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…
Saturday was the first 100% stress free day I’d had in quite a while, so I celebrated by spending all day outside with ponies and my camera. If that doesn’t lift one’s spirits… I don’t know what will! Since several riders at our barn are getting ready for the early March hunter derby and I’m working towards the late April one, our trainer has done a great job doing “derby lessons” that offer more challenging courses than the typical outside…
Due to Austin’s “Snowpacalypse 2014” last week mixed with spending all day playing cross country on Saturday, Mr. Simon hadn’t been ridden in three days before my lesson on Sunday. On top of a fresh pony, the wind was nuts so I knew I was in for a bit of a wild ride. The lesson started off with building some gymnastics. Trot in to a one stride to a one stride to a two stride. At first, Simon was alllll about…
Whenever I tell my husband that we worked on gymnastics during a lesson, he comes back with “Wow, so Simon was doing some cartwheels and some hand stands?” He’s a funny, funny guy. So that’s where the title of this post comes from, because on my Sunday lesson… we did gymnastics! And there were photographers there, so I’m blogging about it 🙂 Traditionally, we have a hard time with gymnastics. You can read the back story about the first time…