July 3 Lesson

This was a "work on me" sort of lesson, so mostly was supposed to be done in two-point and the idea was to come in to one of the "jumps" on one lead, then go make a loop (trotting)  to go the other direction and come around at the other jump on the other lead. One of my big problems is about thinking ahead (without overthinking it and getting flustered) where we'll be over the jump and only then do I think "now where are we going?" when I should've already been thinking about that. So a couple times tonight I managed to actually think ahead and be on top of things so I'm happy with that. Kieran wasn't too thrilled since the jumps never changed so we tried to keep it interesting by doing it from different directions and stuff like that.

Pictures are all screencaps and I uploaded one of the videos Jessica took for me. :)

Just a screencap for now, more later. This is from my lesson yesterday.

More cantering courses

We had a really productive lesson yesterday. :) Here's also some video of  our last run through the 'course'.

Cantering Courses

Well, without any changes of direction. But you know, still. :) Basically, today was about cantering a nice even rhythm over all of the jumps and making nice turns and staying balanced. We also didn't have so much trouble today with using the right lead so...that was good. Anyway, screencaps and video!

Happy pony!

Not bad for a drafty, right?

"Yeah, I totally got this."

Lookit my pretty trot

And yeah, I know. My leg. Swings. A lot. I don't know where that came from. But I think I put the saddle too far forward and that didn't help. Thoughts?

Flying

Kieran was seriously full of beans today. I mean, as much as he ever gets full of beans...he totally was. Even got a little happybuck when I first asked him to canter while we were warming up. Of course, it was a bit cooler today than is typical for almost-June in Georgia so there's that factor, too.

Anyway, last week (well, Tuesday, it was raining on Sunday), Jessica set up the jump blocks so that to go over them all in one go, I'd have to make a backwards "S" shape. She had us trot over all of them, then trot over the first one and ask for the canter after a stride or two out so he'd be cantering (on the correct lead) over the last two. It was seriously hard work but Kieran did pretty well with it and I was happy with how the lesson went.

That's just background to talk about today, of course. :)

Today, the ring looked something like this:

The plain lines are just poles on the ground, the other ones were the jump blocks. The blocks started as just teeny crossrails but as the lesson went on they moved up so that the ones on the long side were "oxers" with poles in each cup when they lay on their sides (like this, except just one block high) and the one at X as a vertical on the highest block setting (so 2').

The was, when I started, that I came in from the right side over the jump at X while trotting and then was supposed to ask for the canter as we got to the jump, and direct him toward whichever pole on the ground I wanted to head for so that he had to pick up the correct lead over the jump. Jessica was like, "this might actually take most of the lesson for him to 'get' but it's really about you learning to plan ahead and know what you're asking for". Would you believe he got it perfect on the first try? So we did that with the poles from both directions and moved on to doing it over the jump blocks.

He very quickly after that started smacking the teeny crossrails with his feet. He wasn't interested. He thinks crossrails are boring. So that's when they got moved up to the "oxers" and for a while the X jump was a medium vertical before Jessica made it the 2' vertical.

We were able to do it come in from either one of the jumps in the corners and around to the one at X or from the one at X over to one of the jumps in the corners. Kieran was so game for this we even went around in big circles a couple of times or I'd go over the one at X then come around and do the whole long side.

As the lesson went on and we started to get tired though, he stopped picking up the correct lead over the X jump. I'd want to go right and he'd pick up the left lead and I think I've mentioned this before....once upon a time he was so unbalanced that when he got the wrong lead, it was easy to feel. Now? I'm still cantering along up there merrily thinking about what a nice canter he's got and Jessica's on the ground going, "CAN'T YOU FEEL HE'S ON THE WRONG LEAD? (but at least he's staying balanced through the turns....)". I suspect there are longe lessons in my future. But anyway....finally after trying a bunch of times and just not getting it right, I asked Jessica to get on him so I could see what he was doing.

Man. In the past I know you could kind of see him be like, "bwah? who the heck are you putting on me? this is weird..." when someone else got on Kieran but with Jessica...he really doesn't like her on his back (and she wasn't doing anything wrong...he just didn't Approve).  He went from, head down, ears out relaxed, doing whatever I asked to...head up, eye tense...and just generally saying "eff you, lady," whenever she asked him for something. Also, it was kind of hilarious how tiny she looks on him. She did, at least, manage to just get a right lead canter out of him so then we switched back and immediately he was like, "oh, this is the right person again. Cool."

So went back and this time was asking him to canter before the jump at X and then was going to continue cantering to the right for the pole in the bottom corner. Apparently he still picked up the left lead going in to the jump at X but when I was like, "Yo, dude, we're going right" over the jump, he did a change and landed on the correct lead and hopped right over the corner fence.

He totally got told how amazing he was and we ended there. :)

Huh

I don't know when it happened but somewhere in there Kieran got so balanced I can no longer feel when he's on the wrong lead.

This is good because. Hey...balanced!

Bad because now I have to learn how to be more cognizant of it.

Otherwise it's entirely possible we might canter a whole circle over cavaletti and it'll be a little awkward but it's only once we get done that someone tells me: ".....you were on the wrong lead the whole time!"

Luckily, that only happened once.

Breaks are good things, apparently

So it's been over a week since I last rode Kieran and I had a lesson today (we didn't have one last weekend, long story).

I was going into it this morning thinking, "hmm...maybe we could just go on a trail ride? Maybe I should call Jessica and tell her I think I'm getting sick and not to bother coming over?

You get the idea.

But I didn't do any of that. And I'm glad I didn't! Even warming up, Kieran was really ready to go and listening and he gave me two gorgeous canter transitions and nice, collected, uphill canters.

Today's lesson involved a canter grid of poles set something like so:

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Sort of like a bounce, one stride, one stride, bounce. The idea being to get Kieran figuring out how to negotiation things that aren't set nice even distances apart.

We started with them just trotting through on the ground. Then cantering through on the ground. Then slowly raising a few up as if they were cavaletti.

Oh yeah, and we did some nice trotting spiraling circles during the warmup and also when Jessica was re-arranging poles as needed we'd do some trotting around encouraging him to stretch out and that was nice as well.

Anyway, by the end of the lesson, it looked more like this:

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Basically a cavaletti at the top with a "bounce" to a low (like...a foot) crossrail and then two strides to another cavaletti.

He'd had some trouble previously, either between me not getting my timing right, him being lazy, or some combination of the two.

The last time through it was just about perfect. Jessica said she could tell I saw my "spots" just right, that I pushed him forward or half-halted at just the right times, and Kieran cantered over everything without knocking anything. Seriously beautiful. (no pictures, hah!)

Anyway, I was grinning ear to ear and we ended the lesson on that note.

Obviously, a bit of a riding vacation agreed with him! :)

LOOK UP DANGIT

Gosh. I admit, we've improved by LEAPS AND BOUNDS (here's us doing something similar a year and a half ago) but gosh, all I can see is me looking down the whole time. And I swear I'm going into it thinking, "look forward at the treeline!".

Anybody got any hints for how to improve that?

Photos!

Basically, this is a picspam. :)






This one was a mistake...we came in severely catty-corner. He's going over the block itself. This was right after the, "you can make a mistake and he can figure it out if you tell him he can" conversation. *facepalm*










I was so impressed with his form when I was first looking at this picture it took me a few minutes to realize this was the one where he knocked the pole down. I think this was right after they'd raised it and so he jumped well but not quite high enough.


Good lord, I need to LOOK UP.

Jumping Courses

Okay, this is not at all to scale, I just whipped it together to give you an idea of what the layout looked like for my lesson today. Hopefully, there will be pictures later but I have to wait and see what Jessica's boyfriend got (he was playing ground crew for us today because she was riding one of the horses she has in for training...that was extra training for Kieran too since he had to listen to me and not pay too much attention to drifting over to where the other horse was).

Anyway, we started out by warming up with a nice walk, then doing the trotting circles in the corners and cantering down the long sides thing we did last week. Despite the temperature having dropped about 20 degrees overnight and it being really windy, Kieran was really relaxed in the warmup and while forward and "there" not...too forward. :)

Then Jessica had us canter both directions over the poles (that's what the thinner lines are). One set was about 3 strides apart, one was about 4 strides apart. The idea was just to get him into a nice canter, canter over the first set, then keep going over the next set and so on. A lot of today was "we've spent a lot of time just getting him over single things and then stopping to talk about it and then doing it again, so now you have to push him forward after a single "thing" and keep going so we can connect it all together".

Then she had the jumps set up. The two angled ones and the one in the middle on the bottom were all using my jump blocks and were just single poles to make verticals. The angled ones stayed at 18" the whole time (and now that I'm looking at it I realize I angled them the wrong direction, pretend they're angled with the outside sides pointed toward the upper corners, not the bottom corners). The vertical on the bottom started at 18" but later we shifted the blocks around so they were at the 2' level. The jump in the middle was made using a pair of jump standards Jessica brought and started out at 2' and near the end of the lesson she had it bumped up two holes to 2'6".

Anyway, a lot of the idea was just to go straight, keep moving forward, and for me to plan out what I wanted to do as we go along. She didn't tell me a particular path to take, she wanted me to decide and make good choices. It was actually really difficult because I've been taking lessons for so long that I've gotten used to letting the instructor tell me what to do and where to go when they're there.

So we had a few false starts, though Kieran of course was pretty good, he never refused a thing. Though like, after we knocked over the same jump (the vertical at the bottom) several times Jessica asked, "okay, so what are you doing that that jump isn't working for you? Maybe you need to do something else." So we talked about it and I changed up what I was doing (went around and did one of the lower jumps first, then came back around for that guy) and it worked.

By the end of the lesson we were able to do the whole "course" without knocking anything over and with me choosing where to go and how we'd get there. Kieran stayed game the entire time. I'm actually really surprised how well he's taking to do this but he seems to enjoy it. One of the other little exercises Jessica had me do with him in the middle of the lesson was to trot in to whichever jump I wanted and get him to canter out and then just sort of get up out of the saddle and allow him to keep going as much as he wanted as a reward. Basically we made jumping into a game today instead of just drilling over and over and he really seemed to take to it.

One of the other things Jessica said today is that I think we need more space to get set up and ready than we actually do. Or well, than Kieran actually does...it's still stuck in my head. So we were coming into one jump but we were a little catty-corner and I stopped and Jessica was like, "why'd you stop? You were totally there!" and I was like, "but it wasn't perfect! we didn't have enough room!" (and that was while that jump was still one of the 18" ones) and she was like..."Kieran is clever enough to figure some of this out on his own even if you don't set him up absolutely perfectly as long as you're up there telling him he can do it, he'll respond okay, Mom." And you know what? She's right. He will. It's actually a little scary that he's so willing. I mean...it's a lot of responsibility up there!

Anyway, it made for a good lesson, even if it wasn't as structured as they usually are. I think it worked for Kieran too. It made for a nice change of pace. :)