Sometimes, I think I can ride
I get strange ideas sometimes, and they have unintended consequences.
Once, someone commented on how bad my dad’s signature was. I looked at it and thought I could do worse. Now I do. My signature is so bad, I would be better off making an X. At least an X would be legible.
And, once, I heard that people who stand with their toes pointed out have dominant personalities. Since I am… less than dominant… I thought I should try that. I will walk like a duck, I thought, And all shall admire my forceful personality.
Well, it’s true: now my toes tend to point out. I haven’t noticed any magical confidence increase from this, or any difference in the way people treat me, but I have noticed that now I walk and ride like a duck.
So, that worked out well, wouldn’t you say?
With Ro at 50-75% capability right now, I’ve decided to work on my position. No leaning forward like a hunter rider. No tightening of the thighs. No raising the calf; my weight is going down, down, down to my stirrup. Toes to point forward, not out. (These last are things my hunter trainer would have crucified me for; I am not sure where these habits came from.)
It works. For two or three strides. If we’re going straight and I’m not applying any aids.
But today, with Ro at closer to 80%, we added in some canter. And as we went, I reverted back a little more to my hunter days than usual—past “half seat” and into “equitate.”
As a teen… no, I’ll spare you the teen envy, politics, and drama. Suffice it to say that I wanted to succeed in the equitation division more than anything, and that I worked my pants off to become competitive. I know some people equate equitation divisions with posing but for me, at least, it was the opposite: the more I thought about my equitation, the more effective I was as a rider.
Today, as I was cantering Ro around, something of that feeling came back to me. I realized what I’ve been missing with my position: I’ve been thinking position, in all its bits and pieces. I need to think “equitate.” I need to rediscover that confidence and security in my overall position/riding, and adjust it to dressage.
It’s not about trying to keep everything aligned just right; it’s about knowing everything is aligned just right and being confident that we can deal with anything that might come up: a single skinny oxer on the short side, a bending triple… um… a leg yield, a free walk, whatever.
I need to pursue dressage equitation with the same stubbornness I pursued hunter equitation. And while Ro is getting better every day, she’s still not 100%, so this is a very good time to focus on me. No more parts: time to go back to the whole.
And perhaps to start walking with my feet pointing straight ahead. No more duck feet. They aren’t helping.
The signature stays, though. I’m kind of proud of its total illegibility.
Eddo Hoekstra Clinic Part II: Video Snippet
After chomping at the bit to get a hold of the clinic video, I was able to pick it up today.
For some reason, I thought having half a dozen media players—most of which claimed to have editing capabilities—plus a stand-alone program or two would mean I could, you know, do some editing.
Two hours later, I managed to get a very short clip with video quality that didn’t completely suck (the DVD is great—clipped-out versions, not so much).
I give up, give in, and generally never want to go through this again. This clip may be all you get from the clinic.
She’s been under saddle (somewhat inconsistently) for about six months now, and this is only her second time off the property. Watch the difference in her trot from the first 3-5 seconds and the rest of the time—towards the end, she really starts swinging and moving like a real horse.
She’s such a good girl!
Eddo Hoekstra Clinic Part I: Obervations
Sonesta Farms held a clinic with Eddo Hoekstra this weekend. I audited some sessions on all four days (Thurs - Sun) and had sessions on Ro on Sat/Sun. I had video taken of my rides, and I’ll put the highlights up once I get it.
Some general observations:
He wanted the riders to do less but do it correctly and allow the horses to figure things out for themselves. He told several riders to use less or quieter aids, and he was very consistent about asking riders to keep their hands upright and close together. Most riders who wore spurs were told to use them less. On Ro, I was told to use only my leg right below the knee when asking her to straighten and move into the outside rein—not my entire lower leg. You could see all the horses respond to this. As the riders got quieter and softer, so did the horses.
The word of the weekend was “rebalance.” There was some discussion among the auditors early on about what he meant by that, and the general consensus was “half halt.” I don’t think so. When he said “rebalance,” you could see the riders fixing their position first and, sometimes, also half halting. The few times he said just half halt, the riders would half halt without fixing themselves. By the time I rode on Saturday, I was pretty sure that rebalance meant “fix yourself first, then the horse,” and that held true through my session with Ro—every time he said “rebalance,” I had crept out of position. A half halt might be part of the overall rebalancing, but the two are not synonymous.
The phrase of the weekend was “If you were in a car, you’d be in a ditch right now.” He very much wanted riders to maintain the pattern no matter what the horse did. They could miss a transition, get a transition late, or just flub everything up entirely, but he wanted them on whatever line the exercise was supposed to be on. If you were on an octagon, you needed to stay on the octagon. If you were on a circle, stay on the circle. If you were going down the long side, you needed to stay on the long side—not wander into the quarter line.
If the horse offered something unexpected to the riders, he wanted the riders to differentiate between “no” and “not now.” He never wanted the horse punished for breaking into a canter. You let them canter on and then come back to the trot. If you ask for the canter and get the wrong lead, you continue on—especially if it’s counter canter and harder for the horse. If you are at the walk and the horse trots, you continue the exercise in the trot—but make sure it is a connected, purposeful trot. You didn’t go on and on in the unexpected gait, but you went on long enough to acknowledge what the horse wanted before saying, “But this isn’t what *I* want, so we’re going to try again.” It was the difference between constantly shutting a horse down so they would be afraid to offer more later and negotiating with the horse so that things did not go entirely off track.
But it did not mean the horse could blow through the riders’ aids and do whatever they wanted. On horses that were consistently blowing through the aids, he often turned to a series of rapid-fire exercises designed to get the horse and rider thinking and back together again. Although horses may be naturally good at some things and those things are fun to work on, you can’t entirely ignore the things that are hard for the horse just because the horse doesn’t want to do them.
He also wanted riders to take risks and make things more like fun and play. One of the first comments he made to me was that Ro wasn’t a baby horse and I needed to sit back and ride her like a real horse. With other riders, he wanted them to push for more in the gaits. Or he wanted riders to just try something for the fun of it. He thought Ro could be doing flying changes in a couple weeks—not schooling them routinely, but he bet that if I asked just to see what happened, she would give them to me.
The idea of risk tasking goes back to the rider doing less and negotiating between no, not now, and yes—the rider needs to keep doors open for the horse to do things. Maybe unexpected things—he likes a forward horse who isn’t afraid to be a little naughty and test what it can do with the open doors.
And if you take a risk and things go wrong? You rebalance and reconsider the situation—maybe repeat the exercise, maybe find a different exercise to achieve the end you originally wanted. As he said to several riders when things went wrong: “You are just as close to something you do want as something you don’t want.”
Some of the best rides to watch were not the riders who were finessing things at whatever level they were working at, but the ones who had things going “wrong” all over the place—very energetic horses, horses blowing through the aids, etc. He had the riders work with that energy, or he had them focus on the horse/rider communication, and by the end of the session there were some very dramatic changes in their way of going. Whatever went wrong could also go right—and he got the horses and riders there by never shutting the horse down entirely. Make sure the rider is correct, make sure the horse is balanced, straight, and forward, and everything else is variables you can play with from moment to moment until you get to the place you want to be at.
P & P
Today’s lesson: a taste of piaffe and passage.
And by “a taste,” I mean “two or three steps at a time.” Of passage. The horse took my application for piaffe, considered it, and rejected it.
Which is all fine. The moments where he considered piaffe, and the few steps of passage that we got, were awesome.
Also awesome: the collected trot going into the piaffe and passage attempts, and the trot coming out, which was big, bold, beautiful.
Now to make sure I am doing lots and lots of my super secret ab-killer crunches at the gym, because I have found a whole new reason to find out whether I even have ab muscles improve my marshmallow belly develop a core.
Lessons in Trailer Loading
You learn something new every day.
Today I learned that “The best laid plans of mice and men…” derives from a 1785 poem by Robert Burns, “To a Mouse.”
Yesterday I learned about trailer loading. And not loading.
One of the owners at the barn was taking her horse to the chiropractor/massage person and I was tagging along. As it happens, things were running a little late when it was finally time to load the horse. We led her up to the trailer and she marched right along right up to the point where she… didn’t.
It soon become clear that we were not going to make the appointment. We moved the truck and trailer so that it wouldn’t be in anyone’s way and settled down to the day’s new task: teaching the mare that she was, in fact, going to load. With the appointment rescheduled, we had all day to work on this.
Enter Awesome Bystander.
If you have any doubt about the state of humanity, allow me to disperse just a little of it.
Understand: we’re in Texas. It’s 90 degrees and wicked sunny. Awesome Bystander offered to help anyway.
She quickly and fairly established a few rules: mare would stay lined up straight with the trailer and not swing her rump around. Mare would step forward once when asked. Mare would stop when asked. Mare would back when asked.
Everything would go really well until mare was at the trailer (it was a step up); she’d walk right up to the trailer but didn’t want to put a foot in. Awesome Bystander kept lightly asking her to step up by tapping just behind the girth with a dressage stick, and rewarding the smallest positive movements from the mare. Every once in a while they backed away from the trailer, reestablished go/halt/back, and tried again. This allowed her to reposition the mare (who sometimes got too close to the trailer to lift her front legs without banging them against the floor) and to relax the mare (hey, here was a task that she absolutely understood and could do correctly!).
No beating, no punishment, just calm, patient insistence and a reward as soon as the mare thought about stepping on the trailer. Best of all, Awesome Bystander explained what she was doing and why each step of the way and made a few recommendations to the owner as well. And, eventually, the mare loaded. It was pretty much that anti-climactic.
Awesome Bystander then unloaded the mare. She and the owner talked for a few minutes, and she drove off into the sunset the Texas midday sun. The owner is, believe me, planning a suitable thank-you gift for her.
The owner then loaded the mare back up. It took a few minutes, but only a few. We shut the trailer and went for a drive around the property, unloaded the horse, and let her graze for a while. Then I loaded her in the trailer—the key here being that we 1) wanted her to load several times and 2) wanted her to load for different people.
I know the owner intends to work on loading intensively for the next little while to be sure the mare is solid on it. The chiropractor/massage appointment has been rescheduled for later this week and hopefully I’ll still be able to tag along (I’ve never been to one, so it should be fascinating).
I apologize for the lack of funny, but I thought it was beyond awesome that someone would spend an hour in the middle of a Texas summer day and help with a loading issue.