Sunday for my lesson, aka the last weekend lesson before the show, it was a balmy 45 degrees, gray and drizzly. Also, I rode like a potato. Hence the title of this post. I was a cold, leg swinging can’t find a distance plopping around all of the place potato. My horse however, was awesome. Also awesome was my trooper of a mother, who took pictures of us in the cold drizzly lesson. You know, nothing like treating your mother…
There’s lots going on here in blog and real life land throughout the rest of the year. For the blog, I’ve got some really fun things planned for y’all for the holiday season. Just about wrapping up prep and organization, so expect some details soon 🙂 On the horse front, we’re getting ready for the year end horse show in two weeks. By getting ready, I mean trying not to panic because this show is always my favorite and I…
I’ve been having a lot of fun traveling and visiting one of my very best friends this weekend, but I wanted to share something super exciting from Thursday night’s lesson. I jumped Simon 3’3″ ish! I say ish because the hole is a little more like 3’2″ haha but still. We worked on gymnastics which are usually a bit anxiety filled for us but this time the strides were set a but easy and Simon was super relaxed and going…
True blogger confessions time: recently I’ve become aware that I had grossly over estimated my abilities as a rider. See, I’ve been a hunter gal all my life (even little local stuff.. still counts) and did one jumper show with moderate success. Plus, my horse is a little bit awesome… when he’s sound. Therefore, I’m obviously ready to make the switch full time to little jumper, right? Yeah, no. So the jumpers are much harder and I have a lot to…
I really wanted to title this post “Baby’s First Bounce” but since no one will believe me when I call my eight year old pretty damn broke horse a “baby”, let’s just simply say we did our first bounce in our Sunday lesson. First, we did trot poles. Simon started out very tense and a bit worked up about them. He wanted to be very forward and rushing going into the gymnastic. With his shorter stride we had a hard time balancing…
I’ve had three official “jumper” lessons now. That basically means I’m an expert. Right? Right. Since I’m such a baby jumper expert, I will drop some pearls of my new-found knowledge on you. Bam! In jumpers, there are more jumps. Shocking I know! When I used to be like “Ah, I’m so ready for this hunter course to be done” around fence 8… in jumpers, I’m still going. I’m still going and I also have to jump off (hopefully) soon….
This past weekend I asked my lovely husband if he would come to the barn for my lesson to take some video. Since it had been a while since he stuffed Simon full of treats, he happily agreed. Simon happily ate the treats, and it was okay because we had a pretty nice lesson. I was happy during the flat warm-up because Simon felt forward and pretty strong. No tripping, no stiffness, no nonsense. Our rides during the week had…
Showing up for my lesson last Sunday I was feeling drained from being sick (breathing is a key element of riding apparently) and insecure in my new saddle. If given the choice I probably would have been cantering cross rails and leaving after thirty minutes. Of course my trainer being my awesome trainer gave me a “No, you are crazy” look and set the jumps up 2’3″ – 2’6″. I have to admit, the more I ride in my…