Trot On

Last night I mounted up.  We did 15min of walking warm-up and then we picked up a trot.

No big deal, right?

No: big deal.

For the longest time, our dressage PTSD has expressed itself in that first walk/trot transition of every ride.  Even our otherwise joyous schools, even when the early walk work was excellent, were marked by a first transition to trot that made me want to take up tennis instead.  Tension, resistance, inversion.  Dropping instantly behind the leg.  Diving on a shoulder.  Swerving drunkenly off our line.  On the worst days, full-on rebellion.

This was my Training horse.  The horse that was consistently in the ribbons after dressage.  The horse who, when carted down to a dressage show on a lark, won both his First Level tests.  We were a long way from perfect, but a simple one-step transition was not beyond our reach.  There was no reason in the world for this to have become a Thing.

Except that it had.  I spent a lot longer than in retrospect I should've making excuses for it, and accepting excuses for it, and trying to shrug it off.  Because it was warm-up, right?  Warm-up was allowed to be sloppy.  As long as we worked through it and the end of the ride was better than the start, surely this was within normal limits for real riders and real horses in the real world.  That's what I read, what I heard, what I told myself.  But in the back of my mind I couldn't shake the conviction that really, it wasn't expecting too much to expect that first transition to trot to be at least harmonious.  Peaceful.  No big deal.

Then last winter in the middle of the month that I spent thinking really hard about whether or not to switch barns, we rode with a clinician who is to this day one of my very favorite professional horsepeople and she said to both of us riding in that set that we needed to work on our transitions.  All of our transitions -- we weren't talking about Tuck's and my glitch (which always seemed to smooth itself out during clinics and at shows, anyway) -- and it was couched as, You both ride well enough to pay more attention to these details, and I thought at the time and think now that the clinician was absolutely right.  And it shored up my confidence in that gut feeling about the wrongness of that first trot: it really, really wasn't expecting too much.

It became one of my secret private goals -- I didn't talk or write much about this problem; I was too frustrated and too embarrassed -- when we moved to the round barn: I wanted to get on, and walk, and then trot.  It became a big part of the reason we bailed out of the ring and onto the trails, because the awfulness didn't happen when we were moving down the trail.  And when we started fooling around with the dressage again, it became one of the things that I was most careful to keep an eye on without, as best I could, getting too invested in.  It mattered so deeply to me that I just could not let it matter too much.

It's been getting better, and I've tried not to take that too much to heart, either.

And last night we walked around.  I thought about my position and about Tucker's way of going and I confess that my mind did a little wandering, too, and then we trotted.  Just like that -- it just kind of happened -- off we went.  It was a pretty good trot, too.  The trot you'd expect to follow 15min of nice-quality walk work if you didn't expect all kinds of angst to crop up the second you asked for an upward change of gear.

I am officially declaring the recovering-from-dressage-angst part of our program to be over.

(Hurrah!)