dinosaur dressage...

I alluded yesterday to the fact that Charlie had a recent dressage lesson! His first (yet again) in a long while -- and the first since we moved to the new farm and got to enjoy the convenience of having dressage trainer C come to us!

Gosh it's just amazing being able to take lessons with many of my favorite trainers without having to load the horse up and hit the road!

no pictures from the lesson, so instead enjoy this shot of charlie chillin at the trailer post-paper chase. his first trailer trip since we moved barns at the end of july!!!!

Anyway, like I said, it has been awhile. And as I've also been saying, Charlie's been doing pretty well lately. Possibly so well that it's easy for a trainer who doesn't see him very often to not realize how tenuous and fleeting the good moments can actually be.

It ended up being a bit of a rough lesson for us, tho it started off more or less ok with Charlie going through his (very slow, but steady) progression into showing off his new contact skills. He was a touch crabby and cranky - likely due to being tired and stiff from the paper chase the day before (me too, buddy, me too) and having been out of regular work for so long.

he loves eating scraps up off the trailer floor <3

Trainer C wanted to really dig into two main rider issues: 1) my own lateral unevenness (tendency to weight my left side more and twist through my pelvis and torso); and 2) my habit of putting my legs too far back. Plus, one big horse issue: difficulty in going into the outside rein for turns rather than using the inside rein as a crutch and popping out his outside shoulder. This is also relates to my rider issue of keeping my outside leg too far back.

C wanted me to feel like I was sitting on Charlie's hind legs, turning his shoulders around his hind end - rather than kinda dragging his shoulders around through the turn. This necessitated all outside rein and leg for the turns, with very very little inside rein - I shouldn't help him out with so much inside rein. Also needed to make my circles smaller too....

sir also got his routine massage maintenance last week. during which time we were visited by a corgi who captured charlie's heart!

This particular exercise of circling on just the outside aids (simple as it is) is extra challenging for Charlie bc it highlights his gate sourness issue with bulging. He's always had a strong draw toward the gate (any gate) - and when we turn away from the gate he's most likely to pop that outside shoulder and go all squirrely.

So we circled. And circled. Smaller circles, more outside aids, less inside rein, more rider leg farther forward. And... this is kinda where we got into trouble with Charlie...

He's a good boy, but he's pressure averse and gets defensive and upset when he thinks he's wrong or in trouble. When we kept pushing this one thing (going into the outside rein while endlessly circling) he kinda maybe got frustrated or didn't understand why we were still pushing and driving him around with no release even when he thought he was doing the thing.

just some sheep around the property. look at the face on that one on the left!! lol

Because he doesn't really understand dressage at all yet, actually, only just figuring out that "well I think she wants me to put my head down, but I don't really know why." So when he kept trotting, and kept circling, and kept his head down -- but yet I still didn't let up the pressure and still kept asking for something more, well. He got frustrated and quit on us.

And.... the rest of the lesson kinda turned into mitigating his patented 'dinosaur stuck in tar pit' tantrums. Which.... is a shame.

It's a hard balancing act with Charlie bc he does need to learn that there's more to dressage than trotting one circle with his head down and then moving on. And sometimes he's gonna have to dig a little deeper to try to figure out what I'm asking of him. He's going to have to leave his comfort zone in order to learn and improve.

Simultaneously tho, this isn't really a horse that can be drilled. He benefits from repetition bc he's a thinking horse, sure, but he's got to be set up to get the answer correct. Bc I can not stress this enough: the horse is a quitter.

unrelated screen shot from burghley: charlie isn't the only horse with a dweeby center part in his forelock!! check out Zara Tindall's High Kingdom!

And if it's something that's very hard for him or that's going to take a while for him to figure out - just drilling endlessly will never be the right approach. Rather, we've got to find ways to weave high pressure moments in to other movements. Instead of endlessly circling where he just gets more and more frustrated by never getting a release, I need a half turn here, quarter turn there, and maybe the occasional circle to try to keep working on getting that feel.

It's possibly a slower method (especially when the rider needs to learn for herself too), but maybe it'll be easier on the horse in the long run. Because the last thing I want to do is sour the horse, esp now that he's really starting to figure stuff out.

So the rest of the ride was basically spent getting him to come back to me and keep trying. And.... it took awhile. He was pretty pissed off. Sigh.

in other recent news, my car died at the barn over the weekend. and.... rather than dealing with it i just left it there and drove my truck around for a couple days lol. bc damn, i did not need another thing 

It was maybe useful for trainer C to see tho. I've known for a while that Charlie is not a horse who works bc of his heart. Uh, no. He's a very cerebral horse. He does things bc he understands them or bc they're fun. Not bc I asked him. Which is perhaps why it's been so critical that I work so hard to build trust with him. And I suspect after witnessing his prolonged meltdown, trainer C has a much clearer understanding of how he learns and handles pressure.

He did eventually settle tho. Took a big deep breath, relaxed his neck and back, and just dropped right on back into the bridle to put together a very nice little trot-canter-trot pattern before we called it a day.

Then the following day he only came out with one nasty t-rex moment that was easily defused before getting right on along with what turned out to be a great flat school. So I don't think he's holding a grudge or anything. It was just maybe not my ideal timing for needing to relearn that particular lesson about my horse's tolerance for pressure.

luckily there are many mechanically inclined folks around the new place, one of whom was happy to clean off the battery, goop it up for protection, and test the charge for me to ensure it wasn't totally kaput. hint: it's.... basically kaput.

Anyway. Other important takeaways from the ride:

• I need to practice leg yields away from the rail just as much as I practice leg yields toward the rail. Charlie thinks he's very clever and has figured out the routine of going toward the rail, but he maybe is doing it more by rote rather than bc I'm aiding for it. Whereas leaving the rail shows more clearly that he's actually not super schooled to the aids yet.
• I also need to avoid spending too much time on the rail at all. Not necessarily meaning always turning or riding figures or whatever - but that even when I'm going up the long side I should be a couple feet off the rail. Otherwise it's the rail that's keeping us straight, or the rail that makes us turn our corner - instead of me and the horse actually doing it in balance. Take us off the rail and we suddenly end up looking a little drunk.

he even had a standalone electrical charger thingy so i didn't need to leave it running to charge up and waste fuel unnecessarily. this charge lasted me about a day and the nasty fucker needed another jump just to get to the shop to replace the battery lol. womp womp.

Ultimately it was a frustrating lesson mostly bc I felt like I let my horse down a little bit.

There are times to push, times to show the horse that "sorry, bucko, but you're gonna have to do this hard thing and idc how much you don't want to. figure it out." But.... I also feel kinda strongly that... this was not the right time for that. A horse coming back into regular work, the day after a somewhat strenuous exertion, and with just days counting down to our next event. None of this sounds like it's the right time to pick a fight and I maybe could have better advocated for the horse.

and bc why not, here's the current set up for charlie's feed storage. alfalfa pellets get poured directly into their tupperware container, ordered one 50lb bag at a time. there are actually two bags of nutrena fuel sitting inside the metal trash can, rather than poured in. this makes it easier to not risk having old feed go rancid at the bottom of the container. then all those supplement baggies i wrote about here are stored in the plastic bucket. it's a lot.... but so far, so good!

In any case, we've got a couple more rides left to keep smoothing things out before Fair Hill, for which we'll be doing BN-B (much preferred for his particular way of going right now to BN-A). And Charlie really is coming along in a way that makes me really excited.

His whole balance has improved, his ability to soften and compress and react more quickly to the aids (esp through transitions! and omg maybe we might kinda actually have the beginnings of a half halt!!!) just gets better and better. So much so that it's maybe easy to forget how green he is to all the more nuanced stuff. It's cool tho. There's just more work to be done, as always.

Hopefully he'll be able to get back in the zone this week bc I would love to show off some of his progress at Fair Hill this weekend. But I probably won't push it if he isn't feeling it - and will save the higher intensity rides for when we're a bit more consistent in our riding schedule. It's all still ahead of us!!