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?