I walked to the barn for my lesson last night with my positivity hat on. I also immediately walked to a lovely group of barn ladies enjoying Sangria, and I had a glass. I figured Sangria could only help our situation. (P.S. I have no media so enjoy these random faces of Simon while I tried to take a picture of his new bonnet I made) Simon brought his A-game too. He actually trotted up to me in the pasture, which…
I came off yesterday. It was the first jump of the second course of our lesson, so pretty early on. We cantered up slowly to a 2’3″ oxer. I leaned for him to jump at a spot that was maybe a smidge long, and he put his feet back down. I fell completely on his neck and then popped off to the side in front of the jump. I fell hard and got the wind knocked out of me. It was…
This is not an exciting or insightful or funny or filled with pictures kind of post. I hope to have more of those next week! Instead, this is a post about my lesson for me. Majority of my lessons are small group jumping lessons, which makes sense since Simon and I are jumpers. However, I’ve recently become pretty addicted to flat work. My horse gets more and more schooled and I keep finding these new gears and buttons. A good…
Good Thing: Even with tons of drizzly days of rain this past week, our arena is holding up really well. My trainer was able to shuffle some things around and give me a lesson on Saturday instead of Sunday! Bad Thing: Simon has decided he can no longer be caught in the pasture. It took 30 minutes and two assistants to help me get him. This is the third time he’s been hard to catch, which means it’s an established…
Usually I have blog posts written for here about a week in advance, or at least a decent queue of pre-written posts to pull from when I’m not feeling creative. Maybe it’s the winter or some other stuff going on, but lately I’ve had a hard time writing as much for the blog. I’m not giving up my Monday – Friday posting schedule, but it is a bit more of a struggle. However, I do want to share a little…
Let me start off this lesson recap blog post by noting two very important things. One – my trainer said that if we had been able to ride consistently for the past two months, we wouldn’t be having any of the problems we’re having. Two – a barn friend’s boyfriend took pictures of our lesson, and he’s basically the best person ever. I owe him brownies. With that being said, I’m going to keep this on the shorter side today…
I haven’t written about my rides much lately for several reasons. At first, they were super bad. Simon was protesting the inconsistent riding and lack of jumping in the best ways he knows how – being super anxious and rushing through everything. No listening to my seat. No softening at the bit. The wonderful flatwork we had worked so hard to get last fall disappeared, so I got super down about it. Obviously he has ulcers. Needs a chiro visit….
I’m calling “the slumps” over. This is due to two reasons. One, I had an amazing private lesson last Thursday night. It was one of those lessons where the individual attention leads to a big “Ah-ha” moment, which means that the lesson will last far, far long than the half hour I paid for. Basically, I learned that I was both over and under communicating. See, we’ve pushed our flatwork to the next level recently. Lots of trot work in…