Tuesday, January 29, 2019

bite-sized jump lessons

We finally got to ride outside this week!! TWICE!!!! Not like, for anything serious or anything, but STILL. Riding outside!! Wooo Hooo!!

there goes charlie making a 3'3 jump look like 2'3. c'mon bro, try a little bit??
I managed to ride in the outdoor dressage court one night, which was very nice to have the extra space. Tho the footing was literally freezing more by the minute, so we just stuck to walk and trot for ~35min. Charlie has a LOT of pent up energy right now and reeeeeally just needs a good gallop. In time, tho, in time. He seemed happy enough to trot around outside lol.

person for scale lol. the smaller natural standards are 3', so those left two fences are solidly in N territory. the right two tho? yea the blue oxer was belly button height on me when i hopped off to grab my sweatshirt.  
We also got to finally go for a nice long hack through the woods and fields this past weekend too. So far our winter has been wet but otherwise mostly mild. Except the few nasty cold snaps have fallen on the weekends - my only daylight hours at the barn. So it's been keeping us off the trails.

Not this weekend tho, and Charlie seemed again to be really happy to get outside -- he was actually *marching* on the trail instead of his normal lazy amble haha.

omgosh so fierce tho on landing, chuck!
All the same, tho, we were still inside for our weekly jump lesson with trainer P. The ground is just too hard, with weird mixed layers of wet and frozen. That's ok, tho, I think Charlie and I are finally adjusted to the confines of our little 20x40m indoor.

we may be a little, ahem, rusty at jumping this height stadium fences lol
And considering I've resigned myself to not having anything particularly exciting on the calendar for a little while yet, we have no urgent need to do anything very specific in our lessons. Honestly it's kinda just play time. Which is fine by me for now.

still pretty boss at the N fences tho!
And the exercises themselves for the ride were pretty straight forward. Apparently a lot of horses earlier in the day were kinda just not feeling things. These wild temperature swings have made the horses kinda a little blah (and actually we've had a number of colic scares at the barn recently....) so trainer P kept things reeally simple with just four fences zig-zagging across the middle E-B line of the arena, each on a diagonal.

practice makes perf-good-enough tho, right? 
Every corner had a pole marker that riders were directed to go outside of for every turn. And trainer P wanted to see us in a tiny bouncy-ball canter doing the add strides to the fences. Really collected, but with a lot of impulsion.

omg he's so excited for me to mess him up at that fence again lol
For me, this felt easy enough while we cruised through everything warming up at lower heights. But when P set everything up to what you see in the pics and video (a mix of N and T), I got a little caught out.

lol sorry buddy, i tried!!
When the jumps were bigger, it was a lot more obvious that my idea of a "collected" canter really did not have the energy and impulsion necessary. My feel was way off, and I was more likely to gun it for the long flat spot vs keeping the revs up in our collected canter..

In my defense, we haven't schooled T stadium fences in a pretty long time. There was just one or two in the Phillip Dutton clinic, but otherwise it's been since September or October probably. Instead, more recently we've been jumping T cross country fences. One thing I still have to learn: the difference in style between show jumping and cross country becomes more obvious and important as height increases.

wheeee indoor jumping haha
It worked out well enough tho. P encouraged me to go large around the ring, getting almost a lengthened canter feel down the long side, then collecting in the short end but maintaining the energy before turning to the jumps. The key was to not get dull or flat or backward. I'm just still kinda slow to figure out if our canter is good enough until it's a little too late lol.

Charlie honestly felt pretty good tho. Honestly pretty happy. It occurred to me the other day that I can't actually remember the last time Charlie had one of his "dinosaur stuck in tar-pit" tantrums. Like those moments will always be there haha, esp when I really start pissing the horse off.


But for now he's kinda just cruisin around. Even when the jumps got a little bigger and I kinda fumbled the approach. Nbd, Charlie still took care of business.

handsome pony <3 and wait a second -- that saddle is a different color than my normal bates!?
I'm eager to get more proper course work practice, and may or may not be scheming for some lesson opportunities in larger indoors in the next couple weeks. For now tho I am actually really enjoying treating these weekly jump lessons as more like fun playtime.

It's like the little bite-sized morsels of useful schooling exercises (like the skinny barrels of the past couple weeks, or the bigger T fences this week) are giving us just enough to stay relatively sharp. But it's not so much as to feel like "work." I like it!


30 comments:

  1. Those boots are just the dreamiest in every single photo.

    I love seeing all of the different exercises you do in the winter. It's amazing to me how many ways one can utilize a small indoor space.

    And three cheers for the dino-tantrums being a thing of old!

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    1. Omgosh I’m officially obsessed with the boots. They are SO comfortable and are so far wearing in nicely. I’ll probably follow up with them in a few months but for now I am so so so happy with this purchase!

      And yea lol I’m quite pleased the bronto is hibernating lol ;)

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  2. "When the jumps were bigger, it was a lot more obvious that my idea of a "collected" canter really did not have the energy and impulsion necessary."

    ^ my life. My trainer is using jumping to get this point across to me in Dressage right now, and it's working. You can get hung out to dry with an under-revved canter in jumping, and in Dressage, it's like "this is fine".

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    1. Yup that’s exactly it. And like, conceptually I *know* this but in practice I get complacent alllll the time. It’s so hard in winter too bc when we are schooling in the indoor we are often sharing space with up to 8 other horses so I end up setting my pace to go with the flow instead of focusing more on Charlie’s individual gait quality....

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    2. it makes so much sense, if only actually doing it was just as easy!! lol....

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  3. you guys are looking great! it's nice having video - sometimes what's happening feels so much different than you expect.

    it's difficult having a large horse in a tiny indoor but man does it teach you to compress the stride...

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    1. thanks! i'm SUPER grateful of the video, it helps me so so so much. i only posted about 40sec of it above, but i actually have more like 3-4min from the lesson and it's really useful for me to study.

      and yea the indoor helps us a lot. i need to let the walls handle getting my horse backed off a bit and focus on adding leg and oomph to the canter.

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  4. I love that exercise! Definitely takes advantage of the space you have in the indoor! That compressed canter with impulsion is so hard! Especially on a big, long Brontosaurus! You guys look great tho, and he definitely tries to get er don for you! Looks like a lot of fun! I can't wait until I, too, have a horse who can turn AND pick up the correct lead

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    1. omg turning AND leads.... seriously the HARDEST. to be completely honest: some of charlie's and my biggest most epic throwdowns were about exactly that. bc it's just fucking tough. in the clip above he's doing all his auto changes which is nice, but that's bc for the rest of the lesson leading up to that point we had a couple spectacular moments of, uh, NOT doing that lol

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  5. Wow, I haven't been a good follower. But man does coming back ever make an impact, you are doing so well with Charlie! I think we need to rename his Charles for how stoic and chill he is. LOL

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    1. aw thanks! and yes he definitely goes by "Charles" haha, and sometimes just "Sir" <3

      also good to hear an update from you - i had to take your site off my feed readers bc it started randomly pumping out weird moving streaming links, maybe some odd sorta hack? anyway looks good now so i'll get everything linked up again!

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  6. Looks like some really good stuff! And yay for no dino feelings in a long time!

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    1. thanks! i'm so happy about putting the dino to rest for a little while. like charlie still has feelings and expresses himself, but i'm hoping we've developed a better channel of communication where he can get his message across to me with less, er, volume haha....

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  7. You guys are looking great! It's extra tough to find the right canter in a small indoor, so try not to feel to broken up about that. It will come so much easier once you're back outdoors.

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    1. for sure!! tho when we're outside we kinda have the opposite problem lol. it might not be obvious but the walls are rreeeeealllly helping me out in the above lol. take those walls away and we can telescope out to a 14' stride in the blink of an eye. long 'n flat is charlie's favorite haha ;)

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  8. You guys are really getting in the groove! Also, is that a new saddle? :D

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    1. thank you ;) and YES that *is* a new saddle!! just on trial, and it didn't actually fit the horse. but i reeeeeeally liked it. post to come on that topic haha

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  9. its so funny bc the canter we *think* is good for jompies really ISN'T the canter we should have hah. "what do you mean more forward, it feels like we're flying!!!!" you guys look awesome!

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    1. lol so true! tho in this case it was kinda the opposite end of that equation: instead of needing more forward, we needed more *lift* in the shoulders, more of an up feeling, while still maintaining a shorter more collected stride length. for me, it's easy to think i have the short stride length figured out by just slowing the horse down, but actually i'm letting him get behind my leg in the process and it makes finding our jumps out of stride a bit harder!

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  10. I'm jealous of your outdoor rides! And also, ya'll look great in the video! Jumping (especially bigger jumps) are harder inside, IMHO

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    1. oh man, totally agreed - *everything* feels harder inside sometimes!!

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  11. Looking good!! My Trainer used to explain it by increasing the RPMs but keeping the MPH the same. I mean, not for me on Gem as we weren't there yet, but that is what I'd hear her tell others and it really made a lot of sense to my brain.

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    1. yea definitely. on paper it makes total sense. i understand the concept inside and out. and i *know* how to do it, as does charlie. we school it constantly. but it's all shades of gray, ya know? and i get to a place where i'm like "Yup we totes are doing the thing!" except, uh, not quite. and it often takes a big jump to prove that point lol. just needs more work!

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  12. I love the way he just casually steps over 3'3" like it's a freaking cavaletti.

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  13. Ooo exciting potential new saddle, and yay for riding outside. So cool you have an indoor

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    1. The indoor is a life saver even as I love to whine about its size haha. The winter from 2014-15 my friend and I had lease horses that lived at a farm with no outdoor, and we were so determined to stay in a regular riding routine that we were hauling out to local indoors to ride 2-3 times a week. It worked, but damn it was exhausting. So nice to not have to travel now just to get the horse moving around !

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  14. I love seeing what you're doing in your indoor since ours is roughly the same size - and man does it start to feel small about now!

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    1. Oh man I feel you on that! Maybe one of these days I’ll have to do a round up of my favorite indoor exercises.... they’re all documented in various posts across the last five years but it takes a little digging to find everything ....

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