jumping indoors ftw

Another day, another lesson recap. And so it goes here at 'Fraidy Cat Eventing lol. This time we're talking about jumping tho (yay!), and instead of a zillion bullet point details with minimal media, I have a zillion video stills and only a few words :)

pony looks ready, no?

As you may have seen in Kaitlyn's post on Something To Talk About Eventing, trainer P had an awesome lesson planned for us this week. And even better? The lesson was more sparsely attended than usual - just Kaitlyn, Brita, a young rider I've ridden with for years (she groomed for me at Jenny Camp and came to the paper chase at Tranquility last year too), and me. 

isabel was *so happy* to be allowed to canter freely again

And nobody else showed up to school either, so it remained just the four horses in the ring for the full lesson. Not bad!!

posted because izzy's tail cracks me up in this pic

Isabel warmed up feeling better than she has in recent memory - I think she was grateful for dry normal footing and the breathing room of a relatively empty arena. We played a bit with the flatwork - esp movements from our upcoming tests - but kept it light so as not to tire her out. 

wheeeeee jomping!!

Then it was time to jump! Warmed up by trotting over that vertical in the pic above, which then quickly grew to a 36' line that P wanted us trotting in for 3. We then cantered into the same line, for which P still wanted to see 3 strides given the small space constraints. As this proved trickier, the line was adjusted to 30' for an easy going 2 strides.

barrels ftw

Same goes for the other outside line, which started as just a single with a barrel under it, then grew to another 30' two stride line. Actually, by the end of the lesson almost every fence had barrels under it. Yay for giving the horses something to look at and changing up the visual landscape a bit haha.

hog's back!! hard to tell from this angle, but that sucker was wiiiiiiide

The outside lines stayed at 2'6" for the whole lesson (tho of course everything in the indoor looks much bigger than it actually is ha), and the diagonal singles (pink gate and hogs back) started around there before growing. 

isabel tries to show wick who's really the taller of the two lol

After running through the lines and the two diagonal jumps individually, we put it all together for a quick course. And the diagonals went to about 2'9". This made me happy for a couple reasons: I haven't jumped that height since breaking my leg and was starting to worry if I'd be scared again. Or if Isabel would be rusty.

video of course here

But nope, it was totally fine. The fences looked big to me (again, everything looks big in the indoor), but not in a scary way. And I only pulled out a couple of my favorite mistakes and oopsies moments.

figuring out how to actually begin each course is challenging with no rail... but we make do

Mostly I struggled with the timing of my half halts in the turn before the fence. I was usually a little late, meaning I was still whoa-ing too much to the fences instead of riding forward. Eh. I'm gonna blame it in part on the small spaces tho. 

And it only really bit me in the ass once, when we turned the course around and took the short approach to the diagonals. I came off the right hand turn to the hogs back (coming towards the camera in the pic above) without enough power and we screeched to a halt. Oops. Sorry Izzy!

see what i mean about it being pretty wide? 

It was easily fixed by riding stronger through the outside aids ("ride her like a race car" - trainer P) with a counter bend coming through the corner so that I could straighten and GO. Like a slingshot. And sitting down through my corners to in turn get Izzy sitting down and using her own hind end, instead of fishtailing around.

Tho naturally I went a little too far and started shooting out of the corners with too much power and not enough half halt, and had to repeat an outside line a couple times before we could find the first jump nicely... Oh well.

mare likes to jump :)

In a way it's oddly reassuring to only see the same old errors I always make, even after not jumping much for so long. My shoddy confidence typically manifests itself by introducing all kinds of weird tics and crappy decision making when the jumps go up. But in this ride, it was just same old, same old. I'll take it !

And hopefully with practice, will continue improving on those ever-necessary details like balancing through the turns, half halting then riding forward to the fence (but not fast!), and staying nicely with the mare over the fences (perhaps with the help of shortening my damn stirrups lol).