Weekend Warriors

Three rides, all different, all good!

Tuck had most of the week off after our beach ride.  We got out on Tuesday for a glorious walk in the snow with a barnmate who also couldn't resist the temptation of 50degF and sun, but another miserably cold snap followed and waiting for the weekend seemed like the better part of valor.

Friday evening I watched a couple of barnmates' dressage lessons and remarked, "Tucker is going to be so angry; I'm all inspired now!"  Actual school ended up being a really cool anticlimax.  We did twenty-eight minutes of average work and then our first left lead depart was the best walk/canter transition onto that lead he has ever done in his life: clean, straight, true.  So I quietly let him canter half a dozen strides, then pulled up and hopped off.

Saturday we again followed our friends, this time in taking advantage of some jumps:

Picture made enormous so you have a fighting chance at seeing the flat X in the middle; it's just two verticals set at a 90deg angle so as to be jumpable across both diagonals and from both directions (as well as straightahead skinnies if that's what you're into).  It can be a bit of a brain-teaser for the horse -- there's a lot there to look at, and the set-up will let them know about it if they don't get their feet up and keep 'em there -- but Tuck, bless him, did not blink.  That's a skinny vertical on the left of the picture, an oxer on the right.

Everything stayed pretty little on account of I had two goals for the day 1) do our dressage over fences and 2) debug our approaches, so staying welllllll within our comfort zone seemed like a better bet for keeping my focus where it needed to be.  We did half an hour of flatwork, thinking draped over Tuck's topline and soft to the inside leg at first and then starting to power him up a bit.  This is basically where we are right now -- ready to add oomph, unwilling to sacrifice throughness and connection -- and it's where we've always hit the wall in the past, so we'll see.  But I feel good about it this time in a way that I haven't in the past.  So: we'll see?

Then we took a break and when we picked back up, did more of the same but this time incorporating the fences and a game that I started calling in my head, Find Something Else.  Tuck took to the work well, as he usually does; as soon as it became clear that we'd be going back to flatwork for a minute or six after each fence, he fell right in line.  For me, the challenge was being disciplined about it and not getting myself all spun up when I Did That Thing That I Do and lengthened to a long spot.  Instead: just ride dressage until the canter was back where I wanted it and turn back to a fence looking to Find Something Else.

Figured out (remembered?) almost instantly that it is easy to keep his canter bright and bouncy and buttery on the right lead all the way to the fence.  The left lead (as above), not so much.  Figured out almost at the end of the ride that my outside-rein half-halt in the last 3-4 strides is very different from one lead to the other.  Guess which involves a half-halt and soften, and which involves a death grip that some pony can just set himself up right against!

I gotta say, it is so nice to be at a barn that allows me to jump on my own.  That has not been the norm in my horsey career and I understand the prohibition, and when unaccompanied I err very much on the side of heights and exercises unlikely to get me killed and/or risk regression.  But: so nice to have a couple of little jumps and just practice for a while.

And today, we trimmed feet, where by "trimmed feet" I mean "mostly walked for 7.4 miles, mostly on asphalt," after discovering the #1 Specialized fitting challenge: making sure to adjust/rasp the correct side's padding when the saddle is off the horse and upside down. This does explain why the left shoulder so consistently has better clearance than the right...  I felt very foolish and also very relieved that there was such an easy-to-fix explanation!

We are back to a glorious mish-mash of tack for our current endurance-styled rides.  Eurolight saddle and our Taylored Tack bridle-and-breastplate get-up.  After much discussion with Figure about her Specialized-fitting adventures (I have been quizzing everybody I know!), I've bumped up to the thickest cushions (aggressively rasped at the front, and with shims set back from the front of the bars) and switched to my favorite dressage pad -- which is a nice but ordinary pad, very thin with no cushioning properties of its own.  I'm still drooling over the second pad on this page, but for now, this seems to be working fine.

We're also using this dressage girth with a super-classy knotted length of baling twine serving in place as a breastcollar dee.  This girth is old and raggedy and has the distinction of being the only piece of fake fleece to touch Tucker's body without making him ANGRY (the boy has strong opinions about being tickled, I guess) and I only put it back into service (the jump and dressage saddles we're using currently both have short billets) because, like I may have mentioned previous post, I wanted to test out a theory that some recent weird back-soreness was related to a girth switch.  (Apparently yes!  I am not sure why or how, but we switched to this girth before I ever touched the saddle shims and -- knock wood -- the weirdness vanished instantly.)  Not sure how I feel about baling twine as a long-term solution (other than, "better than I feel about an aftermarket girth loop"), but I guess if he likes a girth that I already own, I have no complaints for now?

I have also come to sing the praises of the first piece of Back On Track gear that I've ever bought, the riding gloves (I paid less than that, yay) which are thus far doing an admirable job of keeping my notoriously cold fingers comfy without sacrificing as much dexterity as required by my wonderful-for-serious-cold Mountain Horse mitten-y things.  If these wear well, they'll render irrelevant the various other gloves I've found not quite adequate but best of available options for winter schooling rides.  I...did not actually know that it was possible to ride in temperatures below freezing and feel my thumbs the whole time.

In further baby-step news, my tack locker is even more or less organized:

It has been a good weekend.