trying new things

Happy Wednesday!! Instead of another meandering quasi-conceptual deep dive into behavioral training philosophies, let’s get back onto a more practical and, ahem, materialistic plane, yes?? 

Yes!

my handsome mare <3 <3 
testing our new stübben bit in the round pen first

Specifically: I finally tried some new stuff this week, and have riding media omg to show for it!!

And spoiler alert::: basically all of it was a (qualified) fail, womp haha.

my handsome…. kitten LOL, and me.
testing our new pivo in the living room first

That’s never stopped me before, tho, so let’s get into it. Bc actually… there was truly a real win underpinning the day too!!

perhaps the living room was not a sufficiently good proof of concept re: settings 

The short story is that I finally tried Doozy in the new Stübben baby pelham that was highly recommended at the Windurra camp. 

Verdict? It’s way too much bit for Doozy right now. She never did anything bad or wrong with it, and it did give me a lot of control. But… I could tell that she was a little worried and backed off. There may be a time in her life where she’s comfortable and educated enough in her contact that she can hold a bit like this, but… for my purposes I want to avoid that ‘backed off’ feeling.

here we are, pivo! are you coming with us??

The other big test was my new Pivo Silver!! Yes yes, I knowww I’m a super late adopter here… But the reviews have always been so mixed, the expectation so much greater than the reality, that I’ve wanted to give the product more time to develop before clicking “buy.”

pivo! c’mon, you can do it buddy!!

Aaaaand… Well. Our first test was a huge disappointment LOL. It performed slightly worse than a $200 tripod — bc it occasionally locked on and tracked for a second without me realizing. So Even as I proceeded with my ride, centering activities around where I thought it was pointing, it still missed a lot. 

apparently you need to actually select “horse” vs “face” in the settings. who knew??

Joke’s on me, tho, bc I didn’t have it correctly set up. Which… Kinda seemed like maybe the case when it kept saying it was looking for a “face to track” and was able to follow me when I leaned over and stared straight into its eyes LOL. But nobody’s ever accused me of being a quick learner, so I’ll just have to try again another day.

still got some video tho <3 also i think this posture is the reason boyd why boyd likes the pelham

The remote worked well, tho! Esp compared to past phone remotes that were fairly unreliable. The bluetooth range itself is so limited (google says typically 30’ but that seems generous), plus many devices seem to need to be paired again after going either out of range or to sleep. 

ideally we’d want a bit more “nose out” but doozy wasn’t quite comfortable enough to push into it

I left this remote close to the Pivo so that it was easy to start / stop without interfering with the Pivo itself — and close enough that it didn’t unpair. And the app seems to keep everything awake even when you aren’t recording, which is nice. Uses up a lot of battery, I’m sure, but achieves its function.

Which like, Step 1 — Do The Thing, right? I want these things to work first. Then theoretically you can optimize for performance (like battery usage etc) later.

regardless, we went through our paces to try all things things anyway!

Anyway I probably spent about 10min fussing around trying to get the Pivo to follow us before giving up and just getting on with our ride. Bc we had important stuff to do!

pivo FAQs suggest keeping the target close enough to fill roughly 1/10th the screen. obvi these gridlines represent 9 equally sized areas instead of 10, but it’s close. i’m not sure yet if this accounts for the pivo’s zoom feature too, tho, bc otherwise you really can’t go very far away at all

Doozy finally gets to do ground poles again, yay!! Much rejoicing!! lol…

Now you may be thinking that ground poles technically *aren’t* jumping, in theory you should be able to just integrate them into your flatwork without meaningful change in the horse’s level of effort / impact / etc. 

omg doozy trotted a pole!!

Which like. Ya know. Maybe that’s true for *most* horses haha, but Doozy is not most horses. 

eeeeeeeeeeee!!! <3 <3

She happens to believe that even the merest ground pole can be quite fun and exciting, thanks! and therefore I’ve kinda felt like we shouldn’t even really go there (aside from at the walk) until I felt like we’d built up to a substantial enough baseline of trot and canter.

omg doozy CANTERED a pole — look at that face haha

So obviously this was always going to be an exciting ride haha. Except — perhaps the biggest win of the day: I admit to being a bit distracted especially by fussing with the Pivo. And recognizing that the pelham wasn’t quite the right bit… Eh, I was basically a fair bit less meticulous / methodical in my approach compared to the last few weeks. 

the most excited mare, doing a lead change bc why not

But… That practice is in the bank now, so to speak. Doozy was solid gold. Game, obedient, connected and with me. Maybe I was slightly less diligent or disciplined with every step, but she met me where I was. Which ya know… is pretty awesome, considering how difficult it’s been to just get her back to “normal.”

i swear this is not a jump… i guess nobody told doozy tho!

I did set up a few visual landmarks tho to help remind me of all my good intentions etc. Specifically, while most of the poles we did were just singles strewn around the ring, there was one line set as a short 4 from a pole to a little box (above). It seemed like the perfect configuration to introduce practicing walking straight before the fence line — so I put two little riser blocks down before the corner to help.

looking ahead at the riser blocks i set up to remind us to halt calm+straight afterward

And it was good! Doozy naturally was very excited about cantering a long straight line with #obstacles lol… but she always fit in the 4 very comfortably (even tho it sometimes felt chaotic and rushy to me) and after repeating a couple times with the halt, was able to do a lovely add stride too.

so good <3

It ain’t much, but it feels pretty good. I’ve written a lot about how I was always in such a rush with Charlie, always trying to grow and advance and move up. And that’s normal, right? I think a lot of us want to see some sort of tangible proof that we’re “getting somewhere” or progressing. 

It just seems, tho, that with horses, you can never really escape the fundamentals and basics lol. 

there’s video too tho i’ll warn you: it’s all in pieces since 

the pivo wan’t tracking us

So in a way I’m grateful to have this phase with Doozy right now, where the pace or intensity of our work is actually a little bit out of my hands. We have plenty of time for this stuff, and it’s honestly kinda nice!

Tho ya know. It’ll be nicer if I can get the Pivo to work properly LOL.