectly sane, calm, quiet horses don't go Advanced. I remember this when Lex is acting like a moose.

So at the end of the day, yes, buy this book and read the whole thing. I devoured it and will be keeping it around as a reference because even though I'm not dealing with most of these issues at the moment, I might eventually, either on Lex (jumping problems could arise!) or in the future on another horse. And I learned about how I could have dealt with things differently and better on horses I've ridden in the past.

Have you read this book? What thoughts do you have about it?

Trotting is More Fun with Poles, Part 1 (I hope)

I had a "semi-free" ride on Lex today, which in the new world order means that I wasn't taking a lesson but I was riding at the same time as Mary and she couldn't stop herself from giving me some tips and reminders. I LOVE HER. She is the best.

The good trot happened a little sooner today, but we still had our cow moments, especially to the left. Mary was jumping her up-and-coming green baby around the ring and I was very glad to be there at the same time, because it made us move the circle around and gave Lex something to be distracted by that I could work her through. Both horses were well-behaved but M's horse gets a little excited when jumping from the canter. Happily, Lex never overreacted.

Lex and I practiced changing directions and moving her shoulders from the old outside rein into the new outside rein. I think she likes that exercise much more than she likes trotting on a 10m circle forever, and I don't blame her. She's smart and when she does something right she wants to move on. Before Mary went in, she dragged out a pole for us to trot over and watched it happen a couple times. Knock on wood, but I felt it made the trot easier. I think she might be one of those that's easier to jump than flat. Which is fine, because I'm like that too, and ultimately I want a jumper and not a dressage horse. Mary is around to keep us in check with her USDF silver medal. :D Anyway, tomorrow we're supposed to have Fun with Trot Poles Part 2 and I'm to scatter poles around the ring and have her trot over them in her frame and in a rhythm. I think she'll like that--we've done it before and she seems to think it's fun.

We'll see how things go the next couple of rides, but at the moment, we're aiming at a tiny little schooling combined test. I know, I know, I just said I didn't want a dressage horse, but a walk-trot intro test and then jumping a course with four or five cross-rails out of a trot and then getting lots of pats and carrots isn't going to ruin her at all. I think it will be great fun. And the CT is cheap enough that if we get there and she's a total moose, we can scratch and just hack around until she chills out.

Finally, forward progress after a year of starts and stops. It's great!