Breaking the Pony

Thanks for your thoughts and sense-making on last post, guys.  Responses are in line for the first group of comments and will be for the more recent ones that I haven't gotten to yet.  Horses!  They are the worst.

Have swapped a few emails with our lameness vet -- can we talk about how much I love horse professionals who email? especially when I'd like to schedule something soonish but don't want to be intrusive for a non-emergency the day after Christmas? -- and it looks like we'll have an appointment for early next week.  So I can defer further worry until then and focus instead on breaking the pony.

Or not actually breaking, hopefully!  This is of course not a tactic I'd use with a clear acute injury.  But my theory on weird intermittent NQRness is that it's useful to turn the screws a bit, in the lead-up to the vet's visit, and either make the horse sore enough to clarify the issue or else mysteriously make him better, which is useful information, too.

(Tucker historically gets better with work; I've often been able to disappear his symptoms completely with a weekend of long fast hacking and a cross-country school, although dressage work, counterintuitively, is much less effective.  This is why I was so freaked out in the fall when he went like gangbusters under saddle and then palpated sore after the ride; it was the opposite of everything.)

So yesterday we jumped.

I am -- not sure when was the last time that we jumped, other than the occasional downed log on the trail?  Might actually be back in July when I was trying to decide whether to run him at the Huntington horse trial.  Yikes.  But we may be jumping in the clinic on next weekend, so I had figured I should knock off some of the rust between now and then.  (We also may not be jumping.  I'm easy: happy to jump if that's how it works out and happy to not if the organizer ends up with a flat set that needs filling.)

We kept it simple.  The original set-up was four fences set on a short turn out of (or long approach into) a corner.  Knocked two of 'em down to crossrails, one to a 2'6" vertical, and one to 3'0".  Trotted and then cantered out of the corners, halted straight after.  Mixed it up a little when we started jumping into the corner off a big rollback crossing X, but same basic idea.  Focused on riding a good turn to a straight approach and then staying quiet in the middle and giving my hands forward in the air.  Tried to set Tuck to a reasonable distance but mostly just let him sort himself out.

Verdict: not bad!  He was definitely pleased to be jumping and he used himself well -- even jumped me a bit out of the tack once.  Everything off the right lead came up awfully nice.  Off the left, the canter was stiffer and we did have one quit at a deep distance to the biggest of our little fences -- predictably, right after a really lovely jump that I decided not to stop the ride on!  But all in all, not bad.

The plan is to flat this evening, hack out one weekend day, and jump again the other, probably with trot poles in front of all the fences on account of Tuck and I are both unrepentantly horrid about sneaking a canter stride or two in before "trot" fences and I feel like this is the winter to get real about making that not a thing.  The hope would be to jump once more mid-week, but we'll see what happens with the vet appointment and go from there.  Definitely plan to keep up with it over the winter, though, once a week or so.  Have 101 Jumping Exercises and the Wofford gymnastics book, will travel leap medium-tall fences in a series of single bounds.

(Cheers to Lee for the saddle loan!  These grand older Stubbens, man.)