an attempt was made

Happy Monday, folks! In what is likely to become a recurring feature around here, I’m gonna do another deep dive into a recent schooling ride, recorded with the benefit of my new favorite device, the Pivo!

warm up walkies!

Don’t worry, tho. It’s mostly just a lot of screenshots, not too too many words. I promise! Sorta! Plus there’s video to keep me honest — virtually the whole ride, minus the walk breaks and the first 2-3 minutes of trotting.

if you’d rather just skip to the video, here it is!

I recognize that going super micro on a ho-hum run-of-the-mill schooling ride can a be a little… hm… inaccessible or less relatable to the average reader. But for me, it’s like extracting triple the value from a single experience.

representative picture

Bc I just have the one horse, ya know? This ride clocked in at about 26 minutes total (edited down to ~18min of action in the video), and let’s say I do that 4-6x a week, more or less. It’s just… not actually all that much time properly practicing, right? Especially if you believe the whole “it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill” thing…

Brett Parbery says most horses banana better to the left than the right. doozy agrees!  

So the more I can learn from each experience, the better, right? Maybe? Sure. Let’s go with that haha. The ‘data,’ so to speak, includes how I felt about the ride - either in the moment or from memory; what it looks like on video (which I may or may not watch multiple times); and then finally what comes through in this act of putting it all into written words. 

legit cherry picked so hard to find one decent canter snap, and in the interest of honesty: my butt is only even really semi-seated bc i’m about to ask for a down transition

As nice as it would be to hear, “you’re doing that wrong,” and suddenly be like, “Aha! Amazing! Telling me that fixed everything!” Well… Sadly, it’s a slower accountability loop around here. 

I’ve got to do the thing (probably badly), study it, try again (very likely still badly), study some more… on and on and on like this for what I can only hope will continue to be many more years of horsey pursuits.  

meanwhile. youtube’s ai thumbnail generator is like, “pshaw, girl, you sit the canter great! also, your mare gelding has two hind socks now. just go with it!”

So in today’s episode ride recap, we get to see how things went when I focused on two main priorities: 1) prioritizing riding forward, back to front, into contact; and 2) working on the canter.

back in the real world, here i am totally bending my elbows 

A sub-component was to try to stay intentional about lateral suppleness throughout. Which, natch bc I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, I'd completely forgotten about for the first few minutes whole haha. As one does. 

i will say, tho, pole work and transition practice go hand in hand!

Oooh, and I also set up a long line of poles spaced 9’ and approachable from both directions, with the idea of using it to help organize* our canter stride.

*Foreshadowing: It did not.

and here we are, trotting our poles! ahem, cough cough, i said **trotting**

To be honest with you all, I’m not totally sure we’ve got the whole “riding forward” thing fully calibrated yet either. It was equally clear both while I was riding and watching the video that we’re definitely a bit strung out and running at times. 

ahh, see, there we are! totally trotting

Notable, however, was that things didn’t seem to ‘escalate’ as we went. Doozy was honestly pretty relaxed, all things considered, and stayed that way. And it didn’t feel like I ever really got into a pulling match trying to slow her down.

halt straight at the strategically placed block!

In the grand scheme of all the various ways we can go, this feels like a promising direction. The hard part for me is, as always, trying to find that good balance between riding forward while still maintaining an elastic steady contact that keeps the energy and impulsion contained.

lather rinse, repeat, amirite?

In the video, it’s clear that — as usual — my reins are too long and my tendency is to drop my hands and straighten my arms. And tip forward, obvi. 

she legit loves being told how smart she is

There are times, tho, when the pieces get a bit closer to what I’m trying to achieve. The feeling right now that seems to work best is to think about having an “alive” contact. Something about that word for me helps me remember to be more following and steady vs sorta dead and hanging (or allowing gaps of slack into the contact).

most moments don’t look like this, but there are decent moments!

Remembering to be intentional about lateral suppleness, with lots of inside leg and correct bend, helps make the message clear for Doozy too. Tho we currently still have a lot of lateral asymmetry here — she’s really happy to overbend to the left (while her right shoulder careens away— see gif below for example!); while we have a much harder time not falling in while tracking right. 

 

oooh and we did canter the poles on purpose too!

All things considered, tho, I was particularly happy with how things came together in our canters for this ride. Not bc it was perfect or whatever — obvi— but it definitely was NOT a disaster. Small steps, y’all!

it, uh, generally did NOT go to plan OMFG LOL

Tho… Ha. In retrospect, the ground pole exercise I set up was perhaps a bit aspirational. And despite a lot of careful thoughtful repeated practicing of the pattern, with halting straight and all the things, well… I’m not sure the ground poles added much value LOL.

sure sure it doesn’t look that dramatic in motion… but still, c’mon

In my head, I was thinking back to what Boyd and Peter were talking about at Windurra camp, about how they like to use bounces to help improve a horse’s flatwork and to sorta reorganize in the middle of a jump course…

this is why we practice tho, right?

But I think that idea is gonna have to go on ice until Doozy is ready for elements with actual height haha, bc her freakish ability to sorta just skitter and skate over the surface of these poles rendered the whole thing a bit laughable, whoops!

“my way was better.” — doozy, nonplussed

It wasn't a total wash, tho. At least imho. In particular, the pole exercise was set up with a corresponding block to help us remember to halt straight… so we ended up doing a TON of transitions. Like, WAY more than I’d have done otherwise. 

 

was pleased to still be able to trot around even after the drama tho!

And not a ***single one*** of those upward transitions was hectic, frazzled, sideways, inside out, pogo-y, explosive, or any other word of choice. 

lol, tho obvi the drama continued anyway

Which… Actually, is kinda amazing. Possibly a fluke, since that sorta behavior generally happens in our jumping lessons when we have to pick up for our turn, and this ride didn’t necessarily have exactly the same feel or flow to it. 

“your attempt at influencing my stride length amuses me” — doozy, reinterpreting distances as she sees fit

But it IS interesting to me. My initial thought is that by prioritizing riding forward first, Doozy therefore has less anxiety or annoyance about being immediately slowed back down again. 

ZOOM ZOOM

Which, like, duh haha. But it’s historically been hard for me to let off the e-brake when Doozy is so hard to slow back down again, ya know? Except going back to one of my first observations in this post: by starting the ride with a forward commitment, we seemed to actually avoid the whole escalation / snowball sequence. Well. Mostly, haha, the above picture notwithstanding! 

good girl, but whoa dammit haha

For real, tho, I think that’s the trick tho — always trusting the forward first, even when it feels a bit running and strung out — bc Doozy seemed much more relaxed and reliable with that approach. You can see it in the video too — I interspersed a few random sequences of just trotting around in between trips down the poles mostly just to see if we could do it, and she totally could!

finished with a little quasi baby stretchy trot, good girl <3

AND! She finished the ride with a nice genuinely honest attempt at stretchy trot. Not perfect, obvi, but trying. 

So even tho it was sorta a ho-hum ride, with plenty of obvious low-hanging fruit in terms of “room for improvement,” I’m actually really pleased with some of the incremental gains. Small steps, y’all!! Plus a little #PivoAccountability haha.