ground truth

It’s hard to comprehend how I churned out a blog post every day for more than a year. From when I started the blog in August 2014, alllll the way to up until October 2015, I posted daily. It wasn’t until I was forced a bit more onto the sidelines after breaking my leg that I, uh, chilled out a bit on all that. 

These days once a week seems more like my happy place. Except… Well. Realistically this whole blog’s job is to serve as a photographic documentary/archive of my horsey experience… And therefore the number of posts is generally a function of available media content.

bebe crossover!

So it’s been a bit “content overload” the last couple days since I got a new Pivo (omg! better late than never!) and have been busy testing it and trying to get it to work!!! 

And obviously after getting the settings all wrong with our first test, I had to try again right away! 

this is one of the ways we practiced in the recent clinic with Matt

This turned out to be a really great ride to have video from, too, for a lot of different reasons. Mostly all centered around the fact that so much of how a ride feels is fairly disconnected to how it looks. And at least for me in particular, I might diagnose a feeling as one thing, whereas watching back on video, it might actually look like a slightly different issue.

stepping under the other way

Doozy was a super good girl for the ride too, making it a particularly good proof of concept. We started with doing some of the leg-yield-esque steps along the wall that Matt had us doing in our last lesson. In that ride, he had us integrate the steps into the whole session — first walking along the wall, or on a circle. Then also in trot and canter down the wall. 

good girl for playing my stupid games <3

I…. haven’t really gone quite so far in our solo rides, to be honest. But we’ve been practicing in hand daily during our round pen sessions, and then just little steps at a time under saddle. And Doozy is clearly getting the idea!

i swear to god the only thing on my mind in this picture is sitting up tall

She walks out of the exercise feeling super engaged and put together, so usually a nice connected trot transition is right there waiting for us. That’s about as far as we’ve gotten with the exercise, tho, at least for now. 

pivo stuck with us thru this dust cloud, but perhaps was haunted by its ghosts later in the ride since it eventually started losing us here

Mostly bc I don’t tend to do a lot of leg yielding in our outdoor ring. There are usually jumps in the way anyway, plus the long sides feel just a little too long — aka Doozy can get a little strong and strung out — whereas the short sides feel a little too short.

i edited most of the walking out of the video, but we did a lot of it!

And all of that is maybe a bit indicative of our overall trends too. Maybe I start a ride just trying to keep things light and fluffy and relaxed, perhaps sacrificing a bit of connection along the way. But the longer we go, the more tense and tight and choppy Doozy might start to feel. And esp with the lack of connection, she might start unspooling a little bit - anticipating canter, for example or just generally getting tight and braced.

mostly trotting tho, and neck staring obvs

Then maybe I start to feel like she’s running or going too fast, so I tighten and brace too…. And yea you can see where this goes lol. 

why is it that doozy always looks best when i look the most ridiculous? 

What I see in the video, tho, actually maybe looks slightly different. Well, ok, in my defense I was already starting to suspect this particular issue before seeing the video too. In fact, if you had watched our first pivo test video, maybe even you saw the issue as well — particularly when we were working on trying to turn from the rail on a half circle to go down that line of poles.

i’m beginning to realize our lateral suppleness (or lack thereof) might be a main driver to why she feels out of control even when she clearly doesn’t look it

We actually missed that turn, uh, a couple times, and had to circle around to try again. Not bc Doozy was being bad or anything, but bc I misjudged the level of preparation she needed relative to how laterally supple she felt. That experience kinda repeated itself again when I tried practicing riding a figure 8 around the pivo in this most recent ride — a couple times we only really made the turn bc there was a fence in our way.

needs more bend in the body, methinks

So I’m starting to think that perhaps what feels to me like speed and tension might actually just be a lack of adjustability and lateral suppleness. Which, natch, means that my go-to solution of trying to slow the horse down is actually exactly the opposite of what I should be doing: getting her more connected in front of the leg.

the canter felt like a disaster but honestly looks mostly fine

It’s particularly noticeable at the canter too. She feels tight and rigid and hard to sit on, so I keep trying to slow her down more and more. When in reality, her pace and stride length actually look fine. Like remember when I wrote yesterday about how she was able to comfortably do the short 4 strides in between the poles, even tho it felt “chaotic and rushy” to me?

me, sitting up, obvi

So ya know. Maybe most of our issues boil down to the classic case of a rider trying to solve rideability problems by taking away speed, when what’s actually called for is riding more forward, back to front. 

Go figure, the more things change, the more they stay the same LOL.

final trot circuit of the ride looks fairly different from how we start
apparently the pivo got tired by the end tho, started losing us repeatedly in that corner

Doozy did quite a nice demonstration of this for me too, when after we cantered around for a little bit, she was able to show me a much nicer overall trot. Still not perfect, obviously, but much more in line with the feeling I’d like to have.

overall feeling like more video will only help!

The tricky part with Doozy is, as always, calibrating the “more forward” aids without going overboard. 

mostly successful pivo video!

I also want to experiment a little bit with the figures and shapes we ride, obvi maybe with more visual landmarks to help guide us, that are accessible enough to not tempt me into unconsciously trying to slow the mare down (spirals, for example, can be problematic in that regard) but fluid enough to help Doozy be a bit more supple in her steering. Maybe more teardrops or rollbacks?

don’t forget to feed the meter!!

We’ll see. Either way, I’m super grateful for the video. It was kinda one of those rides where I felt better about it after watching the footage, like I understood it better. Or something, idk. 

One of my big goals for the year was to keep investing in our education through lessons with qualified professionals. We were doing pretty well with that too, before Doozy’s injury and subsequent layup. And presumably we’ll get back to more regular lessons soon enough! In the meantime, tho, hopefully the video will be a good source for “ground truth-ing” where we are in the work.