Coops and I had what I can only describe as an eventful weekend.
We paid another visit to my favorite mini trial this weekend (as originally discussed in this post), which was back to its normal weekend in mid/end of August after a couple of years in September due to the ‘rona moving scheduling around, but the fun doesn’t begin there.
No, the fun begins at my trainer’s on Friday afternoon with a somewhat last-minute lesson. My barn owner had to drive over to pick up some paperwork from my trainer (we’re just going to call her M for the rest of this post, I don’t feel like typing “my trainer” over and over again) for something entirely unrelated, and had the excellent idea to see if M could fit us both in for lessons (you know, since she was going to have to drive over there one way or the other, so might as well bring the horses along, and I already had taken the day off for mini trial prep reasons). Thankfully M was around this weekend and had the flexibility to schedule the lessons, so we hauled Cooper and Ice over there for another round of getting our butts kicked.
Things started out well—Cooper was much more relaxed much sooner than he was when we were over there last month, and our canter work was a thousand times improved from what we had last time M saw us, because apparently all my brain needed was for her to remind me that I know how to ride for me to start acting like it—and once we were warmed up, we started working on trot/canter and canter/trot transitions. I’m not perfect at it yet, but over the last month or so I’ve gotten a lot better at reading his cues and correcting his body before he can swap leads without having to think about it too much, so we were able to hold things a lot better, but downward transitions are still a challenge, so we were focusing a lot on those and getting him to step into them properly.
M then set up a teeny tiny crossrail with the intention of having us switch off trotting and cantering into it on a large circle, with transitions in and out of both gaits on the rest of the circle. He went over it fine the first couple of times, then got one tight distance, landed, stuck his head between his legs, and bucked me off. Needless to say, that was not how I was expecting that day to go (and he’s officially killed my one fall every four years average that I’ve had since I was sixteen, although I suppose I should still be proud that he’s only gotten me off twice in the (almost) three and a half years that I’ve owned him). I landed on my right hip and the scariest part of the whole thing was honestly having the wind knocked out of me entirely—I was pretty much hyperventilating for about a minute while I tried to catch my breath, which felt absolutely horrible (though I was able to get myself into the recovery position, which helped), but once my breathing calmed down I was able to roll myself onto my back and do the usual movement of all limbs to make sure everything felt okay.
I parked myself on the mounting block to take a breather while M hopped on Cooper—that’s only the third person other than me to sit on him since I bought him—and she just worked him around for a few minutes while I made sure I felt okay to get back on. Once I said I was good, I hopped back on and we did a bit of easy trot work (just to make sure that I wasn’t too stiff to keep going) before we went back into doing transitions and popping over the crossrail (though we only trotted in and essentially treated it like a raised pole at that point). Downward transitions were hard purely because I could feel every seated stride in the top of my pelvis (iliac crest area, for the anatomically-inclined who may read this), but we ended on a good note overall, though I was sort of hobbling my way through untacking and loading everything back onto the trailer, purely because the entire right side of my body seized up when I hit the ground.
(Is it weird that it’s a comfort to me that my trainer told me there was absolutely no way that I could’ve saved myself from that fall even if I hadn’t been a little bit off-balance from the tight distance? Because that made me feel better, lol. She told me to stick to my plans for the weekend and just trot every fence unless I felt like I couldn’t ride, so that was what I went with.)
I thought about not telling my parents what had happened when I got home, because I knew how they would react, but given that I couldn’t walk normally there wasn’t really any avoiding it. Sure enough, I had them ask if I was sure I was okay and if I was sure I should ride over the weekend, but I know myself and my body well enough to know that I was fine, so I took 600mg of ibuprofen, spent a long time in a hot shower (I am sadly too tall for our bathtub these days, which was my go-to method as a child for body aches after falls), and then laid on top of a heating pad in my bed until I passed out around 10:00 (which is quite early for me, but was much needed after how thrown off my sleep schedule has been for the last couple of weeks).
As expected, I was pretty sore when I got up, but things felt a bit looser, and once I took some ibuprofen and walked around a bit, I was confident that riding wouldn’t be an issue, so I packed up what I still needed for the day and headed out to the barn to get the last few things I needed before we hauled the boys over to the venue.
As it was last year, we had Saturday to school cross country. I knew pretty much everything on our course would be something we’d jumped last year, since we were only entered in Starter and that division shares the same XC course with Very Green at the venue in question, so I wasn’t particularly worried about him being nervous about the fences—I was more concerned about not getting popped out of the tack again, especially because he tends to be extra keyed-up when we go off-property.
Sure enough, he was keyed up, but not about the jumping. No, he was keyed up about the group of small children on ponies in front of us who kept stopping so that every one of them could go over each fence, which forced him to practice his patience and wait his turn so that we didn’t run them over. He didn’t bat an eye at a single one of the fences (again, not a surprise because the course was literally just the reverse of the exact same course that we did last year for our Very Green debut) and we had a very good schooling aside from the impatience about the kiddos.
Once we were done schooling, I hung around to wipe down all my tack and walk my show jumping course, which wasn’t especially complicated, but due to my visual memory issues courtesy of my concussion, I wanted to make sure I walked it in advance so that I could walk it again in the morning if I felt like I needed to—just looking at the course map wasn’t going to cut it (I am generally very for walking all courses where possible, but over a max 2′ course it’s not exactly necessary unless you have my brain and aren’t in a division with ten other people that you can watch go first). It’s always easier to remember courses at this venue, though, because most of the jumps are pretty distinct, so I can give them nicknames that are more descriptive than “the white to the natural.”
(Coops managed to escape his stall when I turned my back for five seconds to fill up his water before I left, but because he is who he is, he was right outside grazing when I turned back around with his Back On Track pad (borrowed from my barn owner) right where I left it on him, and I was able to hook my arm around his neck and steer him right back into his stall without any issues. He remains a Houdini.)
Sunday morning brought with it Anxiety™, though I suppose I should be thankful that it wasn’t the level of anxiety that I used to experience before I would play at my piano recitals as a kid—it wasn’t like I was too nauseous to eat or anything, just… a little tense. The kids were kind enough to feed and hay Cooper and muck his stall out for me before I even got there, so I was able to focus on running through my dressage test in my head and getting him ready, though I still ended up being fifteen minutes behind on when I wanted to get on, because of course I was.
We warmed up and he was a very looky child, but not the worst, and we didn’t have the time that I had originally been planning on to just let him walk around and chill out (poor execution, self), so we just rode on over to the dressage rings and went right in since they were ready for me five minutes early.
It was… not a great test. He was counter-bent for half of it (again, looky and not at all interested in focusing on me and what we were doing), and I had to fight him for every inch of every circle and corner, which is hard enough to do when I’m not only one day out from a pretty hard fall, plus he threw in a nice squeal going into our left lead canter (barn owner and co. tell me it looked like he might have slipped a little on the grass going into the transition, so fair enough) and had zero desire to allow us to do a true 20-meter circle on the right lead as opposed to some egg-shaped… whatever that was. With that being said, though, our execution on things was honestly decent in that we were where we needed to be when we needed to be there, we held both leads, and I have finally conquered my nemesis in the form of the free walk—I was always terrible at it as a kid, but it was our highest-scored movement in the whole test, so that’s cool.
(Things were also complicated by the fact that a bug flew into my eye at the end of the first full long side and I spent the entire test fighting the urge to rub my eye/half-unable to see, so that added an extra level of tension to my riding, love that for me.)
It was our last ride in my dressage saddle, also, because I concluded last week that I hate what it does to my leg—the blocks hit me wrong (because I am all leg and my femur is eight miles long) so my knee turns into a pivot point and I have to fight to keep my leg at the girth/underneath me, and the blocks are sewn on as opposed to velcro, so I can’t move them—so I’m retiring it (read: either selling it to my barn owner/someone else or trading it in for credit on a saddle at our local tack store) and sticking to my jump saddle until I find a new one (which I intend to do before next show season).
I honestly can’t remember if I got my dressage score before I went in for show jumping—oops. I try not to look at them until the end because I truly don’t like knowing—as I said to the lesson kids when they asked why, I either stress out because I’m at the bottom of the pack and get annoyed about not riding a better test, or I stress out because I’m near the top and I don’t want to mess it up with poor riding in the other phases. I’d like to think that at some point I’ll get to a place where I’m confident enough with my dressage scores to want to know what they are, but this weekend was not one of those cases, since I was fairly convinced my test was terrible.
He was feeling very Boing-y going into show jumping (which I’m pretty sure had more to do with all the chaos around us than anything else), but we honestly had the best jumping round I’ve had on him once we went into the ring… up until the last fence. I’ve determined that four/five strides are my enemy because they’re long enough related distances that he can get wiggly, but not long enough for me to have time to really correct it when he’s moving forward (like he was on Sunday), so we had a lovely run-out coming into our final fence. Love that. In his defense, there was no way he was getting over the jump with how wiggly he was, and he went right over it when we circled back around and came in straight, but we could’ve been totally clear if it wasn’t for that. It’s a baby horse mistake, though, and we really haven’t done much cantering into jumps, so I know we’ll be able to fix it as we keep working and make straightness into our norm.
All things considered, I was pretty happy going into cross country, because it’s our best phase and he was feeling better overall than he did last year, but then—but then—we nearly pancaked a jump judge who wasn’t paying attention (presumably they were only working the first half of the day when Training/Novice/BN went and used a field section that we didn’t use in our course).
I accidentally left my helmet cam on my helmet, which is at the barn, so I’ll have to get it tomorrow to review the footage of the moment, but after we went over the tiny coop box thing in the photo above, we had a right-handed turn to a jump made out of hay bales in the fence line. We landed and made our turn, and I realized that a jump judge carrying their chair was walking right toward the fence that we were supposed to be jumping. I obviously did what any rider would do and yelled “HAY BALES!” and the jump judge stopped directly in front of the fence that I was going toward, so then I got to yell “BEHIND YOU!” and they (thankfully) hurried out of the way. Thankfully Cooper is also used to me engaging in absolute nonsense on his back, so he didn’t react to me screaming, but yeesh. Not exactly what I was hoping to expose my green horse to on his second time out competing in cross country.
He was a bit skeptical about the jump judges (who were where they were supposed to be, ha) coming into jump number three, but I just closed my leg and told him to go, and we trucked around the rest of our course.
I wasn’t really trying to make the time (our motto is still “safe and positive”, plus no time faults are awarded at the level we were in at the venue we were at for being too slow—too fast is a different story), so we trotted into almost every fence, but I let him canter some of the straightaways between fences, and we ended up fourteen seconds over our optimum time. Had we cantered just a bit more and I had taken the short route between two of the fences, we definitely would’ve been inside it, but between my trainer’s instructions to trot in to everything and the fact that it rained buckets about two hours before our ride time, I didn’t want to rush anything. I know we have a gas pedal already, so I’ll take knowing that we have brakes too.
I let him canter the last two fences, and that was it—we were home clear, though not inside the time, but at this stage, who really cares, right?
He got a nice, slow walk back to the barn, then a wipe down with some liquid liniment and water, and then I finally went and checked our dressage score (now I remember that it wasn’t posted before we went in for show jumping).
To my surprise, we were in second after dressage. With the show jumping faults, I figured we’d probably end up moving down a place or two, but being in second after dressage with more than two people in the division? Unheard of. To be fair, there were only five people in the division to start with, but still: second! Second after dressage!
(On the incredibly stellar score of 37.3, lol. My only goal was sub-40 since I knew any canter work would be a challenge, so we succeeded with that, and we even had a better score than we did last year with a tougher judge—per the comments, we’re a “well-matched pair,” Coops just needs to relax.)
It took close to two hours for show jumping and cross country scores to come in, so I spent that time watching one of the lesson students who was also competing (her first mini trial, I love bringing The Children™ to the dark side even if it’s only part-time), and our scores ended up coming in at the same time (I was in Starter Open, she was in the junior section of Starter Rider).
To my surprise… we were still in second.
The person in third place after dressage had scratched (presumably due to the torrential downpour between dressage and show jumping, but the footing was honestly decent after a couple of hours of sunshine to dry out the worst of it), and the person who had been in fourth had either a rail or a refusal in show jumping, so that maintained the gap between us, and even if time faults had been added, I was three seconds faster on cross country. Like the title of this post says, we sucked (I’m not going to pretend 37.3 in dressage and a run-out in show jumping is good), but we sucked less than (almost) everyone else, hahaha.
Cooper’s had a busy summer, and it certainly hasn’t been perfect, but I am so, so proud of him. I wasn’t aiming for 100% grownup this year, just going out and trying things with a slightly more serious attitude than we did last year, and he certainly did that and absolutely exceeded expectations in the process. I expect zero ribbons out of him at this stage in the game, but he’s already steadily building his own ribbon wall and it’s only going to get better from here (if you ask me, anyway). I need to hurry up and buy a house so that I have enough room to display them properly.
He’s getting some much-deserved time off this week (I might hop on and putz around bareback toward the end of the week, but mostly I just intend to spoil him with attention), and then we’ll keep it low-key over the next month or so because there are a few things to figure out with him (I’m being cryptic on purpose, I’ll explain later) before we hopefully come back for a local jumper schooling show close to Halloween (it involves costumes and I need to start brainstorming what ours will be because I do not half-ass those things), and then maybe even possibly a trip to WEC Ohio toward the end of the year to do some schooling jumpers there (who am I, possible voluntarily going to WEC when I would not have been caught dead doing that during my stint in the hunter world).
I’m hoping we’ll get some more lessons in before the end of the year, since apparently seeing my trainer even just once a month works wonders for my riding abilities, and I’m going to try to find a new dressage saddle before Kentucky next year so that I don’t come home from my five-star trip with another absurdly expensive saddle and so that we can maybe try to work on our fancy horse dancing skills before the 2023 event season gets started. My goals for next year are to a) do more than one mini trial next season, b) move up to Beginner Novice by the end of the summer, and c) get a sub-35 dressage score. I realize most people are aiming for sub-30 scores, but I’m trying to keep my expectations reasonable til I’m in a position to have my trainer yelling at me weekly.
In the meantime, though, Cooper gets to chill out and be told what a wonderful boy he is, and I get to ask the rainbow that is the right side of my body to please go away sooner rather than later. The few scrapes that I did get are very itchy and I’m not enjoying it. However, in what I’m sure will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone, I am deeply enjoying my continued journey back into the eventing world, and I’m going to be delighted by this weekend (Friday’s fall and all) for a long time.
Until next time, friends x
Spymaster Equestrian 