As I hinted at last week, we had a lot going on with lessons recently — everything kinda all jumbled and stacked last-minute on top of each other in a not-entirely-ideal schedule.
“you know we have a really nice outdoor ring at home, right??” — doozy, on the trailer for the third time this week
Idk why it always seems to be like “feast or famine” with trying to get lessons set up, but that just seems to be the way of things.
it was worth it tho!! and look at all these cute little wooden cutout animals!!
Regardless, we actually FINALLY made it out to see Woodge last week as the perfect little cake topper on our triple stack of jump lessons with 5* eventers.
legit so sad this sassy little fox kit pic is blurry bc it’s SO CUTE
And somewhat hilariously, Woodge basically picked up exactly where Dom left off, after Dom had picked up right where Matt left off. Bc real talk, it’s not like isn’t super obvious what I need to be working on. There’s PLENTY of low hanging fruit, right?
anyway! let’s check in with pivo to see how thing are looking after three big clinics in a row!!
But ya know. This whole riding thing is hard. It’s not that I don’t sit up tall and straight bc it’s never occurred to me before, or nobody’s told me. It’s just that. Ya know. In the grand scheme of things, riding is hard. A lot happens every moment, it’s a contact sport. And I’m only human!
HOLY SHIT I LEARNED TO SIT UP
Anyway, naturally there’s no media from our lesson with Woodge either. But have no fear, I have pivo footage from another flat ride at home this weekend!! And Doozy is looking like a whole ass brick house these days, so we get lots of pictures!!!
hahaha just kidding. but seriously tho, have we considered that perhaps i just post the trot ugly?
Doozy is so mercurial, tho, I swear. She really is a different animal every day. For as apeshit explosive she was at the clinic with Dom (bc #dogs), she was a perfectly prim princess at Woodge’s. And then back to sizzling like a steak on the barbecue for the pictured pivo ride — with occasional pops, snaps and CRACKLES!
she looks peaceful and serene, no? ….looks can be deceiving!
Woodge spent a lot of time focusing on my upper body and arm posture too, much like Dom did. Tho she was more focused on bringing my shoulders more back + together, whereas Dom really didn’t like how much I twist and lean from side to side.
walking out like a slinky glossy panther tho <3
As we all know, tho, I can only really think about one thing at a time. One of the yoga teachers did a series of flows this summer that worked through the chakra systems one at a time, and I found the 3rd chakra sequence particularly helpful. Third chakra being in that solar plexus space above the belly button inside the low ribs, for those less familiar.
for real tho, this canter literally came out of NOWHERE
Historically my posture has always been really collapsed in that zone, so it’s been really helpful to fixate on that for a little while. But it’s just one piece of the puzzle, right? Seems like the next big focal area is the space between my shoulder blades, as my habit seems to be to really roll my shoulders forward, drawing the blades apart.
why thank you ma’am, all i wanted was a trot transition but apparently there’s a whole new low gear in there!
All these things take time, tho, and it can be hard to stay focused on the posture stuff when Doozy feels like she’s ready to launch into outer space. C’est la vie tho, right? I didn’t set out to buy a horse as challenging for me as this one, but she’s the one that I have now and ain’t nobody beating down the door to take her off my hands* LOL!
(*No, she is not** for sale. I honestly love the shit out of this silly chaotic enigmatic critter)
(**Buttttttttttt if you wanna make an offer…… haha)
“AHHHHHHHH” — doozy, just cuz
Like I said, tho, Doozy was a princess for the ride with Woodge so we got to basically go through all the movements in a more tactical thorough way than we had with either Dom or Matt. Like riding the right side of the horse — that was actually available to me during this lesson so we got to work on calibrating it a little more.
“false alarm…. maybe.” — doozy, legit strutting while also considering ALL her options
Or trying to keep my aids — and especially legs — ON the horse all the time, and especially on the landing side of a jump. Bc hell yes, we got to do a little more course work with Woodge too!! And Doozy was great!
it might not look like much, but if you make it this far in the video (hint, it’s at the end) you’ll hear from my tone of voice that this right lead canter caught me totally off guard with how held together she felt
And go figure, keeping my aids on kept everything better!! Woodge had said literally the same thing as Dom, about how you “have to ride the horse you have under you right now.” Which is obvi a challenge for a horse as changeable as Doozy.
basically just enjoyed it for like three quarters of a circle before transitioning down and praising the crap out of her
But it turns out, everything is easier when your leg is on. So no matter what mood Doozy is in, things go better when I have my leg on. Obvi that’s a “duh” statement. But eh, nothing about any of this is exactly ground breaking, amirite?
not gonna lie tho, there’s a huge disconnect in my mind between how much effort is pictured in this moment, just how hard it feels, vs what it can actually look like
And it’s a lesson I seem to need to learn and relearn again and again and again. I have this weird hang up in my brain that equates “good + effective” with “soft + effortless.” Tho as Dan famously quipped to me (a whole ass decade ago, but who’s counting!), “the best riders are soft AND effective, but you have to be effective first.”
clips from the pivo ride if you’re into that sort of thing
And for Doozy right now, at least for me and my skill set and ability, “effective” can often feel like a whole-of-body contact. Like the opposite of effortless.
waiting patiently for her cookie <3
And it usually takes a fairly blunt reminder (like Doozy exploding) to get me to plug in and get connected to the required degree.
and the happiest clam out strolling with friends
That’s another reason why the pivo is so helpful for me right now. Bc again, in my brain, when it feels like I’m working SO HARD and everything is SO HARD and EFFORTFUL, I can feel frustrated and like it’s “wrong” or “not working” or “not getting better.”
not a bad balance
And obvi I’m not trying to say that the opposite is true — that these are all perfect pictures or that the video is flawless or whatever. It obviously isn’t. But I do see moments that give me more confidence about which approaches seem to work better for Doozy. And moments that help me understand that just bc it doesn’t feel effortless doesn’t mean it’s not effective.
The last canter in the video above was, for me, a fairly instructive moment. Again, not that it was perfect, but that Doozy understood and was trying, and also recognized that it WAS good (as evidenced by her immediate willingness to transition back down again — something that can… often be a little slow to develop for us LOL).
And overall, a lot of good moments from the three lessons last week. Perhaps it wasn’t totally necessary or ideal to have them all stacked on top of each other like that… but maybe there were some advantages to the concentration too! Like total immersion haha. Here’s hoping the opportunities remain plentiful into the off season!
Obviously the “she” in this post’s title refers to “me,” as in… Good lord will I ever learn to sit up straight??? Ahem…
we’re at peak colors right now and the weather is GLORIOUS
I’m not gonna lie — things got a little cuckoo with scheduling this week. It suddenly got quite a bit busier than I intended or would generally prefer, and actually we aren’t quite done yet either..
she is the sweetest nosiest cutest busybody biscuit ever, you can almost hear her asking, “hey why are you hacking out without me!?” lol
And naturally I have almost nothing to show for it all in terms of media. Which is annoying, but that’s how it goes sometimes, ya know? Basically, I already told you about the sorta last-minute clinic coordination for getting a ride in with Matt Brown over the weekend…
being sweet and cute at yet another destination lesson too, good girl
And then something similar happened just days later, when I followed up on a lead for getting back onto the clinic rotation schedule with another 5* eventer, Dom Schramm. And the organizer no joke was like, “Actually, yea, will tomorrow at 4 work?”
riding in another lesson with Dom, you might remember we did a couple lessons during the summer of 2024 too
Somewhat serendipitously, it DID work, and so we went ahead and did it! Was Doozy annoyed at getting right back on the trailer again? Nah lol, she’s a total pro about all things traveling for lessons at this point, good girl.
doozy was extremely preoccupied by all the doggos
Tho she was a bit, er, *amped up* at the lesson, esp bc there was a ton of activity in the paddocks and pastures surrounding the ring as horses were freshly turned out and frolicking. All that to say, we didn’t really present our best selves in the lesson, necessarily. But we did accurately represent ourselves, which… at the end of the day is probably more useful.
anyway. back to the twisting. y’all already know how we do. this pic from a few days earlier in the last clinic with Matt, wherein i demonstrate my habit of hanging off the inside of the horse as she skitters wildly around the corner
Dom picked up basically exactly where Matt had left off with us, albeit with slightly more level-appropriate jumps haha. He worked us through a couple repetitions of basic courses — single jumps on each diagonal (one a vertical, the other an oxer), an outside line in what I’m going to guess was 60’ (we did it in an easy 5, trotting in), and a grid of 3 X’s set at one stride distances up the other outside line.
what is there to say other than i kinda just love to hang off the inside of the horse lol. pic from Doozy’s first competition BN round two full years ago, back in 10/2024
But the focus wasn’t really about the jumps. Like. We know Doozy can jump a jump. It’s the before and after that’s the main issue, right? Dom echoed everything Matt had said about low hands and trying to just stay exactly the same right up to, and especially right after each fence.
proof i can lean just as easily i dressage tack!
He took it a step further tho by really hammering on my tendency to tip and lean off to one side, especially when Doozy gets bolt-y and wild — as she frequently did in this lesson bc #dogs etc.
one last representative photo bc why not lol, at least the mare’s cute!!
In a weird way, he almost seemed apologetic or like he had to explain why it was so important for me to be better about holding my posture… but like, dude no, pls, lay it on me. Lay it on thick. I **know** I’m doing all sorts of weird crazy things up there. And I’d really rather not, thanks.
anyway. enough flashback action shots. here’s more peak fall foliage from hacking this week!
But it’s like I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. My muscle memory is so strong, so deeply engrained. And when Doozy is spinning her wheels like a lunatic thrashing around the corners etc bc Nobody Said There Would Be Dogs!!!!!, ahem, sometimes my focus kinda narrows down to just the essentials of that moment, like, “slow down” and “don’t crash into anything.”
the goodest girl <3
In addition to putting posture first in my mind in those moments, tho, Dom also wanted me to either get my leg back on right away, or, better yet — never take it off in the first place. Especially my right leg.
trees are getting pretty bare tho!
And go figure, the more he reminded me these things, and the more I did them bc of the active reminding, the better Doozy got. Bc guys she really REALLY DOES actually want to listen and do the right thing. And at this point, she truly does know what the right thing is most of the time.
trying to soak up every last drop before the clocks change
It’s just that I have to tell her what I want, and be a whole heckuva lot quicker to do it. So much of Doozy’s explosiveness is just her filling a void, making poor choices in the absence of clear direction.
seriously gorgeous tho, right?
And at this point I’m so habituated to the explosiveness that it’s like I take for granted that it has to be this way. When… it really really doesn’t. Well. Ok. Doozy IS who she is, she’s always going to be hot and reactive.
there are certainly worse ways to spend our time!
But she’s also super smart and seems to genuinely enjoy the game when she knows the rules and knows what to expect. Doozy is a high achiever, she’s happiest when she thinks she’s doing the right thing. She wants to color inside the lines, ya know? And do so with gusto and an unceasing forward drive LOL.
So ya know. I keep working on it haha. The lessons help, tho! Hopefully they will continue to be forthcoming into the off season as well!
IMHO, there aren’t too too many downsides for staying off of traditional social media. Especially in the present day age of hyper fragmentation and sloppy bot clots. But it does mean I’m sometimes the last to know about fun activities.
can #cope in new places when the grass is that luscious!
It occurred to me slightly belatedly to reach out to the barn that had been hosting clinics with Matt Brown all summer to see if there was an upcoming date. Turns out, he’d be at a different local barn for this month, and by the time I got in touch with them, the clinic was already full. Womp…
we are having literally the nicest fall so far!
Fortunately, tho, various circumstances meant a former barn mate from the last place (one among many who has since moved on to greener better-fenced pastures) was more than happy to split her time slot into a semi private with me and Doozy. Yay!!!
call me biased but i think she’s the most handsomest mare <3
We were scheduled at the end of what had been a very long day already for the clinic, and I’m not entirely sure how much Matt remembered of us from prior lessons lol. It didn’t really matter, tho — I honestly didn’t really care what we did in the lesson in terms of exercises or whatever. Just wanted to get out, have a little fun, ride with my friend, and hopefully glean some useful nuggets from Matt along the way for how to keep moving things forward with Doozy.
trotting in public <3
He was more hands-off in the warm up than he’d been in our prior private lessons, which is perhaps a bit to be expected. Mostly tho, he wanted me to be a bit more intentional about getting my aids onto the horse sooner, rather than always being so delicate and precious in handling her. Within reason, of course. Bc yea, she’s a little fragile lol.
i recently added a standing martingale to the outfit, it’s been a nice addition for Dooz!
The biggest theme in conversation was all about calibration. I want to be soft and delicate and loose and free with Doozy… But meanwhile she’d much rather prefer I be a bit more reliably steady and present.
LOLZ flying over cross rails
It’s something I’ve been working on for a few months now, and crops up a lot in dressage lessons with Trainer C, where she’s always quick to remind me that “Doozy can’t do what I want if I don’t ask her.” But the devil’s always in the details with Doozy — it’s as easy to override her as it is to underride her.
“I AM SO FAST” — doozy, and her magnificent tail
For this lesson, however, Matt felt like I could err more on the “over” side especially if I was focusing on “staying the same.” Especially in the last couple steps before a jump, and especially on landing side.
“ok i guess it doesn’t have to be THAT exciting” — sweet princess
I don’t need to shove her at a fence (and certainly not these little Xs LOL), but equally true is that I don’t really need to “soften” to them either. Matt observed that I’d get us where I wanted us to be in balance and rhythm, we’d see the distance to the jump, but then I’d soften and Doozy would fill the void by making a big move.
so nosy about the horses in turnout
Instead, I should just hold a steady feeling, always. Ditto on the landing side — he wanted me to be super intentional about reestablishing the canter rhythm I wanted before going back to trot, but be super clear about it. Bc the whole goal is for Doozy to canter around in the same rhythm no matter what. Little Xs, bigger jumps, no jumps — always the same rhythm.
fun times with friends!!
Which, ya know, she’s happy to do when asked! She’s got a lovely canter that naturally wants to find a good balance and rhythm. It’s just up to me to keep practicing on keeping everything (and especially myself the same).
He also wanted me to keep working on lowering my hands and occasionally widening them as a way to maintain straightness and stability on the contact — something else Trainer C has been coaching us on in dressage lessons. Always nice when there’s consistency haha!
So yea, a fun lesson — especially for getting to ride with friends again! And nice to work more specifically on putting little strings of jumps together, but focusing primarily on the spaces between the jumps. We all know Doozy can jump a jump… it’s just the before and after that is a little dicier LOL! Details details… that’s what the off season is for, I guess!
I don’t remember exactly how long it’s been — definitely years, maybe even a decade? — since the MCTA hosted their fall unrecognized at Shawan Downs. For a lot of different reasons, it’s most frequently been held at other local established facilities in recent years.
fall is doozy’s favorite color <3
The stars aligned this year tho, and everything came together to make it happen at Shawan this fall!! Which was super exciting for me — not least bc I got to 1) make the courses again, and 2) get Doozy out to school them! It’s such a lovely place to ride, and I was so bummed to miss this spring bc of Doozy’s injury.
staring at that guy in a gator, ready to rage out lol
You might recall when we schooled Spring a year ago, I was a bit circumspect and philosophical about acknowledging that, yes, we were still just jumping the same jumps we’d jumped the year before that… That it’d been a long and at times bumpy journey with Doozy. But that progress *was* happening, however incremental and hard fought it felt.
barbie dream house to warm up!!!
And ya know. Those things are still true LOL. Tho we’re not gonna talk too much about the challenge and the journey today, bc apparently doing so risks getting yet another earful (eyeful?) of folks chiming in with all manner of oversimplified ‘solutions’ regardless of how explicitly I spell out the words “Spare Me.” Ahem.
sweet little roll top!
And besides!! This time we *didn’t* just jump the same jumps we’d done the year before, and the year before that! Bc Doozy really is well and truly happy comfortable and confident with BN stuff these days, and ‘happy comfortable and confident’ is my jam!
lol our fake ditch was VERY fake, with legit zero filler at all this time around. all good tho, claimed zero victims!
So I finally got to jump around one of my own BN courses!! Truthfully, I don’t really know a whole lot about design, in the grand scheme of things, beyond just what I’ve experienced, what I see out at other competitions, and what I, personally, like doing with my horses.
for some reason these log tables just jump so fantastically on rising ground off a gentle bend
It’s one of those subjective creative endeavors that is actually shockingly easy to get *exactly* wrong when you try to do it. And ‘bad’ design is basically plain as day to anybody - and everybody is a judge. True story, the first time I set a course, literally just about every single jump had an awkward ‘S’ bend before and after it. And none of my jumps measured, they all had to get dug in, bc I put them in basically the worst possible spots. Fun times for the builders!!!
this ramp, tho. for some reason this thing jumps like trash
Luckily, tho, the crew running the operations at this club have been enormously patient and generous with their experience, guidance and collaboration over the years. And for this event, it really felt like things kinda clicked into a nice familiar gear setting everything out.
everyone **HATED** it in the warm up at our spring recognized, and we all blamed the crazy ridiculous ice cream scoops that maybe looked like weird voids or portals into a dark parallel universe. obvi i made it my business to give it a fresh facelift… but maybe will try again with a more toned down hue?
And it was such a treat getting to actually ride around it too! Charlie was kinda already well into his declining soundness when I first started, so even tho I made all the Novice courses somewhat selfishly with ourselves in mind, we never got to ride them. And before this year, Doozy and I had stuck to just the starter courses.
a lot of our jumps are some variation of blue tho — and this feeder always jumps great!
So it was nice to refamiliarize with some of my favorite jumps!! Like the Lincoln Log tables, and the steeplechase jumps (below), and this fantastic feeder that used to live at Tranquillity and that we basically completely rebuilt this spring!
and another sweet little roll top! wtf with those janky flags tho, what kind of amateur hour is this??? oh wait, **checks notes**, yep, that was me who flagged it. WHOOPS!
I was especially eager to experience first hand how the jumps felt relative to the terrain. Shawan Downs is a long narrow race track set on a massive hillside. Depending on which end of the track you’re on, the slope can be quite severe — and it can be tricky getting the lower level courses far enough out to turn them around without sending them either straight up or straight down that slope, and without running over the allowable track lengths by level.
finished with the steeplechase brush, minus the brush bc we hadn’t set it out yet LOL. didn’t matter, doozy jumped it great
And naturally, Doozy being who she is, the terrain can be extremely challenging for us haha. So it was super reassuring when everything rode more or less decently for us, even with all our, uh, personal challenges haha.
short ’n sweet helmet cam video
It wasn’t necessarily a good enough ride to make me really want to do all three phases of the show itself… what with all the other difficulties we generally have… But it was a good enough ride for what it was. A productive net positive experience.
“i am the fastest horse in the world” — doozy, so fast
And also a smoother and more consistent schooling experience vs some of the drama we had at Windurra a few weeks back. I really don’t think the typical lesson format of ‘starting and stopping, one jump at a time, everyone takes a turn’ suits Doozy at all.
so sweet and silly too lol
She’s much happier with the opportunity to settle into a rhythm and jump a few things at a time. For my purposes, I need to be good about not taking that too too literally — we can still work on putting circles in between jumps and reestablishing balance and all the things so that each individual jump is a nice pleasant effort. So it ends up feeling like something in between “one jump at a time” and an actual competition course.
fall arrived for the show with a bang — hard to tell but that is FROST on the jump!!
All in all, tho, a fun time, with some super nice jumps on perfect ground in perfect weather! And all done by basically mid morning, so I still had time to get Doozy home and taken care of before getting back out to finish numbering the jumps and finalizing all the rest of the show prep.
easier to tell on this pic, just look beyond the little bits of scraped off poo lol
Seriously, tho, guys — if any of you have any interest at all whatsoever about all the various tasks in the lead up to an event, you should 1,000% sign up for an event prep volunteer shift at your favorite local venue. There is always *So.Much* to do, and a lot of it is honestly kinda interesting, especially for adding another dimension or perspective to how you see things at a show.
pictured: super important volunteer shit
And everything actually went pretty great for the show itself! A couple ups and downs across the day — it’s horses, after all, and horses and horse sports are hard, full stop. But from an organizational and operational point of view, things went just about as well as can be hoped for — lots of happy horses and riders, and all the necessary resources and protocols for anyone who needed them.
I might not have ridden in the show myself, but getting to check off “Ride at Shawan!!” from the wish list for the year feels like a win all the same. At this point, I’ll take it LOL!
