Discomfort

Dressage is not only fun again.  Dressage is hilarious! 

Mud season has given Tuck and I plenty of time to do our homework.  I’d planned to get some hacking miles in Sunday, but our supposedly warm sunny day turned chill and rainy instead.  My next riding day, Tuesday, looks like more of the same.  Today it will be warm enough that I’d ride out even if it were raining, but of course I have a class instead.  These are spring problems instead of winter problems, though, and the novelty keeps me from being too annoyed.

We jumped on Saturday.  I’m determined to fix our trot fences (read: return them to existence), so every jump school from here to eternity will include trot poles to something.  In this case it was a crossrail that turned into a vertical and I figure we’ll just continue with that for a while, building up the fence and confirming the trot to the base before we take the helper poles away.  We also had a skinny vertical, a square oxer, and a nifty little line: little vertical 21’ to square oxer 21’ little vertical.

The jumping crew at the round barn ends up with a lot of configurations roughly like that, little (or not so little) gymnastics that incorporate a fence of some size and then something else on the backside to keep the horse thinking, keep him careful, encourage him to self-organize.  I love it; Tuck is clever enough that it works a treat and cocky enough that it’s nice to let the fences teach and correct him instead of constantly having to do it myself.

Useful, productive school.  He warmed up great and I continue to be impressed by how much easier it is to find a distance when I’m not twisting us both into pretzels on approach.  And it was a good day to have eyes on the ground.  During our first jump-around, we were getting to the single oxer with enough impulsion, decent balance, and a reasonable distance and the jump kept feeling a little lurch-y off the ground even so.  I wondered out loud if I needed to close my leg off the ground; barnmate thought it was a quality-of-canter-through-the-back issue.  So I experimented.  Barnmate was right and second jump-around was much improved.

Sunday was weather-induced dressage and like I said: hilarious.  Position-wise, I’ve been working primarily on keeping my toes forward/heels away and my hands closed, because those are bite-sized but high-yield changes, and when those biomechanics are clicking, adding in body-back and smaller/softer posting.  For the piece of this exercise where there is, y’know, a horse involved, we run through a sequence of strong trot to warm-up followed by trot/walk/trot transitions, looking for a snappy response with the shoulders staying up, and trot/canter/trot with the canter coming from the hind legs and no pesky little flick upward from head and neck.  Basic, basic, basic stuff, done on straight lines and fairly generous figures, and yet Tuck’s balance and willingness is so much better that I can’t see it ever getting old.  Not sure I’ll be able to fit in a lesson this month, between instructor’s schedule and mine, but I feel pretty good about my grasp on what we’re doing right now and I’d just as soon get it a little more dialed in before having another lesson to evaluate and reality-check our progress and maybe get a next assignment.  So that’s okay.

The part that I find funny, though, is that part where working sans stirrups has reentered my program and – you guys, I am so out of shape and so bad at this.  I start out alternating between sitting and posting -- I glance at the clock and pick time to stop that is enough minutes away to feel semi-respectable but let’s be honest, at this point it’s not very many minutes at all – and I am pretty sure that by the end I’m mostly alternating between cantering and bouncing instead.

But the combination of no-stirrup work and our new improved forward trot – instructor has expressly told me it’s okay at this point if the trot feels a little bit running – feels like we’re just zooming around at a million crazy miles an hour, counting on balance and sheer stubborn pride to keep me in the middle because my muscles sure are not up to the job, hands forward so as not to hang on Tuck's mouth for balance and core fatiguing enough that I am pretty much at the mercy of his good nature, steering- wise, and this is definitely the part of the program that feels less like playing DQ and more like non-stop flashbacks to being an eight-year-old up-down lesson kid.

It is super dignified.

(But I gotta say: I have missed my cheerful-suffering practice!)