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!
As promised, I ordered some prints from our recent competition outing — Loch Moy’s final recognized horse trial of the year. From which, as you may remember, I opted to call it a day after a less-than-stellar dressage test paired with increasingly poor ground conditions in the chilly rain.
a picture of a picture of us trotting in the rain <3
Everything might have been fine if we’d decided to continue. It’s not like the bad dressage is unusual for us LOL, not like we haven’t carried on from last place in basically every other show. But eh, with the recent whoopsie it felt a little unnecessary to push in decidedly not ideal circumstances. So, we didn’t.
bolting in the rain too!! lolz…..
The pictures aren’t half bad (for us) tho! Like Doozy is obvi running away with me in the canter pic haha… And trust me, she was indeed. But as far as our standard fare presentation goes… I’m not sad to have the photos!
oh doozy dear, you are indeed the fastest at dressage tests!
I still had a good long talk about it with trainer C at our most recent dressage lesson, tho. Bc our scoring really is consistently just so bad. Like, “outside the normal distribution” bad. Consistently, with every judge. And it’s not just like we get the low end of any given judge’s marks. No no no, we are generally well into the “You probably shouldn’t be here” marks.
in case you wanted a graphical + annotated representation of what it means to be “objectively bad,” here we are well outside the ‘standard deviations’ of our last show’s dressage score distribution
Case in point is the handy little histogram I made of all 18 horses in our class at the show. It’s all to scale, one percentage point per tick across the horizontal axis. With 17 horses all clustered around the average score, and then a loonnnnnnnng tail of nothingness until us.
she’s 100% objectively cute tho <3 <3 <3
I maintain that I honestly do not care about winning. In fact, I don’t necessarily even care about specifically losing. I care more about how it feels while we’re doing it. Like, Charlie would still strut like a champion after putting in a severely mediocre test. Bc as far as he was concerned, he Did. The. Thing. and was a Good. Boy.
Doozy, on the other hand, sometimes almost feels like she thinks she might actually die.
i only went out to blanket her, but she wasn’t having it, didn’t think i should be able to leave without her <3
Well ok. That’s a little dramatic. But she definitely feels like she thinks Something Bad might happen at any time.
Which, I should note, this is the point at which most people love to tell me that I just need to “keep getting out there” and “give it time” and “keep exposing her.” Which is a strange thing for me to hear bc 1) what exactly do the people saying this to me think I’m doing??? and 2) we’re legit ‘getting out there’ far more frequently and with more regularity than most people I know, and definitely more than the people who like to give me this advice. So ya know, spare me LOL.
happy out hacking!
But eh. Y’all know how it is. Folks love to offer solutions to everybody else’s problems. And it’s pretty clear that Doozy and I have a Big Dressage Problem. Doozy’s tension is obviously still there in the other phases, but the feeling is completely different. Still at times chaotic, but a whole lot less “IMPENDING DOOM.” The dressage, tho. Oof. You’d think I was asking her to do a 20m circle right around the precipice of an actual literal black hole.
reasons to be grateful: two horses who spent a fair bit of time this year laid up on stall rest, reunited back out on the hills!
Sometimes I have to actually stop myself and appreciate how far she’s come in so much of our day to day life together — how she is in the barn, out on trails, going to lessons and clinics, all the various things we regularly do. Doozy is truly a lovely horse to be around, to spend time with, and to ride in all the various activities I love to do. In company, alone, whatever.
sweet silly mare
So yea, it bugs me that this one specific activity — riding the dressage test at a show — is so specifically unpleasant and un-fun. Especially when you consider how much we enjoy our dressage lessons lol… Make it make sense!
might not be everybody’s favorite view point lol but we have fun :)
Trainer C was feeling equally boggled by the whole thing. She only sees us in lessons so from her perspective, Doozy has long since moved on from her earliest chaotic tendencies. And it’s obvi hard to explain just how much the horse changes, turns completely inside out, when we actually enter for our test.
All the same, tho, she was adamant that we keep trying to experiment a bit. Keep trying different approaches, and, yes, still keep giving the horse time and exposure. Bc the horse truly can make a lovely test when she’s feeling secure and game. Plus obvi we still wanna do cross country! And the path to the start box goes through the dressage court.
It is somehow turning into the most glorious fall already. We’ve still had some warm days — but that cool crisp kinda warm that makes you want to bring layers just in case.
everybody is snuggly and sweet when it gets cold out!
It’s also been properly chilly on a couple days, and naturally a little rainy at times too. So all the nice cozy categories of weather. Only real bummer is the increasingly early sunset, I guess!
even doozy! in her new rain sheet!
Doozy, for her part, has been great. We had some really nice schooling rides in the last couple weeks, including a good dressage lesson, good schools at home, and that properly pleasant jump school I wrote about — plus one more after that wherein we basically just repeated exactly the same set of exercises with exactly the same properly pleasant results. Who doesn’t love that?
the sheet came in handy, bc it’s been rainy! (also, yes, that is a whole ass flake of hay just sittin loose on the trailer floor LOL)
It was a good feeling too, bc we actually already had an entry in for Loch Moy’s final recognized HT of the year. Tho… Truth be told, legit one of my first thoughts after falling off at the starter trial was to check to see if it was too late to withdraw. Alas, it was.
It was a good aspirational bold plan when I sent all those entries in all at once — instead of my usual conservative / pessimistic approach of waiting to enter each thing until after the last thing, just in case.
“you can’t be serious” — doozy, so sweet she melts down in the rain
But, eh, that’s how it goes, right? I decided I’d still go to the recognized show since it was paid for and all, and we’d give it a good shot. Mostly I was curious to see if we could replicate some of those really good moments from the starter trial — esp in the dressage warm up.
proof we sorta kinda tried to do a thing! got some pro pics too bc #whynot, but you’ll have to wait for them to come in the mail
Idk, tho. The vibe was kinda off the whole day — and not just bc of the persistently damp chilly rain. We parked way down in timbuktu bc the place was a ZOO for area champs. They rearranged a lot of stuff from how they’d done it last year, including adding a second show jump competition ring and moving sj warm up to a whole new location (conveniently right above where we parked so we got to walk through all that** on our way to dressage).
(**All that being inclusive of the frequent victory gallops as each champs division concluded)
“i’ll take my snacks to go, pls!” — doozy, ready to be done
That’s all a long way to say: No, our dressage was not representative of any good work or improvements or whatever. It was, as they say, quite bad. Siiiiiigh.
I’d originally determined to stick around at least for show jumping, bad vibes be damned, but… eh. XC seemed out of the question with increasingly slippy torn up tracks (something like 40 BN horses had already jumped our track over the course of the weekend) and especially the warm up zone, and I don’t think I’d have forgiven myself if we had a repeat (or worse) of our last outing.
anyway. cats!! cats in paper bags!!! <3 <3
Ultimately tho, I opted to just pack up after dressage. Some other time it’ll feel appropriate and necessary to push through the cold wet chaos to go jump our jumps. It just didn’t have to be this particular day LOL.
speaking of creature comforts… my farrier started bringing his puppy on the road omg
And obvi Doozy certainly didn’t mind!! She doesn’t know she didn’t jump lol. Honestly, aside from being absolutely unable to cope the second she enters at A…. honestly aside from all that, she’s been an extremely happy camper lately!
doozy was obsessed, to say the least!
Nice rides, relaxed, pleasant and happy in the barn. Low key creepy in love with my farrier’s puppy. Ya know. Normal happy horse stuff!
ooooh and more horse shows — this time on the administrative side of things: drafting maps!
So we’ll see what the season brings. Perhaps going back to the drawing board entirely re: test riding + ring craft. Or perhaps shifting focus to other activities that don’t involve dressage courts at all. Or ya know. Maybe just continuing to work as we have been, trusting that the progress is happening even if it’s hard to tell? Idk! We’ll see!
making plans for all these pretties!!!!
In the meantime, tho, we’re kicking back into high gear with all things Shawan Downs, as the local riding club’s fall starter event is rapidly approaching!
get on the bus, lil’ table!!
There’s something so satisfying about being a part of that process, watching all the plans and pieces come together as the event takes shape.
so exciting to see things start taking shape! and look at those hints of crimson in the foliage!!!!
Fingers crossed the weather cooperates too bc while I’m undecided about entering the show, I’m very hopeful to at least make it to the xc schooling days. A girl can dream, right?
doozy, don’t you wanna go play too???
Right. It’s a tricky time of year to get too attached to any one specific plan or activity, with the weather being what it is. But honestly after having been on the sidelines for so much of the summer, it’s nice to even just have the choice!
perhaps haha. i think perhaps she does!
If the weather *DOES* play nice, we might have a few other upcoming activities planned too that require zero dressage (or even flatwork). More galloping hill and dale, less messy stressy contact on 20m circles. Doesn’t sound half bad, right?
Cross your fingers the weather agrees LOL. And in the meantime, hope y’all have a nice weekend too!
