Eric Horgan Dressage/Jumping Clinic 7/22-23

Forgive me, readers! I have been remiss in my blogging this week. In my defense, between getting the facility ready for the clinic and trying to move my entire life back into my newly painted and carpeted room (yes!!!!), there's not been much time at night to sit down and write! Also, since the messy breakup with my fiancee, I've not been particularly interested in other human beings or seeking out what they have to offer, but as fate were to have it, the very attractive tranny that works at the Dunkin Donuts that Gogo and I always ride to (and who also always gives Gogo a donut when we get there) has been hanging out with me quite a bit this week, and we've really hit it off. Unfortunately, he gets off work at 10pm, so I've been doing a lot of staying up til 5am and getting less than an hour of sleep a night. Yeah, I know he's a tranny and I'm gay and that's all complicated, but hey, I'm flexible ;) I intend on getting to bed by midnight tonight, I swear!

I also apologize for my lack of commenting on all my favorite blogs, and for not yet picking up my Honest Scrap award that a couple of you have sent my way. My next post I will, I promise :)



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After the past two weekends of fail, I was feeling pretty lousy and not looking forward to the fact that we were going to host a private clinic at our barn with Eric Horgan that was decided fairly last minute and that I was not going to have the funds for, seeing as I had not known about it far enough in advance to set aside some money for it. Thankfully, one of our boarders came to the rescue, and asked me if I was planning on participating. When I told her I wanted to but just didn't have the money for it, she told me not to worry, and that she'd cover two days worth of lessons for me as a sponsorship. I about fell off my chair. They really are a wonderful bunch of people here.

And man, the clinic was so helpful. Wednesday was my jumping lesson, and while I got on feeling still stressed and miserable (and totally hormonal... seriously, I almost started crying for no reason when he asked me a simple question, who does that?), the lesson went on for over an hour and a half and I got off my horse beaming. She was a superstar. We had to ride in the indoor unfortunately, because it had rained so much that our outdoor was a lake, but it all worked out just fine. Eric had me start over a simple vertical at the trot and canter coming from both directions, just to see what was there, what I knew, and what needed to be addressed. The first thing he addressed was my 2-point. Now, coming from a dressage background, I've really struggled to maintain a half-seat in any way, and my lesson with Kerry helped to address that. Unfortunately for me, my overachiever self took it too far, and I've been unknowingly clamping down with my thighs and calves in order to maintain the position. Eric noted that my right stirrup leather squeaked against my saddle, and when I told him it always does that, he smiled and said "Well, it won't by the end of this lesson." Apparently, that comes from keeping my legs clamped like vices onher side! What he had me do was to think of my stirrups as my base of fluid support, and to keep my legs in contact with her but very relaxed all the way down, so I could easily flow over her back in balance while still allowing her to move underneath me. This had quite the effect on Gogo - her normally ewe-necked self came very round in the canter, rounder than I think she ever has during our jumping work. It felt very much like she felt very unrestricted, and had the ability to really let her energy flow forward through her back from her hindend. It was very cool.
We jumped the single vertical back and forth from both ways, and I had significantly more trouble jumping off the right lead, which is my much weaker way. As a right-side dominant person, I tend to really let her slip through her left shoulder if I'm not paying attention, a fact that isn't helped by the fact that she is also right-side dominant. My position in the air needs some significant addressing, but I already know the issues with that - letting my lower leg slip, ducking, and unfolding too early. Eric thought the bigger problem was in how Gogo and I approach fences. She tends to put her head very high in the air before every fence, and he wanted her to maintain a sense of roundness to each fence, seeing as good bascule comes from a proper approach. While we never stayed totally round to every fence, she did maintain a nice sense of soft self carriage, and jumped very easily out of every spot we found.
At some point Eric mentioned the fact that travel in a straight line for horses is very hard because they instantly want to fall on their forehands, and I asked him how one would counter that in a line. So, he set up a line and said let's find out! I was asked to maintain a more forward canter (which gave us a pretty good spot every time), to stay off her back (struggled with that a bit), to set her up before the fence and then let her find her own way (not riding her right to the base, which I tend to want to do), to tell if the spot to each fence was short, just right, or long, and how many strides I got in the 6-stride line. A lot to remember! By the end, she was jumping 3'6" easily, and I felt no need to push her to anything, which is my natural inclination when the fences go up. In the bigger, rounder canter, she maintained her own energy, and I never felt like I had to help her find a good spot. She found them herself.




While you can clearly see the faults in my jumping position and just how much that hinders her upon landing, you can see how rateable she was and how easy she found the work. And how darn cute she is over fences :D
I came out of the lesson feeling like I really had a lot of homework to keep in mind and a lot of tools to help us both out. Eric seemed impressed with the amount of information I retained, and at one point said, I'm throwing a ton of mud at the wall, and it all seems to be sticking! Which, I assume, is a compliment :). The bigger canter, the position work, the way we ride to each fence... all these things are really going to help us. I felt very satisfied and looked forward to the next day.




The dressage day was also just as helpful. I told him about the lack of brilliance behind, and after we warmed up, he had me really push her forward. There is a definite line with her where you can easily cross into rushing, but it's really fun to get to that brink of brilliance/insanity and try to maintain it for as long as possible without heading one way or the other. He also had me do a similar thing to what I had done the day before - relax my thigh and really let her back move underneath me. When I did that, I felt my leg slip into the most natural and balanced position I think it could ever be in, and her back really started to swing. The other really big thing he pointed out, aside from how crookedly I was sitting in my shoulder-ins (took some work but we got it straightened out, literally!), was that in my sitting trot and canterwork, I am weighting her forehand instead of releasing it by... well, I don't know exactly how to describe it. By riding down instead of up. And there was a definite difference between the two, a definitee lightening of her forehand. I wish I had a better way to describe it, I really do. It's just something in the way I sit and move my body that is very supple. We're going to have to see if this aids in achieving a little more in the way of collection.


All in all, she was fabulous, and I felt like I made a lot of progress myself. We've got our homework cut out for us, that's for sure, but there is always something to learn and always something to work on to better ourselves. We're slated to really get out and do several intense XC schoolings, as well as maybe picking up a few schooling jumper shows, just to get out over some courses and work on our homework in a low-pressure environment. I sent out my entry today for Huntington Farm H.T., in late August, as one final reprieve before the AECs in September. I feel that we will be ready by then, and our little spinning issue will be resolved. The Lyme titer hasn't come back in, but with how marvelous she's been these past few days, I'm not really suspecting it any longer. We shall see, we shall see.

We've back into our heavy training schedule without show interruptions: Sunday 2-hour conditioning hack with 25 mins of trot, Monday jump, Tuesday-Thursday dressage, Friday gallops, Saturday off. We'll adjust for XC schoolings.

I am very, very excited and very refreshed. Bring it on, world! We can take it!

The Dialogue of Dressage

It's strange how much a change in nutrition can really affect a horse. Over the winter when Gogo was on quite a bit of Ultium, she was irrational, hot, difficult, and spooky. She's finally back down to just the ration balancer, and the difference in her behavior is astounding. No more uncalled for blowups. No more rearing, no more thrashing. She still fusses with her head sometimes, but with all four feet on the ground and still traveling at the same tempo and gait. She still has to make her opinions known, you know!

Dressage is slowly evolving for us into a running dialogue instead of a question and answer session, or an interrogation even, sometimes. Instead of just letting her do whatever she wants with her head until she decides to play the game, I can now ask quietly and she responds quietly. Instead of fighting with her and her fighting right back, I can now make a correction with a rein aid and instead of inverting, curling, flinging her head or being otherwise generally offended, she can quietly take it and do the correct thing - reach back out towards the contact no matter what we're doing. Before, you couldn't touch her face without asking for tension or a fight. You just had to leave her alone and let her figure it out on her own. Over this winter, however, she's matured and started to, for the first time in her life, take my corrections not as a personal affront, but as a polite request that she's willing to make. A year and a half ago, touching her mouth at all caused her to either bolt or rear - it was right after I got her back from the evil trainer. A year ago, she still wouldn't take a correction or any sort of, but if you gave it a lot of time, she'd eventually go to the contact herself and actually be very correct. Six months ago, she was still like that, and would fight and fight against you if you made any attempt to manipulate her front end. Now, she's in the process of changing again. Right off the bat when I picked her up yesterday and today, she was right there. She wasn't 200% warmed up and perfectly fluid, but when she did make a balance mistake and came off the bit, I could make a correction and she'd take it and go back to where she was supposed to. Her canter isn't totally there yet with this newer self - she is less willing to accept corrections, but she's still been trying hard to figure it out. I think if I am very careful and cultivate this new mindset properly, we could really be headed for great things.

Dressage has to be fair, and it has to be an intelligent, kind discussion. There can be no telling, no demanding with a horse like Gogo. She needs to have her input, and she needs to know when she's done the right thing. When I ask her to bend a little more left, she might ask in return if she could tighten her jaw a little and stay where she is. But that's the difference now... she's asking. She's not crossing her jaw, yanking hard, and refusing, taking my question as something that could potentially cause fear and pain, and trying to protect herself from it. She might prefer to not bend quite as much as I ask, but now she is taking my question as a fair one, and accepting it. All the connections in her mind to all the abuse she and her mouth have sustained finally seem to be letting go. She doesn't feel so defensive anymore. It's as if she's finally, finally, almost two years after her mind and body were demolished by the wretched trainer, accepted that I'm not going to yank on her face, I'm not going to crank her in, I'm not going to flip her over. It's something she'll never, ever completely let go of, and I know that. But it's my duty to do the very best I can to her, and to always try and do the right thing. She's letting me push her a little more, letting me make my minor corrections to whatever she's doing, and getting better because of them instead of worse.

She's matured so much over the winter, mentally. She's astounding me every day. It's as if someone hit the fast forward button on progress all of a sudden in these past two weeks, and I'm completely amazing and floored and trying as hard as I can to just keep up and not make any mistakes that might set her back again. We've come so far, we've grown so much, both of us. I can't believe how much she's letting me influence her body while we're doing dressage, and I can't believe how little she needs me while we're jumping. Last year, I felt strongly that I needed to hold her hand to every fence going cross-country, and she let me know that she needed support to every fence in order to have confidence about it. This year, she's finding her way to whatever I point her at without feeling like I need to be there to support her at every stride. All she needs me to do now is point her in the right direction and sit chilly. She does the rest.

She's telling me that she'll let me do my job as direction of dressage if I let her do her job of finding her way around a course of fences. We don't rely on each other for physical or mental support. We instead work together because we want to both be there, and we know we can do it together. We're both strong-willed and independent, and we don't rely on anyone other than ourselves for survival, but at the same time we have the perfect symbiotic relationship. Her partnership completes me in that way that only a good horse can. I know she, of all opinionated horses in this world, is not working with me because she has to. She's working with me because she wants to.

And I am truly the most humbled and honored person in the world.

ICE CITY.

It's Ice City out here. They weren't kidding about New England ice storms, seriously. Gogo almost did the splits going out to turnout two days ago, and I also fell on my ass while leading her. Thank god she just stood there and laughed at me! Dangerous... won't be doing that again.

On a better note, I've had two very successful dressage days, one being a lesson on Thursday and one being a ride on my own on Friday. I was in kind of a funk yesterday and didn't know that I wanted to ride (thought about riding today instead of yesterday, and giving her the day off yesterday instead of today), but once I got out into the barn I found that I really did want to get on and ride. I love that.

Thursday, Gogo just warmed up WELL. It's not often that she does that, and Vicki and I are trying to come up with ways that encourage her to start off the workout well so that we can progress to more complicated things faster, and not spend the entire workout on the warmup. Before, it was common to spend 30-45 minutes just trying to get her to relax and give her back to me, and some rides I'd never get it. Lately, it's been so much better, better than it ever has been before. It's like she gets it suddenly... she's growing stronger in her topline so it's easier for her to work correctly. Using her neck against me was such a vicious cycle before, but it feels like we're really breaking up that resistance. She warmed up perfectly, and we did w/t/c, trot lengthenings on a straightaway, leg yields, shoulder-ins, a million transitions, and canter lengthenings on a 20m circle (which is part of the Training B test). She was going so well that Vicki ran to her office and whipped out her Omnibus (or well, last years... they've done away with the paper Omnibus this year, which is good and bad in a lot of ways) which has the Training A and B tests in them, and we ran through Training B. The only major blooper we had was when I was coming into the first canter transitions and I surprised her in the corner by not setting up for it, then poking her a bit hard with my spur. She bucked! I noticed that this past week though - I've not been using my spurs on her hardly at all, in any situation, so those few times when I have poked her, she has objected quite loudly. Our stretchy trot circles still need finessing too, because picking her back up still causes a little bit of tension (she thinks she's done, I assume). We're making progress there though. We had a totally perfectly balanced, square halt at the end, and we ended on that!

Yesterday I was kind of funked out all day, and wasn't sure if I really wanted to ride or not. I decided that I did in fact want to ride once I walked out into the barn and breathed in that good horsey smell, so I pulled her in from turnout, spiffed her all up, and got on. And she was GREAT. After a good long trot and canter on the buckle, we did some walk work (which is currently the Golden Ticket to progressing to better work), then moved up into trot and canter, where we got some fabulous mediums, some awesome canter-trot-canter transitions across the diagonal (her nemesis - she wants to do flying changes ALL THE TIME), some gorgeous leg yields, a whole mess of serpentines of varying sizes and shapes, and some really high quality shoulder-in. We even did some stretchy walk and coming back up, and got an awesome stretchy trot at the end. YAY MARE. I felt much better after I rode, which is an awesome feeling - sometimes getting on Gogo in the wrong mood is a BAD IDEA, but in cases like these, it's good to just get on and go for it. I'm glad I did, because we had a really high quality, productive workout. Hell, it was only a half-hour into it and I was going, all right she's perfect I'm done! Which NEVER happens... it's almost always an hour before we're ready to be finished!

Yay mare!!!!

Today is Lendon Gray's Weekend Educational Program (or well, this whole weekend is, but I'm working tomorrow so I can't go). Vicki's giving a lecture at 9 called "Riding A Winning Warmup", which is obviously something I really want to hear, and there are a few other lectures I want to attend, such as "Keeping the Dressage Horse Sound" and a few others, maybe. I'm only going for half the day, I think, so we'll see what else is open for me to do!

Tonight I'm going over my January goals and creating some new ones for February, so stay tuned!