My riding sucks.  And there are a slew of things I could criticize, starting from the top down: my head tilts forward, as do my shoulders, my hands flop too much, my back curves, my seat isn’t independant, my thighs don’t maintain even contact, my knees occasionally clench and my toes point down.  Between my clenching knees and pointed toes, my calves don’t constantly squeeze my horse.  And I decided that for this lesson, I was going to concentrate on keeping my lower leg on my horse especially over the jumps.

This is not to say that I simply neglected everything else.  It just meant that if there was one thing I was going to try to fix above all others, it would be my lower legs on Future.  There’s a reason for this and that is to build from solid fundamentals.  I think that your legs are the most important aids when riding.  More so then flailing hands or a subtle seat.

My sitting trot was a bit off because instead of letting my calves creep forward, I tried keeping them back.  Hopefully I’ll keep stretching regularly and this will become easier.  As a consequence, I didn’t sit the canter today nor did I try to sit the trot into any of the jumps — this was back to basics, baby.  A solid two-point all the way.

And it paid off in spades.  I pushed that guy into every corner I wanted him in, guiding his head to where I wanted it pointing.  He cantered into every corner and there was no doubt that he was going to nail every jump I guided him into.  He even came off jumps and completed lines that had been evading me for weeks.  All because I told myself I was going to keep my leg on through every jump.  Who would have thought something so simple would be so effective.

We got our tack in order and headed out to the arena but he wouldn’t enter.  My coach came to the door and calmly explained that the propane heater usually scared the horses until they were used to it.  He freaked out before getting in then freaked out again as he ran past it.  I would like you to know I am aware how lucky I am that he calms down quickly.  A girl on the lesson just finishing with her own horse told me how bad he had been during their lesson.  She had stayed on and I told her that some days that’s the biggest accomplishment.  So her eight year old had gone crazy with the heater and I was supposed to be productive on the back of my four year old?  On our first walk around the arena he backed up when he was 20 yards from the heater and turned around.  And it is here I will eat my words of two lessons ago; I would be happy to finish the year without another fall.

We took it real easy on the flat, following other horses and trying to get him softer during the turn.  I had my legs almost clamped on him and every two minutes I had to remind myself not to squeeze on my knees.  Things were looking better and we even managed to push into three of the four corners.  The canter didn’t go so badly either.  In this paragraph, I’m going to eat my words of several lessons ago in which I was so angry at my coach for ironing in one corner of the arena.  If I hadn’t had an experience like that, I wouldn’t have been able to keep calm during this lesson and just slowly keep working him out, pushing him as far as I could without fighting him.

The first jump went well.  The second line we did had us start in the scary corner and go over a skinny/gate combination.  I feel that a more aggressive rider could have put him over them; we got two runouts.  He went over them and the rest of the lesson defaulted to an easy line of two jumps.  Twice over them was no problem.  I put more impulsion in us the second time, starting from a canter.  Over the 2’6″ jumps.

Then my coach decided to have some fun and raised the jumps to 3′.  I put him in a canter and we sailed over.  Then up to about 3’2″.  This was our coach’s Christmas present to those of us who could do them.  I’m back in love with jumping.  And in case I didn’t make it clear, it was a good lesson.  Merry Christmas!

My jumping, however, seems to have fallen apart.  I can’t read when he’s going to jump, I can’t bend into a proper jump form, I can’t release over the jumps, and I can barely steer when during and after the jump.  I was reading about jumping, thinking about it, trying to squeeze harder and nothing seemed to be working.  So with that in mind, I decided to resort back to a beautiful style I saw over the summer.

One of the top riders at the barn was jumping an uncooperative pony over a course and over every jump her upper body stayed in perfect two-point position.    I know (now) that this is not proper equestrian form for jumping but she was in control and balanced over everything.  And I decided to screw my bending over and crest release and everything else that I was over-thinking and under-achieving and go back to something that once upon a time worked for me.

I can’t say how good it felt to just ride him over a simple line in control, feeling him jump up, holding a bit of mane as he hit the ground, balancing in time for the next fence and cantering off in the corner.  Thank goodness there was a light in this dark tunnel of jumping.  My coach turned to me at the end of the lesson and told me that what had been happening to me over the last two months was actually a normal progression for riders.  I was slowly moving from a passenger who just sits on their horse to someone who’s actually trying to ride and a complementary side-effect was the over-thinking that I had been falling prey to.

I’m not sure what the cure is for the passenger-turning-rider but I like the sound of the end product.  Maybe this is my horseback riding adolescence, where things get worse before maturing.  It’s unfortunate that for two months coming up soon, I’m going to be out of the country and unable to ride.  I’m not sure what effect that hiatus will have on my riding, and my chances of being able to show a higher jumping level this summer.  I suppose it’s one of those things I’ll have to wait to find out.

It turned out to be a semi-private lesson and the other rider was a girl who happened to have to work on almost the exact same things that I did.  She had been riding for much longer than I and I realize that she was much better at certain aspects but we both had our sitting trot to crank through.  And we both had a gymnastic line to master.

First of all, sitting the trot.  If anyone reads (does anyone read?) this post you know my love/hate relationship with sitting the trot.  Well, we pounded away at it some more.  In general, I need to consciously work on pulling back the appropriate shoulder when I want to turn.  While sitting, I need to loosen up my legs and drop them down; my coach recommended a butterfly stretch (Google Images has many pics of it) for 10 min a day to help but almost more important was that we were practicing it without stirrups — something I hadn’t done in too long.  I was really scared of Future taking off and I could constantly feel my left leg creeping up, threatening to dump me off to the right hand side.  When did I develop this fear?  (Ans: Sometime between being thrown off in the summer and having my head cracked a month ago.)

The gymnastic line should have been easy but for some reason neither of us were jumping properly.  I seem to have fuzzy memories of being able to jump really well and whether that’s just bad memory or was a really long time ago, I need to work on my form.  First off, I need to suck it up and ride that horse.  Why am I getting scared over a 2′ jump?  It’s rather ridiculous.  (See above paragraph.)  Second, I need to RIDE my horse.  We had a nice long lecture about how dangerous it is for the horse when riders ask them to do things and don’t support them.  Over one line, I screwed up the first jump and just threw the line away.  I got in shit (well-deserved) for that too about how one of the most important things you can learn is how to recover.

So I need to work on jumping.  Making it natural.  Steering my horse better.  Sitting after jumps and collecting him.  Collecting him in general.  But that lesson was what I think all lessons should be like — where me, my coach and my fellow riders are all working on similar goals and just drill, drill, drill.  I’m old-school like that.  Here’s looking forward to Tuesday.

The most important point of today’s lesson was keeping your ass in the saddle while in sitting trot.  I’ve written countless blog entries about sitting trot but the heart of it still eludes me.  I have this impression (perhaps its just the hope of a romantic) that when you master the sitting trot, you’re at the stage of your riding where you can finally start to learn to ride.  My coach was trying to explain it to us in detail but she finally just said, “that’s it.  Just sit on your horse like a sack of potatoes and try to move with them.”

And so I did.  I sat on that horse like we were in some kind of stupid old western: reins loose, ass back in the saddle, sitting down as comfy as I could.  Legs forward.  Toes probably down.  Evidently those last two points weren’t as important as the first few and my coach just watched me and asked what I was doing.  I couldn’t put it into words because it was just so dumb — this wasn’t me actively riding Future, this was me sitting on a horse and just letting him go.  My legs were horrible and I’m sure my upper body wasn’t in the correct position.  But we were working on seat and mine was (I can’t believe I’m writing this) good.  Somehow through my ridiculous motion I was able to keep my butt where she wanted it.

Clearly there’s a long way to go when you can’t sit the trot while using your legs.  The point that got across to me wasn’t that I have a nice sitting trot or that my legs suck.  It was that even at twenty-eight years of age, you can still show potential for learning how to sit the trot.  Yes, you read that sentence correctly: potential for learning.  It might sound trivial but for those of us who ride with others who started fifteen years before us, and aren’t sure we’ll ever be that good, it’s epic.

I wasn’t able to make it to the barn on Tuesday and this had been another busy week.  Luckily Future was a super star.  I went to grab him from his paddock and he happily took the halter.  Patting him on the neck, I promised to ride him nicely if he took care of me.  That exchange was impressively prophetic.

During the warmup my main objective was to try to make this as easy for him as possible. And I tried doing this two ways: by steering with my legs and by balancing myself.  The two were strongly interrelated.  I found that they both entailed me having stronger contact with Future with my legs and one result was that a lot less was needed with my reins.  I know that a good English rider keeps some rein contact but I was so delighted with the leg steering that I kept a pretty loose rein for this lesson.

I had read in a magazine (I’m trying not to shamelessly plug Practical Horseman too many times in this blog) which said that you should ride as though if the horse were to magically disappear, you’d land and not fall.  It also recommended going through a checklist in your mind as you ride to make sure you’re in good form.  I was doing that and part of my checklist involved trying to keep my legs apart — almost splayed under me.  I had been tightening them which caused me to slide my thighs forward.

The jumping went alright but my coach was chastizing me for not steering.  It took two unsuccessful jump lines for me to realize that I was just collapsing through the jumps.  All my leg squeezing and directing were going to naught when I jumped.  And why?  There was no real reason.  I had to grab his mane as we wildly flayed over the jumps.  Maybe over the warmup jump it was but I should have tightened things up.

Which is why it was so nice to go over that one final line.  I chose an easier one — a X to a skinny in a broken line (as opposed to the two one-strides in a shallow loop).  And I squeezed my legs and somehow rode him better over it.  I didn’t even grab the mane; we didn’t have to.  Just a release like a normal rider.  Here’s hoping for more of those next week.

My biggest fault to Future was bringing my hands up while I jumped and not releasing.  The remedy to that symptom is to grab his mane as I jump over.  The real problem is that my legs aren’t holding and directing him.  My coach pointed out that better riders get on him and put him into a frame because they wrap their legs around him.  Steering then comes from the legs and the hands can do things like release properly.

I’ve noticed that when I sit, I like to sprawl my legs.  I seriously believe that without either daily riding or regular visits to the gym, my form will not progress.  That alone is a bit of a hurdle to me because my life is pretty busy right now and I can’t afford either.  Hopefully Thursday will come with some improvement.

EVER SINCE THAT FALL, YOU’VE BEEN RIDING LIKE A SPINELESS WIMP.

This is one of those cases where yes, my coach wasn’t giving me the nicest conditions in which to ride and yes, my horse wasn’t being as agreeable as he could have been BUT I was not riding up to my potential.  Needless to say I was pissed as all hell during the lesson.  I have to paraphrase George Foreman reflecting on his own comments that he made following his Ali loss, and that was that when you lose, you blame everything and anything.

I was back on Future, which automatically raised my confidence a bit.  But my coach was ironing in one corner of the arena, which scared Future.  That somehow got him scared of the other corner along the same side.  Somehow he was supposed to understand that she was ironing patches on his winter blanket.

I was riding around mad at my horse for being dumb, madder at my coach for creating a scare in one corner of the arena, and maddest at myself for still being scared from that fall last week.  Clearly not the best response to imperfect conditions.  The proper response is to settle myself down into a solid position and ride him as best I can. Not letting him cut corners crazily during lines, not leaning way forward (this is what I do when I get nervous — I hunch over like some guy who lived in Notre Dame) and not riding around cussing under my breath.  I don’t want to get preachy and say that 90% of riding is getting in the right frame of mind, but maybe 90% of riding is all about getting in the right frame.  Mind included.

When I got there, I took him out of the paddock and put him in the crossties.  As I started to brush him, the smell and the fear came back to me.  It was weird but I could feel my head start to hurt too.  I brushed him off and went into the arena.

We tacked up and I got on him fine.  He was slightly energetic and the flatwork went well, albeit he still has steering issues.  I also checked his girth once every ten minutes.

When it came time to canter, I was terrified.  We went right side first and I let him do whatever he wanted.  My coach yelled at me for not steering as I (in my mind) held on for dear life.  In retrospect, the whole thing must have looked really funny — me hunched over as this horse calmly cantered around.  And getting rightly yelled at.

The other direction I decided to try a bit harder.  And that went well.  I pushed him into the corners and we kept it up decently.  But things fell apart on the first jump — I could barely read him and yanked back (I know, I hate myself for it) and probably landed horribly.   The line of two jumps went only slightly better.  We went up to the first one and my mind got a hold of me and just thought I could cruise him through it.  STUPID.  He stopped and crashed through it but my coach told me to just keep going.  So we did and I took him over the following oxer.

Then I stopped and realized what I was doing.  A year ago, I rode Future while he was learning to jump and there’s no horse I would rather go eventing on.  In fact, I have made courses on Future that other riders better than me could not make.  I do that by riding properly.

So that’s how I rode Bo.  I sat the trot, forced him up to the fence and got up into my two-point squeezing hard with my legs.  And we nailed them.  Everything we pointed at we nailed.

And I remembered why I love this sport so much.  Because even though I shouldn’t be able to — because I’m too old, because my balance isn’t good, because I’m still too new at it — I do.  Somehow, I do.

My biggest problem this lesson was my saddle slipping.  It did, during the canter, and the light came on telling me I had no chance of staying on.  I wish that I didn’t have that light but I suppose it’s built in to everyone.  He was reluctant to canter and I cracked on him with my legs.  Just as he started to go steadily, the saddle started to slip.  I started to bail, my ass sliding non-stop to the left, and he let out a few good bucks.  Down and back I went, hoping his feet weren’t going to land on me.

They didn’t, but I did fall back and give my head a pounding.  My coach thought it was my stirrup irons.  No, I told her, that was my head on the ground.  I can’t tell you how angry I was.  I got back on and we cantered the other way successfully, and did a few crossrails before the lesson ended.

I was looking forward to this lesson.  I’ve been getting too comfortable with Future and too emotionally attached.  This lesson did not help.  But I believe I should ride this horse again.  In the meantime, I’ve got to go to the tack store and get a new one because everytime you ride you should ALWAYS WEAR YOUR HELMET.