child's play

So Brita and I don't get to ride together very often, outside of lessons and shows. Her work day ends earlier than mine, so she's already ridden and long gone before I even show up (meaning she also gets to ride in daylight pretty much year round and can therefore seek out the good ground even in nasty winter... #jealous!).

But this week, the stars aligned and we managed to plan a ride together! Exciting for a few reasons: First, our big lighted outdoor is finally back in shape, with freshly harrowed new footing!

"do WAT now?!?" - isabel

Secondly (and arguably more interestingly), we decided that since this week's OF jump lesson is cancelled, we would do a little jump school of our own. Not just jumping any jumps, tho. Jumping some stuff. Some WEIRD stuff. lol

it's a course with character lol

We pretty much pulled out every funky potential filler we could find - including the white barrels, some lawn chairs, and naturally this bizarre children's toy table thingy and it's matching tiny stools (visible as the ground line in the upper right hand corner above).

Nothing particularly massive - the biggest jump on course was probably 2'9" - but LOTS to look at. And increased technicality for the smaller stuff (a 30' two stride line of skinnies from the crazy table thing to the barrels).

apparently not spooky enough to garner a nicer effort lol

And ya know what? The horses were GREAT! Well... Isabel was actually pretty fucking hot to the touch - that glorious perfect canter I gushed about yesterday was nowhere to be seen, as I apparently jinxed myself haha. Instead we were in more of the 'race as fast as possible while ducking behind the contact and behind my leg' frame of mind.

sideways barrels are officially boring

It was fine tho. Temps had dropped something like 15-20 degrees from the day prior, and it was dark and windy. Plus the horse was actually still really very good. I tried to go through that whole process a la Dan of pushing her into the bridle at walk such that she's soft to my hands and collected before we transition to trot. Then repeat at trot before transitioning to canter. Then, boom, commence nice canter.

so much blur, so few cares

It, uh, only kinda worked. She never really softened to my hands or pushed into the bridle - and instead preferred to try and match my requirements for 'slow' with a short retracted neck and false frame while actually not filling up the contact at all.

zomg gallop go FAST

This is tricky for me bc it's so much harder to both get a sense of our pace and see our distances... Plus, when she's that false in the contact, she doesn't land in the same canter she jumps from - she can easily land zooming and careening out of balance bc the only thing keeping her together before the jump was my holding, and that all goes out the window when I release over the fence. So then I end up holding more and more, and we get fugly jumps...

lawn chairs are apparently nbd too

But again, it was honestly really fine. I need to learn how to ride her when she's in this kind of mental space and I think we actually made pretty good work of it.

I just tried to remind myself not to have a backward feel with my hands, to stay upright (and not ahead of the horse) with my upper body, and use my seat and entire leg, hip to heels, to push her up and forward. The basics, folks, sometimes they help!

these little stools gave us some grief tho

Plus the course we set actually ended up riding REALLY well! Like, one of those courses where you could land from any given jump and have at least one, but usually a few options for where to go next.

It was pretty simple, too - just seven jumps: a single on each diagonal and on the center line (parallel with the long sides), a 60' line down one outside line, and a 30' line near the other outside line on a shallow diagonal.

cute despite the blur 

Everything rode well too - the lawn chair single rode super for us every time, as did the 2 stride. I struggled a little in the bending from the in of the outside line to the skinny stools on the diagonal - wanting to fit 6 strides in something around ~65' .... but when I allowed for the 5 strides all was well again.

wheeee!!!

The very upright verticals - cone jump on the center line (above) and skinny stools on the diagonal (left side of frame in above pic) - rode a little trickier, esp compared to the wider jumps with broader bases.

But, generally speaking, neither horse looked at a single thing on course and just jumped around like it couldn't possibly be any easier. Yay ponies!!

~2min fence line video here, with warm up and first course

I set up my helmet camera on the fence line to try to catch the ride, and was actually quite pleased with how well it turned out despite the darkness. Plus the fish eye lens combined with our fairly centralized course design meant that every single fence is in the frame.

We took cell phone videos of each other's final courses tho, in case the helmet camera didn't turn out. I particularly like this second course too bc you can kinda get a sense for how I tried to establish our nice trot first, then nice tiny canter - with marginal success lol. Plus you can see Isabel was landing in a different canter than we jumped from - tho her super forward pace led to auto changes in both directions, score!

~1:30min video of second course here

All in all a super fun ride and solid schooling - yay for jumping weird shit and the horses not even blinking! Now we're all trying to figure out what we should try next haha. (Or maybe it's time to start thinking about our first xc outing of the year?!?)