Happy Monday, folks! Hope everyone northeast of me didn’t get too too soaked with the recent storm, and hopefully not too many trees down in the wind! It was mostly quiet around these parts. A little soggy, a little chilly, but mostly quiet.
handsome mare doin her best
But lo — the pro pics from our most recent show arrived in the mail!! I continue to just order actual physical prints bc… well. Number 1, I love pictures — lots of pictures, ALL the pictures!!! And #2, I’m grateful the photographers are there and want to support them.
just trottin around
For whatever reasons, the most economic option continues to be physical prints that arrive in the mail, of which I take slightly sketchy glare-y digital pictures to share here haha.
we might not be very good at this, but it doesn’t matter lol
And our selection from this go-round was a bit limited. I don’t know for sure, but it seems like the photographers curate the albums. Or maybe they only shoot when they think it’ll make a good picture. Regardless, it can make for slightly slim pickins for me and my silly mare.
we are slightly better at this, tho, sometimes! sorta!
C’est la vie, tho, right? I’d rather have the pictures than not have them!
pretty sure i’d already gone off course by this point tho LOL
The day may not have ultimately gone the way I wanted, but there were a lot of good moments and it deserves its spot in ye olde archives haha.
photographers chose interesting locations on cross country, so this is our one and only shot, literally just moments before our little oopsie… oh well!
Plus, ya know, I happen to think the mare is cute. She might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but she’s just the right little red wine grape for me!
So! Doozy and I made it back out for our first full three phase horse trial since her injury last spring!! And…. welllllll…. it didn’t go *entirely* to plan, to be honest.
**record scratch** yep, that’s me…
But actually the good moments were quite good for us, all things considered, even if the day ended prematurely with my first ever fall off Doozy at one of the smallest jumps on xc. Well. Ok, cough cough, technically speaking, we were already eliminated in show jumping anyway bc SOMEBODY (me) missed a jump, ahem, oops. But Doozy didn’t know that!
you’re probably wondering how i got here!
So yea. A few things went wrong LOL. But. Eh. What else is new?? So let’s get into it!
it all started about five hours earlier….
Obvi I’m not gonna lie — it’s hard to consistently kinda suck at this sport. But ya know. It’s not like I’m not trying, right? And hopefully close observers will agree with me that even with all the fuckery, there are still some pretty solid bright spots from the day — still some clear signs of slow (oh so slow) progress.
for real, tho — all joking aside, it ended up just fine. doozy, tell the people you’re fine!
Tho maybe not THAT clear bc we’re lacking a fair bit of media so…. haha, you’re just going to have to take my word for it on some stuff! Like dressage warm up. For once, I was adamant that dressage warm up would be a feature of our day, that it would get the time and attention it needed.
doozy!! tell the people!! …doozy??
For whatever reason, some of my clock-related psycho tendencies include giving myself exactly not enough time. Not on this day, tho! I gave myself 40min. It’s more than we need for the “work” itself, but I hoped would provide the same sort of mental buffer for Doozy that the 7min break between tests at last month’s twilight dressage did.
oh. ah. i see. just a little low key mugging while i’m trying to selfie lol… yep, she’s fine!
And we’ve been working really really hard at putting together a consistent simple flatwork routine. More evidence to come of that from a recent pivo ride that I haven’t had time to write about yet.
All things considered, with all the prep work and time buffers and all that, I was actually extremely pleased with our warm up for dressage. Especially the canters. It wasn’t perfect, wasn’t as good as at home. But was NOT explosive, and actually bordered at times on ‘pleasant’ and ‘harmonious.’
walking downhill from trailers: first ring is dressage warm up, next ring holds the dressage courts, and the ring below that (behind the judge’s booths) holds show jumping. cross country is on the opposite side of warmup from this path.
Unfortunately tho that just doesn’t translate into the show ring itself. Doozy just gets so tight and tense. The test wasn’t at all our worst… some parts were probably fine. But the score is atrocious anyway bc every single movement is so tense. And still with the collective 5.0 (x2 coefficient) Harmony score.
anyway. for real for real — show jumping started off great!
I’d say it was a bummer except… Meh. For once I wasn’t even checking scores online throughout the day. So I actually didn’t even know the scores until I grabbed my test the next day while volunteering. It was important to me to try my best, to not feel like I shortchanged us in the warm up. But otherwise, it kinda is what it is, ya know?
actually quite pleased with how i rode the tricky half stride distance in this line
So we just got on with our day — the next step of which was show jumping!! And another major major bright spot of the day was the warm up for this phase. Not that there’s any media at all, so again, you’ll have to take my word, but this might have been one of our strongest jumping phase warm up efforts to date.
slightly, uh, less pleased with straight up just forgetting that red #7 even existed in the world, oops
For once I actually was able to practice opening and collecting the canter and felt like Doozy understood and was responding. We jumped four jumps — the X, the vertical once off each lead, and then the oxer, and felt READY.
ah well. doozy didn’t know her pilot is a moron. well. ok actually she might have an inkling on that point, but it was all good!
The round itself started great too! The whole course was kinda twisty serpentine-y bending every which way with almost every jump feeling slightly related but also slightly on an iffy stride.
We got a great shot into the first tho (with a rub but no rail), and then got the strides I wanted to jump 2 in a bending seven. The tight turn to 3 went smoothly, and I was super happy with our ride from 4 to 5, which was set on exactly a half stride but rode in a tidy six with just a slight bow vs the direct line.
full round, complete with our drive-by of #7
We landed counter cantering tho and in retrospect I should have fixed the lead to 6 bc even tho Doozy had good distance, she had the rail and then landed in a bit of a run. That’s not why we missed 7 tho — I literally just straight up forgot about it, never even aimed for it.
Just went right on around to the in-and-out at 8, which rode sticky and long for us, then another kinda sticky jump at 9 to finish. I suspect the stickiness is a direct result of my shoving her at 6 when she didn’t feel totally comfortable in her balance.
they still let you go cross country on a technical elimination tho!
Obvi the warm up steward — longtime volunteer and rider Meredith, who ran a fantastic ring!!! — alerted me to the missed jump and subsequent TE. Honestly tho? I honestly wasn’t ruffled by that at all. Obvi with the way our dressage is, it hardly matters anyway, right? We’re just here for the experience. And even if they’d said we couldn’t go xc, it would have still been a net positive experience.
and it started off pretty good!
But they DID let us go xc, so ONWARD, right?? And again, Doozy actually had a very nice warm up — I only jumped one fence just when the horse ahead of us was in the box, mostly to check the brakes etc, and all was well. So we made our way to the box, picked up a trot about 30sec out, then headed out and got a great shot to fence 1!
straight up princess to #2
Doozy landed strong, but I made it my business to reestablish balance right away, and she got a really nice feeling forward stride to the second.
i call this down hill run to jump 3 the “heart breaker,” but doozy did it just fine
Ditto for jump 3. It’s a fairly long downhill run away from the trailers and warm up and all that. I’m notoriously terrible about riding downhill, and everything about this jump is perfectly situated to tempt a rider into getting too backwards and behind the leg. Not Doozy tho! She carried a steady rhythm and jumped it nicely.
we’ve seen some variation of this bending line a few times now — #6 is top right corner
The next few jumps are all extremely similar to a couple courses we’ve done here before — with jumps nicely positioned on gently rising ground with bending approaches.
got a pretty decent shot to the table!
Doozy was a touch distracted at times — you can actually hear me at various points in the helmet camera telling her not to worry about various jump judges etc lurking in the trees… But honestly she felt super rateable and rideable.
proof: the good moments were good <3 <3
And she got what felt like a great shot to the table at 7!! Hindsight being what it is, tho, I wonder if she felt again like I kinda shoved her at it, sorta like jump 6 in show jumping. She didn’t land out of balance or anything like that, honestly she still felt great (albeit slightly distracted).
got a little bit of a clunker to the corner tho, oops
But the next jump definitely was a little sticky. Just not as confident a feeling as I’m used to with Doozy. I’m not entirely sure why — some people said their horses felt a little slippy on the ground, she also could have just been tired. Idk. But I opted to let her trot into the water just to be safe.
a few small things went slightly wrong here that layered together into a slightly bigger oopsie
Tho again, hindsight being 20-20, it wasn’t exactly an effort to get her to trot. Which… Should have clued me in as unusual. And she just trit-trotted right through the water, right up to a piddly little slow-motion stop at the cedar logs after.
Watching the helmet cam, I understand what I was thinking — clearly I was just waiting for her to pick up and go and take me to the fence. But she just… didn’t. And I didn’t do anything at all about it…. so yea, whoops. So we turned around and picked up the canter to try again.
evidence: oopsie
But you know what they say — you really ought to jump it the first time bc it’s almost never going to look any better the second time. For whatever reason, Doozy was just out of steam and a little upset and didn’t want to play any more.
“i need an adult” — sweet little biscuit
For a hot second, I thought she would push me back into the saddle with her neck. An instant later tho I was way up in the air and actually afraid she might be coming toward and possibly over top of me. Good girl tho flung me clear and spun back and away. And then actually just stopped and stood there waiting for me instead of bolting off into the sunset. Whew.
honestly not hard to find bright spots about this video
I’ve never fallen off Doozy before — obvi have come very close, many times — but really was not at all sure what she’d do. She’s such a sweetie tho, she really does like to be with the people. So she waited <3
bummer to end on a sketchy note tho, but c’est la vie
So ya know. Obvi disappointing. In retrospect I kinda wish I’d retired after the first refusal bc the next couple jumps were all on slightly fussy downhill off-camber lines that probably wouldn’t be ideal for us anyway. But eh. In the grand scheme of things it’s not the end of the world.
no worse for the wear <3
We both probably need a little more schooling, a little more fitness. And *I* definitely need to work on being more proactive especially in the moments when Doozy ISN’T dragging me to the fences.
All the same, tho, I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater bc of one a couple mistakes, even if they were kinda big mistakes. There was a LOT to like about how our day was going. The moments that were good, were really good (for us lol). And at the end of the day, that’s what we’re here for!
Doozy and I trekked out to the midweek Twilight Schooling Event at Loch Moy this week — a fantastic summer series they’ve offered for years but that I almost never make it to.
biscuit out in public!!!!!
Mostly bc… Well. The events run midweek usually from late afternoon to early evening. Which… Tbh is not the best traffic situation. Tho, turns out, getting a 6pm ride time actually worked almost perfectly from a traffic perspective, even if I was practically begging for sleep by the time we were driving home again…
looking like a sweet little snack <3
These events are quasi starter trials, in that you can do all three phases. But it’s suuuuuper low key. Minimal rules (as you can see, Doozy wore her boots for our dressage tests), no final placings, and no ribbons. And xc is run almost like a derby — jumps for all the levels are all flagged as one, you can jump literally whatever height you want. Actually, you can jump literally whatever anything you want.
was such a good girl and let me plop the pivo onto the fenceline right before our test
Want to jump a low option first then circle around to try the bigger one? Totes cool! Want to skip a jump? Or add in something that isn’t even flagged? All good! Literally the chillest lol. Literally just schooling.
Which… not gonna lie, made me feel slightly sheepish once I got there having only entered to ride two dressage tests with zero jumping rounds in either show jump or xc.
and pivo nailed the test, hell yes!!
But honestly, I think my instincts were right — it was a good plan, and it was a productive outing for us. Being in that type atmosphere, but being exclusively focused on dressage and doing multiple tests, with no worry or distraction about any later phases, really helped me stay intentional about my riding.
and then we were off!!! note: the xc warm up is right on the other side of the shrubs left side of frame, and show jumping is basically directly behind the camera. plenty of atmosphere!
Doozy has been such a star lately, it really feels like things are clicking for us. So I was curious to see what might still be accessible “out in the wild,” vs what would revert back to chaos.
i tried to level out the pictures where i could bc omg so many pictures snapped from the video!!!
And? Well, guys, I think our new focus on forward, first and foremost and forever, might actually be a winning ticket for Doozy!! Goooooo figure LOL.
alas tho the pivo was on a somewhat rakish angle and kept putting us in the bottom corner of the frame
I’ve been super intentional in our warm up rides at home lately to develop a recognizable, repeatable pattern that could be replicated wholesale in the warm up at a show. Riding forward, covering ground, fluid steps — and incrementally introducing a lively but inviting feel on the reins. Starting with just the inside rein at walk, but eventually working up to normal contact just trotting around. Still riding forward tho. Always.
it’s still worth a watch tho <3
It’s my impression that I get into the most trouble with Doozy when I have in my head this idea of a long loose free stretchy connection. It’s a nice idea, but in actual practice the result is essentially ‘disconnection.’ Which, with Doozy, is a one-way ticket to the chaotic doom loop of racing bracing and going inside out.
judge actually literally said ‘the quality is there’ omfg
Instead, if I can try to keep the contact alive and active — but with a forward feeling, always with the forward!! — Doozy feels a lot more secure and balanced and, in the right circumstances, even soft.
it’s just. ya know. buried under the tension haha
Obviously a show atmosphere made all this a lot more challenging, but overall I was happy with the warm up. It felt like I got what I asked for, it felt representative of how we’ve been going. Tho, obvi, Doozy was definitely wayyyyyyy more tense.
for real tho doozy showed some very nice moments in her second test!!!
The tension really REALLY flared when we got into the big arena for our turn. Doozy just got completely uptight and worried. Tho, being full of surprises, as she is, was still a docile little lamb while I hastily situated the pivo on the fenceline from her back on my way to circle the ring.
i’m mostly happy with how i rode the whole thing too — second test moreso than the first obvs
Our first test was basically just… Exactly par for the course for us. With added benefits of me going off course a couple times bc whoops I’m rusty too!
downward transitions #SlowToDevelop
She was tight and running and braced and just sorta all over the place and it’s so hard to ride her like that. As it was, tho, I tried to stay really present and really treat the test like a schooling round. For example, I did a few extra down transitions (including some steps into walk) between the first canter and trot diagonal, just trying to keep Doozy with me vs just whipping her through the movements.
“don’t mind if i do!” — doozy, the second she’s invited to free walk
It was overall not a good test, but perhaps productive in some ways? Idk. Perhaps even more productive was the roughly 7 minutes we spent just standing in the back corner of the large arena while another horse went, before coming back to do our second test.
our center line turns did NOT do justice to the practice we literally just did with trainer C, sigh
Doozy maybe wasn’t thrilled to be going again, but also was sorta just like, “This again? Ugh, ok fine!” And just like… did it.
halt was ok enough tho! perhaps a smidge late LOL
Now I’ll be the first to admit that I always tend to ride a second test better than the first. It’s like I have to make all the mistakes or forget all my intentions or whatever, get that all out of my system. And then come back and be like, “ok this is what I MEANT to do the first time!”
But it’s also just plain true that Doozy WAS more relaxed the second test.
judge offered some nice constructive feedback afterward
Not perfect, obvi. But more rideable. More “with me,” more connected. Like she understood a little bit better the rules of this weird little game.
click for full size
And the judge was super complimentary! Overall comment was “Big improvement from first test, keep using turns and transitions to help big horse balance big gaits.” And a harmony score of 6.5!!!!
this level of relaxation immediately before and after the test gives me hope that the horse will eventually understand that the test itself… honestly really is not a big deal
Compared to our first test, with a comment “Patient ride on tense/distracted horse. Keep working for more relaxation / length of frame and stride” with Harmony score 5.0…
lots of pets for the big girl!
Obviously in an ideal world, I shouldn’t need to do a first test badly in order to ride a second test well. Ideally I’d just… ya know… ride better from the very beginning haha. But I’m a realist and an amateur sooooo. Ya know. It’s all good.
smooshy biscuit <3
Bc I think we both learned a few things from this experience. It felt really productive. Felt like we got some proof that the work we’re doing at home is actually sustainable and accessible even in higher stress situations. Compared to, say, Waredaca last year when it felt like everything we’d been working on in lessons and at home basically just disappeared entirely in the warm up ring.
very pleased with this critter!
It also felt like doubling up the tests — but with a brief intermission between while another rider went — worked really well for Doozy.
She’s so funny — it’s not like she’s in an actual panic when we do our tests. Obvi she can just stand there while I fuss around with the pivo from her back before the test… and free walk like a slinky slithery panther in the test, and then be at ease immediately after… It’s not like she’s just trying to bolt away entirely, right? Rather, it’s like she’s just expecting… ~~something~~ to happen, but she’s not totally sure what.
Which gives me hope that she’ll eventually learn the pattern, figure out the rules, realize that it’s all just a game. A girl can dream, right? Just more reasons to keep on getting out on adventures!!
