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.

quick 40sec video of our last sequence

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!