(bi?)weekly wanderings, part ii

“He’s going to be okay.”

The thing about knowing someone from the age of ten is that, even when you haven’t consistently seen each other in over a decade, you tend to know each other’s tells pretty well. The thing about knowing each other’s tells is that it makes it a lot easier to say the right things.

Last night my trainer kept saying the right things.

I’ve articulated a lot to her in the last couple of weeks about the experiences that I’ve had between the last time she taught me consistently and now, but there’s a lot that I also haven’t articulated to her—how little I trust myself, how much I feel I’ve lost in that period of time, how sometimes I feel like I’m not good enough for the horse that I’m sitting on. The fact that the last (almost) two weeks since we moved barns haven’t been the smoothest hasn’t helped with that.

Cooper lost a shoe his first full day there, which was also his first day of turnout, because he’s out with a coming three-year-old, a coming four-year-old, and their nineteen-year-old babysitter. They’re apparently getting along “like peas and carrots,” to borrow my trainer’s description, which also translates to having so much fun that he removed his front right shoe immediately. He would’ve gotten it put back on the day after, but the farrier got sick overnight and couldn’t make it out (not his fault and I absolutely do not blame him, those things happen), so Cooper didn’t get his shoe back on until this past Monday (fortunately I’ve got Easyboots after another debacle with his shoes in September, so he did still get to go outside), which meant that I couldn’t ride him in my first lesson last week.

Instead I borrowed the aforementioned coming four-year-old from my trainer, who is very cute and also an extreme push ride to a degree that I genuinely have not ridden in… well, over ten years. Pair that with the fact that I really am out of shape, especially where riding is concerned, and I just about died during that lesson despite the fact that we only did walk-trot (only half-exaggerating, I really should’ve used my inhaler beforehand and it took me most of the night after I got home to catch my breath). It wasn’t a bad lesson by any stretch of the imagination, but it didn’t leave me feeling very good either.

I wasn’t feeling all that spectacular coming into my lesson on Monday, despite the fact that Cooper had had his shoe put back on that morning so I could actually ride him, and that wasn’t helped by the fact that I could immediately tell that he was Not Quite Right when we picked up the trot. My trainer watched him go for a couple of laps and told me that the farrier had said he was in the wrong size shoe for his feet (too small) and something was probably pinching because it had been about three and a half weeks since he was last shod. We decided to try to do a bit and see how he felt, with the understanding that if he was very clearly still uncomfortable, we’d call it quits for the evening or just do a bit of walk work (I’ve said it before but will repeat it now: my trainer was a vet tech for years before she started teaching and riding full-time—if she felt we needed to stop, she would tell me).

Thankfully, he started to move better after a few minutes (“thankfully” because he was feeling more comfortable, not because I was intent on having our lesson—I don’t enjoy it at all when he isn’t feeling his best and I worry about him a lot), so we decided to keep going.

We spent the first five minutes or so after that with my trainer just observing, because she hadn’t seen us since November and wanted to see how he was doing, and we went from there. She pointed out that, in spite of all of the vet-assigned stretches that we do, Cooper is pretty stiff through his neck and shoulders, so that was what we were focused on changing. We started on a fairly large circle where she asked me to overbend him for a few strides, then let him return to regular bend, overbend, regular bend, repeat however many times, then essentially do a figure eight to do the same thing the other direction.

He was pretty resistant at the beginning, but he started to soften when we added spiraling in and out to the circles (still asking for overbending periodically). We’ve done that exercise with him before and it did the same thing then, so not a huge surprise, but then we started doing what my trainer likes to refer to as “obnoxiously tiny circles” here and there, where we weren’t even overbending so much as just riding a six- to eight-meter circle where he really had to bend around my leg and step under himself. We kept changing directions on that as well so that he had to keep changing the bend, and once he was giving there, we added in some canter.

Canter work is legitimately my nemesis. I think we know that at this point. He’s weak and I’m crooked and I’ve been letting him get away with things that I shouldn’t have. I do subscribe to the idea that everything we do with horses is either training or untraining them, and I’ve honestly been untraining the canter a lot recently. I asked my trainer for two lessons a week for the next month or two in large part so that I can get the canter under control enough that I can ride it on my own without messing it up further. Aside from our lead swapping issues when we’re just going around (though they have been better since his SI injections), we also have an unfortunate lead swapping issue where he swaps in the back when I ask him for a downward transition so that he doesn’t have to step under with his inside hind.

Our canter work on Monday focused on that latter issue a lot. My trainer had me overbend his front end into the downward transition while at the same time forcing his hind end out so that he had to step under with his inside hind and couldn’t swap, and then we would immediately go into one of those obnoxiously tiny circles as soon as we trotted. In essence, I was riding my downward transitions off the inside aids (though obviously supporting enough on the outside that he couldn’t pop a shoulder and blow through my aids that way).

At first we were having a really hard time with it, which is hardly surprising because I’ve been (wrongly) letting him get away with swapping in the back, but after the first few times, he started to get it and actually step under and keep the lead through the transition. I had to really exaggerate my aids for it, which I don’t love doing, but as my trainer reminds me, he’s got a double-jointed D-ring snaffle in his mouth so I’m hardly going to kill him if I put a little bit of pressure on the reins (fun fact about me: I’ve had the same bad habit since I was ten years old, which is that my hands are always too soft. Most people get yelled at to not death-grip. I get yelled at for never closing my fingers enough).

At the end of the lesson, after doing a bit of stretchy trot, we talked about both his feet and the rest of him. She put a call in to the farrier to have his left front (with the pinching) looked at/the shoe changed to make him more comfortable, and we agreed that it would be a good idea to get farrier films in addition to back and possibly stifle x-rays the next time the performance vet is out at the end of February, just to have a baseline and know what we’re working with. As she put it, it’s an investment up front, but it should save me money in the long run because we’ll be able to structure his training program for what his body needs and also keep him as comfortable as possible, all of which I’m a fan of.

She also gave me a goal and a challenge. The goal is that, in the next thirty-five to forty days, we should develop the ability to do long and low work correctly, because that’s what he really needs for his topline. The challenge is to get a dressage score in the 20s at whatever mini trial/horse trial we go to first this year (which will not be the one she was originally thinking of, because my cousin is getting married that weekend). Bearing in mind that our score on our test back in August was 37.5, this is asking a lot, but we’ll do our best.

I rode “alone” (read: in the ring while someone else was having a lesson, so not having my every move observed) on Tuesday, and it was just… I struggled. Part of it was that I didn’t want to ask for too much from him because he hadn’t had his shoe dealt with yet (although he did feel okay), but part of it was that my body didn’t want to cooperate for some reason, and when my body doesn’t cooperate, his certainly won’t. I was feeling pretty crappy about it at the end, but I didn’t say anything to my trainer on the subject because I knew we would have a lesson on Thursday anyway.

He got his shoe fixed yesterday morning and then we had our lesson in the evening. The shoe alone made a huge difference—my trainer couldn’t even tell which leg had been off when we started trotting—and he was already feeling a lot more flexible through his neck, despite the fact that he’d been in all day due to the weather (it’s a rare occasion that they don’t get any turnout, but yesterday was a weird mix of storms and sun and everything was dangerously sloppy in the fields). He was much more obliging about bending while we were warming up, and was fairly responsive even when we started a new exercise.

The exercise in question was a pole setup, with a set of V-shaped poles on a twelve(ish) meter circle at either end of the arena, plus a pole on the centerline at X. To start with we trotted the middle pole, trotted the V poles on a small circle, then trotted the middle pole again and changed direction over it (essentially a figure eight with an additional smaller circle at either end). I think I found it more challenging than he did because I’m honestly still figuring out where to put all of my aids, especially on the outside, so I had to really think about it (petty hunter resenter here, I was almost never asked to actually ride a horse like that in my prior training situation and consequently forgot how to do it—what are real turns when your courses consist of outside-diagonal-outside with big sweeping arcs), but after a few very rough trips around our smaller circles, I started to remember how to put everything together.

Once we did it enough times at the trot, we then added another part to the exercise in the form of adding a canter circle after the smaller trot circle. The canter circle took me between the V poles and the center pole (advanced level is cantering the V poles and we are not there yet), and then back to trot to go over the center pole and change direction. Due to the aforementioned being inside all day, Coops made one attempt to launch me into the ceiling the first time I asked him to canter, but after tearing around half the arena and coming back to a trot, he engaged in no more nonsense and actually picked up the canter and did his circles. We were still doing the downward transitions off the inside aids, but aside from the fact that he decidedly did not want to settle in the trot after cantering, my trainer said she only saw him swap in the back once for a downward transition the entire night.

After we got through all of that in one piece, we then changed the canter circle to canter over the center pole instead of going between it and the V. This caused me momentary panic because our attempts at cantering poles haven’t been great (yes, yes, I was jumping him while not having good canter pole work, we all make Choices™ and not all of mine have been good ones), but when my trainer tells me to do something, I do it, so: we did it. The first couple tries were pretty rough, but in true magician fashion, my trainer told me to take up more contact and make him stay on the eleven-and-a-half foot stride instead of the fourteen-foot stride that he naturally prefers (especially since he’s so short-coupled that he has no real excuse for not being willing to sit), and… we stayed on the eleven-and-a-half foot stride, where I could get us into the pole with a reasonable distance that didn’t have him tripping over the pole or himself.

She then had me put the same sort of effort into practice with our downward transitions to make him properly trot after cantering, rather than taking half the arena to settle back down. He was decidedly not thrilled about the idea to start with, but after the first few attempts he started to listen (maybe I will be able to jump him in a regular double-jointed snaffle one of these days if that lesson sticks).

Every single time we finished a portion of the lesson, she just looked at him and kept repeating to me that he was going to be okay. We’ll get his feet sorted out (the farrier says he’ll probably be up two shoe sizes within a few shoeing cycles), we’ll figure out exactly what training program will be best for him, we’ll figure out what body work will help to keep him feeling good, and (as she said), give her another two weeks and he’ll be using his back every time I get on. I just laughed and told her that he knows what to do, his rider is just incompetent most of the time, because he really does go wonderfully on those rare occasions that I actually use myself properly.

Her response was that I’m not incompetent, that she can still see everything in there that I learned how to do all those years ago when I was last riding with her consistently, that the challenge for me is that right now I have to think about all of it because my brain knows what to do but my body doesn’t entirely remember. She said that we’ll just keep working on it until I don’t have to think about it anymore and that I have to trust that I know what the right thing to do is, because I do know what the right thing is. She taught me the right things fifteen years ago, and they got buried underneath a whole pile of other stuff. We’re not building from the ground up so much as excavating a structure that already exists.

I don’t know what the spring is going to bring for us, or even this year. I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to get back to where I used to be in terms of trust of myself or my confidence. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get Cooper to where we need him to be to be able to run Beginner Novice (because that is my goal for this summer—run at least one Beginner Novice event, even if it doesn’t happen til September). Hell, forget all the rest of it—I don’t know how long it’s going to take for me to be able to canter him in a straight line and have a clean downward transition at the end.

What I do know is that I got home last night and I felt good. I felt happy. I felt like we had actually accomplished something and, for as much as I had to think about every step of what I was doing, I didn’t come out of it feeling like I don’t know how to ride anymore. I wanted to ride with my trainer again because she’s the best teacher I’ve ever had when it comes to the actual skill of riding (even back in the days before she became a big bad 5* eventer), but also because she’s always known the right things to say to me. She knew how to talk me through confidence crises as a kid and she knows how to talk to me now, and when she tells me that my horse is going to be okay and I do know what I’m doing, I believe her.

Things haven’t been perfect the last couple of weeks, but nothing ever is, and I truly do feel that this was the right move for us on so many levels. I’m sure there are going to be a lot of ups and downs for me in terms of how I feel about myself and my riding, but my trainer knows how to make me feel like I’m capable, and Cooper is having the absolute time of his life. He has a big stall, he has a huge window to look out of in the barn, there’s always something going on so he has plenty of entertainment for that overactive brain of his, he’s already the best of friends with his pasturemates, and my trainer told me that even for a gelding, he’s settled in ridiculously easily and has been great to handle, and he also gets bonus points for how much chaos he’s already taken entirely in stride (no pun intended). He did absolutely vacuum up his hay the first couple of days, but he settled down on that afterward and has been eating/drinking/behaving like absolutely nothing is amiss. God only knows what trouble he’s going to get up to once the weather changes and they’re back in the big fields instead of the sacrifice paddocks.

I’m not sure when we’ll have our lessons next week (we schedule for the week on Sundays), but Cooper has already improved so much after two lessons that I can only imagine where he’ll be after four. He’s also going to get a few training rides later in the spring, mostly so that my trainer can really feel what we’re working with because she’s only ever been on him for five minutes before (you know, when she got on him after he forcibly ejected me back in August) and my current ammy skills are not going to adequately showcase his potential in the way her riding him will.

In the meantime, I’m going to go ride tonight and hopefully not undo any of the good work that we did this week, and hopefully get my new phone ordered this weekend so that I can start getting some video of my lessons courtesy of my Pivo. Having a driver’s license is great except for the part where I no longer have a built-in barn photographer/videographer. Such is life, I suppose.

(There’s enough happening now that I should have regular things to report, and I like keeping this blog as a record of what we’ve done even if nobody reads it, so… expect me back in a week or two.)