Ponies 4 eva!

Today, good readers, you will receive not one, but two posts! Yes, I am in a very generous mood today. Well, that and I utterly failed to post yesterday's events immediately after they occurred. Therefore, today you will profit from my laziness! Or my generosity. Either way, you get two posts, and who could complain about that.

Oh yeah, the people who hate me or this blog. Although, if either of the previous statements appropriately describe your feelings, my question to you is, why are you still reading this?! That being said, I'll leave you to ponder your existential crisis, and return my attention to the people who actually like reading this. Or they tolerate it. Or they do it just because they're bored. Either way, they don't throw things at me and hurt my feelings, which I appreciate."That's all well and good," you say, "but GET ON WITH IT!"

Your wish is my command. Yesterday morning, Saga's mom came out to help me out with Zigs. The original intentions were for her to hop up on Zigs and see if she could figure out why he's been blowing off my half-halts at the trot, and to work on jumping. As I expected, he behaved just fine for her, and very obediently half-halted when asked. I was very happy to see that because it let me know, yes, he does know how, and will do it when asked appropriately. After trying both reins, Saga's mom commented that Zigs felt a bit un-even to her. And asked me to get back on him to see if I felt it. I think she said a few more things as well, but as soon as I heard uneven, I sort of tuned out, and immediately started paying very close attention to how Zigs was going. I couldn't really feel anything out of place, but just to be on the safe side, we decided to just work on walk/trot, and trot/walk transitions and leave jumping for another day. One of the first things that was made apparent was that I wasn't waiting until I had a good walk to cue for trot. Hence, crappy walk led to crappy trot. So, we worked for while on when to judge a good walk when I had it. I discovered that I've actually been going past "forward" and into "rushing", because when Zigs is through and round, the pace of the walk is slower, but he feels light in my hands.

The other thing that was made apparent is that I have a nasty tendency to let Ziggy "dribble" on both up and down transitions. On my up transitions, I'm not giving a clear enough cue, and on my down transitions, I'm not riding him "up" into the transitions. I'll be honest in that when Saga's mom first told me that, I totally didn't get it. The whole idea of a down transition is to go slower and-- actually, strike previous. A downward transition isn't necessarily a change of speed, although it often is. It's always a change of rhythm. I think that internally, I realized that when I was riding yesterday, but it just became obvious to my conscious mind. Anyways, now that I've noted that epiphany before it escaped me, allow me to go back to my original train of thought. (Coherent narrative, just another service I provide!). After thinking about what it meant to ride "up" into the downward transition, I realized that it meant I needed impulsion from behind so that when he settled into the walking, he was already stepping under himself from the trot that he'd have a much firmer stance in order to keep driving his hind end up to his front.

Now, as far as the trot goes, the lion's share of the trot is coming up to it from a good walk, and within the first 3 strides, riding the rhythm that I want. One of the things that I'm still bad about is forgetting to ride as soon as I get the transition. For some reason, the whole of my thought process is, "Yay! I got a trot!" and shortly after that gripping insight, my brain vaults out of my left ear, and happily sponges its way off to its vacation home in Tahiti. It never lets me come along, either.

Jerk.

I showed him, though. After a few decent transitions leading to some sub-optimal trots, I finally locked the wayward grey matter into my skull and actually began riding the trot I wanted after I got the transition. Once that was sorted, I had a lot of good moments. Zhi was kind enough to take pictures, and had I actually charged my camera battery last night, I'd include them here. But, alas, they are importing into iPhoto as we speak. In short, I felt like the ride went fantastically well, and I learned a lot. I didn't even care that I didn't jump.

Now, before I leave you to write the next post, there is one last thing I need to share: I am terrible about KEEPING MY FINGERS CLOSED around my reins. I shall endeavor to fix this going forward.

**Addendum**
I also accompanied Duchess' Mom, Saga's mom and Fuzzy Pony down to Dripping Springs to watch Saga and Duchess go in a jumping lesson. My initial intent was to take pictures for the two of them, I was cleverly thwarted by my camera, whose battery I heroically neglected to charge yesterday because I took a nap. You can read all about the lesson over at Saga's blog, but I will say that I was very impressed with Paige, and I would definitely be interested in taking a lesson from her. My number one take-home watching the lesson was Paige's comments about "waiting" for the fence. Saga, Duchess and Zigs are very willing and game jumpers, and they'll jump anything we point them at. So, our challenge is not to push them forward to the fence, but to keep them up and forward and ensure a good approach. That being said, now I'm going to bed for real.

Look Ma, No Stirrups!

I think I have finally discovered a formula that works well for riding on the week nights.  When I get home, I'm usually pretty tired, and it's still rather hot, so I sit around on the computer for a while until it cools down.  Tonight, instead of doing that, I curled up on the couch and took a brief nap.  Wouldn't you know it, when I woke up, I wasn't tired any more.  I went out and saddled up Zigs not quite sure what I was going to work on. I toyed around with the idea of setting up a few jumps or trot poles, but since Saga's mom might be coming over this weekend, and since I'm still pretty green at jumping, I like to do it when there's somebody more experienced to watch me and let me know if I'm doing something wrong. So I opted for flat work. I spent most of my warm up trying to figure out what I wanted to concentrate on, and I finally decided that I'd work on sitting trot without stirrups, since it's been a while since I last worked on it.

It went pretty well, although not in the ways you may think. For the most part, I kept my position, and was able to stay with him, although by sitting the trot, I was able to discover a couple of subtle problems I've probably been having for quite some time now, but didn't really notice since I'd spent so much time doing posting trot.

1. Zigs has a nasty habit of speeding up when I point him back towards the trailer


2. My half halts in sitting trot aren't very effective. No, I have no idea why.


3. I'm doing something that causes me to occasionally bounce out of the saddle to the outside.

That being said, I have made significant progress since the last time I performed this particular exercise. I can sit a much bigger, bouncier trot than I used to be able to, and I was able to maintain my position. It went so well, in fact that I decided to do a few trot/canter transitions without stirrups. Those went considerably rougher. I started out on the left rein, since that's Zigs' easier lead. For reasons I can't figure out, when I gave my canter transition, I got a really fast trot that I had some trouble bringing back down. But rather than get frustrated, I kept working at it. Eventually, when I finally stopped thinking about it, and just did it, I got a good canter depart. Ziggy made it clear that he wanted to go off to the races, but I half-halted for everything I was worth, and managed to keep him in a forward, but sane working canter. After a few canter circles, I dropped backdown to walk and changed reins. My downward transitions from canter still suck. I keep totally forgetting to ride once I get the trot transition. Let's call that item #273 on the list of things to fix. ;) The right rein went pretty much exactly the same way. I kept at it until I got a nice canter transition, and walked Zigs out. All in all, it was a good ride, and it was nice to see some progress in the sitting trot. To be honest, I've lately been feeling sort of stagnant as far as my riding progress goes. But hopefully, by the end of the year I'll have a new job, so I'll be back in lessons. Until then, I'll just need to be patient.