feeding frenzy

Happy Monday, friends! It’s been a bit of a whirlwind around these parts for… hm, basically the last full month. I actually straight up cancelled all my plans this weekend to just chill out and slow down. It was super nice, not gonna lie!

doozy is obsessed with these specific leaves and legit drags me to them
srsly tho, look at those flared nostrils!

And gave me the perfect opportunity to get a whoooole bunch of random photos off my phone and recorded here in ye olde blogge for posterity, if not exactly for some sort of cohesive story line lol. So, uh, brace yo’self for the randomness!

new tailgate spot this year!! 
(purple dot)

First up, obviously my friends and I had our big annual To-Do at the Maryland 5*!! I always love making a whole big thing of it — with volunteering Thursday and Friday at the YEH Championships, then tailgating Saturday, and then show jumping / shopping on Sunday.

Allison Springer & HTS Jenson in the 3* at our prior tailgate location

And this year did not disappoint! Every year is a little different, It’s still a very young event and they tweak and change things with each running. For example, our tailgate spot of the last 2 years was absorbed into another area, so we relocated up the hill to the Sunken Road complex. 

Monica Spencer & Artist in the 5* at the new spot. not bad!

And guys, it was a fantastic spot! A super cool (and influential) combination to watch, plus a big screen to follow along with the action. AND a liquor store literally directly across the street — convenient when I realized we needed more ice + coolers. Plus, this tailgate section is on the opposite side of the ropes from the normal spectator paths, so we never had to deal with crowds. 

It was a great day with a wonderful melting pot of so many horsey friends over the years, including our core original group, friends from the last boarding barn, Charlie’s barn, Doozy’s current barn, and even some folks from the Isabel days. So fun, I’m already excited for next year!

and meanwhile, doozy <3 <3

Per usual, I did all my shopping on show jump day too. Unfortunately didn’t get pictures of everything yet, but am pretty pleased with my haul. Biggest priority was a shimmable half pad, since Doozy and I continue to be frustrated by weird fit issues related to our combined crooked mechanics.

new shimmable half pad from shopping at the 5*

Like, both saddles fit the horse. But they also both shift in exactly the same way over the course of a ride bc Doozy and I are both dynamic and moving beings who apparently don’t adhere rigorously enough to postural ideals. Womp. 

brand is ErrePlus, comparable to the Mattes pads

This particular half pad appealed to me bc it’s predominantly natural fibers — with the sheepskin lining and wool shims. But it’s also extremely non-bulky. So it can be as “barely there” as you want it to be, with a nice progressive set of shims for precision adjustments. So far, so good, I’ll keep you posted. 

also got a few new pairs of breeches at the 5* — finally, purple pants!! and green!!

Other shopping items were maybe less exciting — I got a couple pairs of Romfh breeches from the same booth I always pick up a pair or two. For whatever reason they always have the inside line on Romfh deals, legit maybe the only good “deal” to be had in the entire vendor village!

equine artist Darlene Ivey had the most incredible prints, you should follow her on insta if you’re into that sort of thing!

Tho independent small business Sona Equestrian definitely won the award for best prints used across the most inspired selection of products! I picked up a pair of socks, but was also completely smitten with her charming shower curtains, notebooks and notecards, tumblers, totes, and so many other items, definitely check her out!

all the better for our low key schooling practice on terrain in random paddocks lol

I’m also working on getting Doozy back onto the cross ties reliably in our grooming bays at home, and picked up some really really cool rapid release devices from our friends at Nunn Finer. I’ll get actual pictures + thoughts when I’ve got them properly set up.

pictured:: mare who ignored the nets when they were full….

Ok. Whew. So yea the 5* took up a lot of time and energy (and miles driving LOL), but life goes on and Doozy naturally requires her due as well! Obvi we had our big Windurra outing a couple days later, and I was slightly miffed to observe that… Doozy wasn’t really touching her hay nets in the trailer.

musical chairs hay piles!

I’d noticed the same at the Area Championships, but thought maybe it was just a funny weedy bale or something, so I filled another couple nets for the trip. Obvi the idea of a 3 hour round trip without palatable hay doesn’t sound great to me, so when she left basically all those nets untouched after Windurra, I opted to dump them all out in her paddock and start from scratch.

apparently much more palatable when not in a net…

My very first riding instructor (at whose barn I first learned chores) always said to leave a hay pile for the “invisible horse.” As in, enough piles for however many horses are in the group, plus one. Her rationale being that the dominant horses will always push around the meeker horses, and you want an obvious open spot for them to go.

good girl, eat your vegetables!

Doozy is such a tyrant with her ponies, tho, that I opted to leave enough piles for **two** invisible horses LOL. And somehow, go figure, the hay was much tastier when she didn’t have to fight a net for it. Ugh, horses. 

so you can grow big and strong for our adventures!

In the meantime, I picked up a bale of timothy / orchard mix from the local feed store. At ~$14 a bale, it’s more expensive than just buying a regular bale from my barn as I’d been doing… But, eh, peace of mind, right? It’s hard to ride an unhappy belly.

i might be biased, but i think she’s extremely handsome <3

So that brings us up mostly to real time. Doozy and I had a bit of an uneven few schooling sessions post-Windurra. Not ‘bad’ rides, per se, but probably the ‘least good’ since we started using our recorded ride guides. I think my most recent version is just a little too long, making it more likely that I’ll deviate from the plan and possibly tune it out a bit. 

and so is our hacking buddy Dante! 

Plus, obvi, it seems reasonable that we might both be a little tight after such a big cross country schooling session! Fortunately it worked out that we were scheduled for another body work / chiro / acupuncture session. 

Doozy still doesn’t love these sessions as much as Charlie did, but she’s getting better. And the practitioner seems really pleased with the mare’s development and condition, so that’s always super reassuring!

good mare, always marching eagerly ahead haha

Anyway. We closed out the weekend with a lovely hack through the fields and woods. Our foliage is finally peaking and daytime temps are still super mild in the 60s, what’s not to love, right?

as a reward for making it thru all those pics, here’s my cat,
as he discovers the radiators are on for the season!

Not gonna lie, it felt super nice to have a relatively quiet weekend. This time of year I’m always so tempted to get swept up into a whirlwind of trying to do all the things bc “winter is coming!” But ya know. There’s still plenty of the fall season ahead of us!!

schooling at windurra

Happy Wednesday, folks!! I promise not to be too wordy, but we have a metric shit ton of media today, woot woot!! Doozy and I had another xc lesson at Windurra with local legend, Sally Cousins, fresh off her impressive finish with Wizard in the 3* at Fair Hill!

grazing serenely when we first arrived <3
(tho yes i promise she did get more amped after i got on)

Honestly I think Doozy and I really had a nice little routine going with our solo xc schooling trips to Tranquillity this summer and last fall. There’s something to be said about just going out and doing what you wanna do, without making a whole big thing of it. 

warm up loggoes!!

But there’s a time and a place for everything, right? And now that Doozy and I have a relatively established baseline of experience and comfort, it feels appropriate to seek professional guidance to start fine tuning and adding more (level-appropriate + progressive) challenge.

oooh right away starting with the jumps we finished on last time

And Sally is such a pro at that. Teaching is a huge part of her business model, and for a very good reason: she’s good at it. She has loads of regular students, even more like me who flit in and out on a semi-infrequent basis over the years, and presumably countless straight up strangers riding in her clinics. 

normalizing <3

Over time, she’s developed a keen eye for feeling out horses and riders, and guiding them through appropriate and progressive exercises. It also helps that she knows Windurra inside and out, she’s always super familiar with how everything is set up, and knows how to string exercises together in all the various ‘zones.’ 

sally is so progressive about introducing things like cut outs etc

My goals for this ride were simple: Listen to Sally. Don’t get too stuck in my head. Prioritize confidence and relaxation. Listen to Sally.

trit-trotting to the little bank!

And we totally did exactly that! Sally started us off right away stringing things together — first some small logs, then a line of starter jumps, then introducing those ‘slightly smaller than BN height, but definitely more spread than starter’ jumps we finished with last time, and then right onto actual BN stuff. 

another nice roll top

Doozy was more or less being quite good. She gets a little stuck and behind the leg and snarled up in a pretzel every time we pick up for our turn, but I just did my best to kinda ignore it and just ride her forward, oozing into a flow as drama-free as possible. 

omg a **real** ditch aaaah lol (still quite narrow tho!)

Sally’s biggest feedback for us was that I need to focus on straightness to the fence (sound familiar?), and that we need to be organizing **right away** on landing. She said I’ve got about 2-3 strides on landing before Doozy kinda bolts away, and that I need to act quickly in that time — the longer I wait to half halt, the stronger the half halt will need to be. 

this was definitely the biggest thing we jumped, esp re: spread. caught us both a little by surprise

While technically this is legit the opposite of some of the work we’ve done with Woodge on exaggerating that big release exactly at the moment Doozy would expect me to pull, I think these two concepts actually can live in harmony. I need to practice the release so that the half halt works when we need it, like when jumping cross country. 

doozy nailed the super fun mini course!

Mostly tho, Sally advised that I don’t over think it. Ride the horse forward, connected and straight. I’ll know it’s working when… I get the result that I want. It really is that simple. 

last exercise of the day (tho we repeated once more to clean up the house)

Anyway we put a few fun features together — jumped a little ditch, and did slightly more grown up variations of the bank and water complex exercises we did last time, and it was good!

omg guys we are growing up!!

It was interesting tho, with the larger jumps (esp a properly chunky house by the ditch that I suspect exceeds BN dimensions at least in width but possibly height too), Doozy a couple times had to dig a little deep, try a little harder. And it kinda surprised her, I think. 

lol went a lil’ extra there, dooz!

Not necessarily in a bad way, but just like, “Oh wow, ok I really do need to work a bit here!” And it led to a few more squirrelly efforts than either of us are used to — first at that chunky house, and then at a couple subsequent jumps when Doozy was maybe feeling a bit less sure.

a bit jittery at the house, but we cleaned it up to finish

It was a good experience for us both, tho, bc obviously… yes the horse can do it, but also yes we both need to stay committed and forward. 

full helmet cam video!!

And it gave Doozy a chance to sorta keep pushing through after a harder-than-usual effort, and smooth it out and gain confidence. She was an actual super star through the little bank complex mini course, and honestly made quite easy work of that somewhat technically challenging line through the water.

sweet mare barely broke a sweat <3 <3

All in all, a really great experience for us both, I think. There are a lot of little details that are obvi still a bit of a mess, but I can also really feel a lot of improvements in the mare even just from all our work with the recorded ride guides. 

Plus it’s just exciting to be doing this again!! It’s kinda crazy wandering around Windurra and gawking incredulously at some of the stuff I jumped a lifetime ago with Charlie… But equally exciting to be forging a new set of memories with this special little red mare <3 <3

more show pics

Happy Monday! We had a relatively quiet weekend around these parts, but prints from last weekend’s show finally arrived — yay media!

i don’t usually buy photos from our dressage phase bc… well. let’s be real. it’s not our strongest phase lol. and these aren’t exactly perfect either, but they’re better than we usually see, plus omg braids!

might not be a ‘classically correct’ way of going, but you can tell doozy is really trying bc even tho her head is sky high, her nose is still down lol. baby steps, y’all

and anyway, she’s much more of a running horse haha, it’s her favorite!

this wasn’t our most flowy xc track together, but we had fun <3

and who doesn’t love all that exuberance with the iconic Sugar Loaf Mtn in the background?

also got a couple shots from our final phase of the competition — show jumping on saturday!

she’s not exactly, uh, trying, over these jumps (as evidenced by yet another purchased pro pic featuring a flying rail lol) but in a way, it’s kinda a nice feeling!

good mare, doozy, thanks for a fun experience and great memories! 

life goes on, tho, and we’re right back to payin it forward by scribing the dressage at this past weekend’s starter trial. look how thoughtful the folks at Loch Moy are, tho — legit provided judges and scribes with heated blankets omg!

Hope you all had a nice weekend too!

blowing up the balloon

The shorter days (and looming rainstorms in the forecast) have me feeling eager to maximize our outdoor jump ring while we still can. Given that there are no lessons booked this week, plus a fresh course set up at home, everything felt right for a jump school!

sweet biscuit can’t be bothered to look at the camera lol

And naturally I opted to bring along my helmet camera to try to film as much of the ride as possible - including our Brit Bot facilitated warm up on the flat. 

brace yo’self for more fence-mounted helmet cam snapshots lol

I don’t know exactly the dimensions of this ring, but suspect the width is around 40m (maybe slightly less). So it’s actually pretty easy to treat the far end, which is currently empty of jumps, as its own little 20x40m space, more or less. 

i didn’t do a great job of positioning the camera, c’est la vie

Tho it proved a bit tricky to capture that space (extending to the left side of the frame above) AND the jumping exercises with the camera. So I ended up not making a video of the flat work portion bc it was too choppy with us going in and out of frame. It was still helpful to watch, tho!

working hard on ride ability at the canter

I felt **really** good about this ride, like we’re really consistently staying together on the aids. Doozy is able to maintain a much steadier rhythm, and isn’t ping-ponging off in every direction. I like it! And actually the biggest change from all this is being able to start actually pushing her up in front of the leg now.

proof that i didn’t actually break the right lead depart

Like we’ve made the shift away from “racing off on the forehand” and now I need to focus on not accidentally being too quiet. 

look who’s learning to hold her own self together!

And Doozy is so smart, she’s starting to learn and anticipate some of these exercises from the recorded ride guides. Like the middle section of the longer session — where we do the trot-canter-trot-canter exercises on the figure-8 of 20m circles. 

We’ve been practicing that recently and it’s been great — but now if she is anticipating, she’s actually more likely to suck back a bit and get braced and fragile feeling. 

everyone loves walk breaks lol

Which, ya know, is a new and sort of exciting change, and a good opportunity for me to start learning how to calibrate pushing her up in front of the leg. Recall at last month’s starter trial at Loch Moy, our jump round was a little bleh for this exact reason — when she’s not so amped and dragging me to the fences, I need to be ready to fill that void and create the forward balance. 

back to work! 

In my head, I imagine it a bit like putting more air into a balloon. Just a little bit at a time, not so much that I risk popping it with tension — but enough to keep everything together and firm, vs sorta flimsy and noodle-y.

jompy time! this was our 4th jump in the video but is at the other end of the ring

And anyway, this felt like the perfect feeling to take into the jumping. I want to get back to consistently jumping BN+ height again — but without being frantic or racey about it. Just wanna keep working on that nice steady rhythmic canter that’s easy to find a distance out of. 

our little grids are starting to look a little more formidable! 
distances are roughly 21’ to 33’

And Doozy was super! Especially considering the last time we really jumped was at the area champs show. She was super balanced and on the aids, again a testament I think to our little Brit Bot friend.

normalizing 2’7

We started with a couple X’s, including one with 9’ landing and takeoff poles that is a bit tricky to see from the video bc it’s at the far end of the ring. You can see tho the canter circles we do to prepare for that exercise, and how quickly (relatively) Doozy is able to adjust from a sorta racing-just-landed canter to the more gymnastic balance we wanted for that exercise. 

easy breezy!

From there, I sorta just looped around, catching mostly single fences on bending approaches. We progressed from the X’s to that skinny set of boxes set to 2’6 pretty quickly, which just reinforces again for me that Doozy is (has been, let’s be real) more than ready for slightly bigger jumps. 

didn’t even rush, good girl

And obvi that feeling held even more true when she was able to go straight into the triple combination (set slightly lower than 2’6 but still properly visually imposing!), then come back to trot for another X, then finish with the final vertical above.

video of the course

In a way, I’m kinda grateful that this year unfolded the way it did. It wasn’t what I expected it to be, and the set back this spring after so much time off in late winter really kinda caught me off guard. But on the balance, I think it’s been good for us to take things so slowly. 

Doozy has always been a brave horse, but she feels more confident now — like she has more tools and awareness in the jumping, like speed isn’t her only answer any more. 

cookies for a good mare <3

Tho ya know. It might also be time to start developing the next set of recorded ride guides haha. Gotta keep things fresh and progressive, right? Any special requests on exercises or formatting / style?