start with the poles

I had my second lesson of the year yesterday, roughly four months after the last one.

I haven’t taken more than two lessons in a year since 2018, and 2018 barely counts seeing as I parted ways with my previous trainer before the end of February that year and didn’t ride again for eight months (and a bit, and there were no more lessons at that point). 2022 might be the year that I manage at least three.

The lesson yesterday was my third lesson in three years, my third time back with my eventing trainer since I was thirteen years old, my first time riding at her farm (she’s only about ten minutes down the road from us, so it’s an easy haul), my first jumping lesson with her in thirteen years, Cooper’s first jumping lesson ever. I didn’t know what was going to happen, walking into it—she had only seen him twice before, once when he was only a three-year-old and we only did walk/trot, and we were having a hard time cantering when she last saw us back in March—but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have at least a little bit of an inkling.

See, here’s the thing: I’m not riding well right now. I haven’t been for a while, and I told her that as we were doing our walk warmup. I told her that my confidence is shot, that I was overfaced in my last training situation to the point where I don’t trust things anymore, that I’m fairly sure a lot of our issues are less an issue with him and much more an issue with me, that while my long-term goal is to be confidently running Training level with him one day (if not at a higher level, but I didn’t buy him with the intention of him being an upper-level prospect, so if one or both of us can’t get further than that for physical or confidence reasons, so be it), my short-term goal is to just… rediscover that confidence that I used to have, back when I was that middle school student that she taught when she was barely older than I am now.

(I’m a lot of things, but never let it be said that I’m not at least moderately self-aware.)

I almost wrote up a post about those feelings back in March after the last time we saw her, but instead I ended up getting angry, to the point where I was just too pissed off to write up anything coherent (although, who knows how coherent this is going to be). I ended up getting angry because I have all of these bad habits now (turning my toes out being the primary one that we were dealing with during that lesson) that should never have had an opportunity to develop, that I never had as a kid, that reared their ugly head because I wasn’t called out on them until my trainer came back into my life, and having her around again made me aware of all those holes. I ended up getting angry because I realized that, by and large, instead of developing as a rider over the four or so years before I moved to my current barn, I was paying a metric fuckton of money to stay stagnant, if not get worse.

(For weeks after that last lesson (and even now, at the right moments), I could hear my trainer’s voice in my head: “Turn those toes in! Put that ankle bone on! Push his ribcage out!” In a shocking turn of events, I’m no longer turning my toes out as badly as I was prior to March. It’s definitely still happening a little bit, but I suddenly have a semi-functional lower leg again. Funny how that works.)

I told her what I was feeling (though not that I was extremely pissed off about certain things, lol), and then she did to me exactly what she did when I was a kid, but I didn’t realize it until the very end: she started me with the poles.

She had me warm up, walk-trot-canter, and then she dropped one of the verticals down to a set of four trot poles and sent me through them. Where my last couple of lessons were about getting him to move out and be in front of my leg, in this one I was told to not allow him to trot faster than he could think. We solved the forward problem already. This was about getting him to relax into the bridle and the contact, to step up under himself and think about where his feet were, to not let him race around like a giraffe and instead make him focus on what was in front of him so that he had enough time to actually make decisions.

He’s tight through his back—he definitely needs another chiro visit because he keeps doing Things™ to himself by being an idiot in the field because Baby Horse Play Time, plus I’m dealing with the fact that his back has changed a ton so my saddle doesn’t fit as well as it used to (not that it was ever perfect, but we need to revisit our half-pad/shim situation until I can have it properly fitted to him now that he’s done growing up), and he’s still guarding his hind end even though his stifles are a million times better than they were even last year—and that meant that, even though he’s gigantic (pictures are deceiving because I am also Very Tall) and should have no trouble with four-foot spacing, we ended up with three feet between the poles.

In a lot of ways, that’s also my fault. We were doing a lot of poles over the winter, and he really was working over them well, but I dropped the ball on that once we started riding outside regularly a couple of months ago, and we’re now paying the price for that (and it’s part of my homework, but more on that later).

Once we were getting through the poles comfortably, she popped the center two up to a small crossrail and moved the other poles out for striding, and had me trot him through it. He didn’t think much of it—again, he’s huge, he can trot over a two-foot vertical without even trying—but he got a lot of praise every time he went through it quietly, every time he listened to my half-halts coming in and didn’t charge the fence, and she just kept popping the sides of the crossrail up until, all of a sudden, he actually had to try a little bit.

That first real effort was a little bit messy, but it woke him up, and then he just kept powering through it—not rushing, not being silly, just doing what he needed to do—and it stopped being about him and started being about me. Soften my wrists. Lower my hands. Sink into my heels. Don’t chase him with my seat or my shoulder. Let him take me to the fence, give him his head, stay out of his way. Sit up afterward and put the canter together before I let him trot because who knows if there’s another fence to deal with (well, we know, but y’know, coursing in general).

Once we were going through the crossrail comfortably, she added a vertical to the mix and had me doing a figure-eight. The vertical was only about 2′ high to start with (also with a striding pole, see in the background of the photo right above this paragraph), and again, it was about me. Don’t chase him. Half-halt, keep his nose straight, support him, let him figure it out, put it together on the backside before the downward transition. Cooper being Cooper, he went right over after a minor bit of baby wiggling (and then threw in one of his happy bucks on the backside, which got a laugh out of both of us—as my trainer said, he’s just saying “Look, Mom! I did it!”), and then we started putting the figure-eight together.

We put it together, and then she started raising the vertical too. One hole, then another. I didn’t even think about the height. It registered, but not really. Even when I was a kid, I never doubted it when she raised fences on me. If she was raising them, it was because she knew I’d get over them, so I never asked questions. I never counted holes until after my lesson (if I even counted them at all—to this day I still don’t know what the highest fence I jumped with her was. All I know is I was definitely coursing 2’9″). I just went, because I trusted her.

I haven’t jumped over 2’3″ intentionally in over four years. I’ve definitely jumped higher than that because I’ve been riding baby horses who like to launch themselves over things, but I haven’t set fences higher than that on my own (and really, I haven’t set fences higher than 2′). It’s not a question of my horse’s athletic ability, whether we’re talking about Cooper or those months I spent on Ice (still love that little pocket rocket). It’s a question of my own confidence in myself, in what I can look at without being terrified, in what doesn’t make the part of me that was psychologically overfaced for years want to turn around and run screaming.

I jumped 2’6″ yesterday, and for the first time in years, I didn’t even think about it.

(Also, holy shit does Cooper have a round jump when he’s trying? He just about popped me out of the tack over that vertical the first couple of times after she raised it? I don’t think I’ve ever ridden a bascule like that up until this point? My whole life has been a string of flat jumpers?)

We threw a few more fences in there (a two-stride line and a vertical featuring Cooper’s first real experience with flower boxes—sure enough, he jumped them with his head between his knees the first time so that he could stare down at them as he was going over, which I told my trainer was my bet for how that experience was going to go before our first approach, 10/10 for me knowing my horse), and by the end, we had it figured out. Our canter in between wasn’t perfect, but I was able to put him together enough that our downward transitions were balanced, that we didn’t collapse into the trot, that we didn’t run into it when we picked the canter back up either.

I had a lot to think about by the end, and we talked about a lot by that point too.

My trainer told me that even in the four months since she last saw us, Cooper has matured a ton, that he looks like an adult now, that she can tell he’s getting stronger even if he’s not where we want him to be yet. She told me that sure, he still has some stifle weakness, but he’s at the point now where we just have to keep working, to build it up, to get him to loosen up over his back and really push from the hind end. She told me to just keep working on the canter, to not get out of the saddle except over jumps, that I shouldn’t get off of his back until we have adjustability when I’m sitting, to not treat him like a three-year-old because he isn’t one anymore and I’m not going to break him by asking him to work a little bit harder.

She also told me that she can see that I’m tense. She told me that I just need to take a breath. She told me that she can see the moments where I’m unsure and he’s asking questions and I’m not there to give him the answer that he needs. She also told me that it’s something we can fix, it’ll just take some time and I just have to keep working on it (she knows better than anyone what I used to be like since she’s the one who got me there, and we had moments yesterday. They were fleeting, but they were there, and now I just have to keep chasing them until they’re a constant).

She told me that she can see my seat is still there (especially since I stuck his couple happy bucks without any trouble and didn’t go flying when we had a sticky distance and I lost a stirrup), that that’s not a problem, that I just need to find it in the canter again because it clearly hasn’t actually gone anywhere, I’m just tense as all hell (my words, not hers, lol). She told me that he’s got a great jump on him and an even better brain, that he’s a smart horse and a forgiving one and that I should never let him get away from me because you don’t find a horse like him every day. I wasn’t planning on it (I bought him with the idea that he’ll stay with me for the rest of his life), but all I wanted when I bought him (aside from him not being a literal psychopath) was for her to approve of him, and it means the world to me that she does (seriously, I could and will cry, her liking him enough to tell me that I should never get rid of him is a huge deal in my book).

She also told me that I need to remember how to trust myself, and how to trust the honesty that I’m sitting on. She told me to do something that she once told me to do almost thirteen years ago, after I had a very scary (but thankfully not physically damaging) fall while jumping on my own that set my confidence back to zero: start with the poles. Set a course of poles and trot them. Trot them until he’s bored and I’m bored. Canter them until we’re both falling asleep, then make them crossrails. Trot those until they’re old news, then canter them. Make them a little bigger. Trot. Canter. Make some little verticals. Trot and canter those. Turn the whole thing into an absolute snoozefest, then pop them up a hole or two. Keep going until I don’t doubt myself or what’s underneath me.

That’s exactly what she did to me yesterday.

When I was thirteen, I fixed my confidence issues in an afternoon by doing that. It’s not going to happen that quickly here. Yesterday was not a cure-all for everything that I have running through my mind when I get in the saddle now, because I’m not fixing one bad day, I’m fixing hundreds of them. Yesterday did, however, remind me that I know how to ride, somewhere deep down in there. It reminded me that all of those things that she taught me thirteen and fourteen and fifteen years ago are still there, buried under a few years of bullshit and nerves, so I’m not starting from nothing so much as meticulously uncovering a whole treasure trove. It reminded me that I’ve owned this horse for over three years now and I haven’t totally fucked him up (partly because he’s a saint, partly because it turns out that I’m not a complete idiot), and we’re getting professional help (lol) early enough to prevent me from doing that in the future.

(I’m also under instructions to just do a ton of trot poles and jump tall crossrails “50,000 times” on my own, so. there’s that too.)

We’re trying to get a lesson on the schedule for August (at some point. Hopefully before the mini trial that I just entered us in this morning so I can actually have someone yell at me while I school my dressage test) (I say yell at me but she never yells, she can just project her voice to an insane degree), and she also invited me and my barn owner to tag along at the beginning of the month when she hauls out to take some of the baby horses cross-country schooling at a venue in Ohio. We aren’t at the point of weekly lessons yet (too hard to schedule being on separate properties), but I’m officially on her waitlist for an open stall (my barn owner knows this, this is not a surprise to her, I will still be engaging in all the joint shenanigans even when I do move because, again, my trainer is ten minutes down the road and it will be very easy to come pick me up) and once that transition is able to happen, we’ll be in a real program.

I’ve also said it on here before (I think, I haven’t checked, it might’ve been in a draft post that never went up), but: I love my trainer. She’s the fucking best. She was already fantastic when I was just a kid riding with her, but she’s only gotten better over the last decade-plus, to the point where my dad, who watched her coach me on a weekly basis for the better part of three years and already knew she was amazing, spent half the drive home yesterday talking about how impressed he is with how much she knows and how good she is at teaching it. She’s never made me feel discouraged or upset, even when she’s pointing out all the things that I’m doing wrong. Everything comes with a discussion of how we can fix it, so I always leave feeling empowered rather than beaten down. All I wanted for years was to be able to ride with her again (literally used to have breakdowns about how much I missed her when I was a teenager because that’s normal, lol), and to be able to do it on my little gigantic wonder horse is an absolute dream.

All this to say, I suppose, that good trainers are priceless, that you can have twelve years of riding experience with five years of really solid coaching at the beginning (I say I’ve been riding for seventeen, but it’s really twelve since there’s about five years of lost time in there due to various breaks) and still ride like an absolute idiot sometimes, that you should never waste your time or your money on trainers who make you feel discouraged and less than (seriously, don’t do it, it’s not worth it) because there are trainers out there who will do the exact opposite, and that I had a really, really fucking good birthday yesterday and I can’t wait for my next lesson. There were some rough years in there, and I really didn’t deserve them, but: riding is fun again, I somehow managed to find myself the absolute best horse that I probably ever could for $1,500 (or ten times that), I have my trainer back, and I’m finally sure that I’m on the road to exactly where I need to be. It feels more than good to feel that way.