"This Russian rider’s freestyle begins pleasantly enough–you can actually hear some birds tweeting in the background. Then the ominous music kicks in, the wind picks up, the sky darkens, and it begins to thunder. Then rain, then monsoon, then… dun-dun-duuuuun.
Nonetheless, the show must go on!"
It is dangerous to continue a show, never mind the test, in a situation like this. The show should have been stopped with weather conditions like that. Shame on the show staff for continuing. But who knows what kind of show this was. It's an upper level test. What if they were trying to qualify for the Olympics? What if they had been training for years and years to get to this specific show? I'm just glad nothing happened to either horse or rider.
Gotta say it: that is one bombproof horse. He keeps going with ears pricked like nothing is happening. Total trust in his rider. I hope they won that show by default, seriously. And it was good to see the well-deserved pat that the rider gives her horse at the end.
This was Lily yesterday, during the first 4 minute trot set on the lunge. Her best rendition of a floaty trot. She hasn't done this under saddle yet, but it is my favorite version of her trot. She usually only does it when she's really "up" at liberty or on the lunge:
This video should show up horizontal...I did edit it in YouTube.
I wish you could DNA test a horse to find out what breed mix they are, like you can do with dogs. 95% of the time I question her supposed Andalusian half. I see TB for sure, of course. I also see Arab most of the time, too. She has a dished face that I've always wondered about. I've thought Arabian more so than this Spanish horse cross that her original owner said she is. I've also seen QH, especially when she's super-buff-her butt will look like a QH's. But then again, some TB's will look like that too.
IM injection of ace. Only 2 mls. Not the best technique, but I loosen my grip on the syringe when she starts head bobbing because gripping the syringe hard when she does that will only cause more trauma. Oh, and you're supposed to pull back on the plunger before injecting the meds when giving any kind of injection, but good luck doing that with Lily.
This is her being really, really good!
Scratching her neck while she makes faces. What I do to get her to forgive me for stabbing her with a needle. She looks ginormous next to me in this video...I'm 5'4", she's 15.1 hh. Not a big horse at all, and I don't feel tiny next to her.
Maneuvering towards the whip rack. We nailed it today!!
Counted walk! Here it is Liz! She gets distracted by a horse in the stalls at the far end and accelerates halfway, but the beginning and end are really good! The best we've done so far.
A FAB one of her trotting. I was really happy with her in this one. Oh, and yes, I'm aware that I'm on the wrong diagonal for like the first half of the video! When she snorts in the beginning, I lose my diagonal and don't realize until we've changed direction and circled...doh!
Charles filmed the second set too, for which we moved to the outdoor-another boarder was in the indoor with her horse, doing something with the halter, right in the middle of the track. I moved Lily to the outdoor, only to discover the footing was awful-moist, uneven and loose. The video wasn't as good due to the poor footing, and Charles was taking photos at the same time, so each time he took a pic, the image froze for a second. He didn't realize the video would show this. It does. She was also very reluctant to pick up the trot in this set, I'm still not sure why. I have to nag halfway around the arena before she obeys. You have to ask for things politely with Lily. Kicking won't get you anywhere. I was aware that I did 3 minutes - she felt ever so slightly off going up the far long side, and I took her down one more time to confirm whether it was real or I was imagining it. She felt fine the last time, and she looks fine to me in the video. Yay video for Me the Worrywart!
Here is a video of us walking, NOT looking like drunks (this is what she looks like on 3 mls of ace):
Oh God, and no, we don't have chickens at the barn...those were birds singing from the rafters! They don't sound that loud in person. We have a lot of little finches that hang out at the barn and pick through the horses' poop. :)
I love those finches. They showed up the second it started to warm up, back at the beginning of spring.
And here is a video of Lily's trot session today:
The footing in the indoor had not been dragged recently so it was very uneven, which is why she trips a couple of times. I've been riding her in there because it's harder than the footing in the outdoor at the moment.
We did get 2 of the counted walk, but of course today the day that we had the camera, we sucked royally at the counted walk so I'm not posting them. :p
Distracted and hollow-backed in the beginning...
Better
Stretching, but keeping withers up. I was really happy to see it looked exactly the way it felt!
This was my fave photo of the day. As you can tell above...
I rode Jezebel yesterday, and we worked on the zooming and the new pop-my-shoulder evasion that she had been doing.
Jez was COVERED in mud when I got her from the field. The snow from the day before had all melted, turning the field into one giant mud pit. It was horrible, and Jez had mud encrusted all the way up her legs, over her ears, and ground into the roots of her mane. She looked like she had dreadlocks! Since my own mare does this on a 99.9% of the time basis, for the first time I had a real vision of what her mane would REALLY look like most of the time if I'd let it grow out! It took a while to get all the mud off Jez, and I was still finding chunks in her mane while riding her!
One of the trainers was working her horses at liberty in the indoor, so I chose to ride in the mucky outdoor. It was very, very wet, but not slippery, as the footing is sand. However, I decided not to canter, mostly because the footing was so bad, but mostly because I wanted to work with Jezebel on not zooming. She'll have a nice relaxed trot, and then all of a sudden she'll take the bit between her teeth and ZOOM! (This is very much a baby horse thing-Lily used to do the same thing in the beginning.) Then you have to bring her back and do circles to get her nice and soft again. Which is when she'll now overbend and pop her shoulder... So we worked on this-just trotting at one speed, no zooming, and keeping the circles nice and round. And lots of halt-walk-trot-halt transitions too. We also sorted out some initial minor brattiness with the gate - she wanted to go TO the gate. After circling evenly in front of it, and then half-halting or bringing her to a halt from the trot as we rode past the gate, she stopped wanting to go to it as fast as possible. Soon we were trotting by the gate at a nice, controlled pace with no attempts at drifting towards it. Her other small issue was wanting to be close to whomever was standing by the fence-Charles was standing by the fence taking pictures, and she kept wanting to drift over to him every time we rode by, thinking she'd get to stop. I did stop her once, but then we worked on not doing it again, and she got it once I started using my WHOLE body to turn her. lol Then she'd go without a fuss. She did great and before I knew it, we had been riding around for 45 minutes, and I chose to stop before the session got too long. Jez is just fun to ride-you really do have to watch the clock while working with her! I do love all of her baby OTTB antics; she's a really good girl overall. I dismounted at the back of the arena and walked her to the gate. I'm going to keep doing this, so she stops associating the front of the arena (and the gate!) with ceasing work.
A very relaxed warm-up walk
We were doing a nice soft, slow trot here.
ZOOM!
She was looking at a cone next to the jump, but she looks so pretty in this photo.
LOVE this one!
For those of you who'd like to learn more about Jezebel, her story and about Sally herself, this is Jez's blog.
I hosed the little mare's legs to get all of that mud off and in the process, clean her cut on her left hind. It looks like it's healing well.
I turned Jezebel back out, and thankfully, since it was after 4:00 pm, she just stayed by the gate and kept her legs clean! I walked on to get Lily, who of course was at the back of the lower part of the field. The field was AWFUL...there is no grass any more, so it was just one 15 acre expanse of slimy, wet, squelching clay mud. Thankfully I had brought an extra pair of socks and dry shoes for later, but.... UGGGHH!!! I tell you-I miss the Florida swamp sand!
Lily was very calm, and for once, she wasn't plastered in clay! I tacked her up, and after taking another look at the outdoor, decided to just ride in the now empty indoor. She was being extra wiggly, especially about going straight down the far long side of the indoor. We argued about it, and then I just started asking her to go down that side in either haunches-in or shoulder-in.
She was not thrilled about that. You can see in the video above where she starts to drift backwards in protest! Eventually, towards the end of our session, she went straight.
It wasn't the most productive workout ever, especially because in the beginning I was letting Lily get away with murder, thinking that I must be doing something wrong. When Charles is at the barn, I will stop and look at the videos as he's taking them, just to see how we're doing. This is the only way I can really see how I'm riding. Remember that I don't really know dressage-I come from a jumper background, and in Puerto Rico, dressage was fairly unknown at the time. I mean, it was known, but almost no one did it. It didn't really hit the island as an equestrian sport until after I left. Unlike most kids, I actually wanted dressage lessons, and my really good trainer from my late teens incorporated dressage into our flatwork, but we were doing the functional stuff-getting the horse to move out and use himself correctly- not the fancy-dancy laterally stuff. I didn't even realize what we had been doing was dressage until almost 10 years later!
I started jumping lessons when I was 13, and formally stopped jumping when I was 31. I've been riding dressage officially, in my head (lol) for the last 2 years and half, but have only had about a year of proper dressage lessons about every 2 weeks, and that's it. The rest I've put together through YouTube, reading, The Clinic last year (yes, with caps-it was an epic clinic in my further development as a rider), and watching other riders, and from what Lily allows me to to do. We'd probably be MUCH further along if I could afford lessons consistently with a really good trainer. Or even if we had larger arena mirrors...I know how it's supposed to look, and have an idea of how it's supposed to feel, but don't really know the proper way to get there. Watching the videos yesterday was when I realized that I was being way too forgiving with Lily-we were literally cutting corners in the arena, and she was evading bending by becoming very rigid through her body. Case in point:
I wasn't very happy when I saw this one. We were doing lateral-ey stuff. In the beginning, we start out at a very slow sitting trot where she gets on the forehand and I pick her up, and as she comes around the corner of the arena, she almost gets a little bit of lift in her trot and starts to track up, as she collects PROPERLY, yet she goes no faster when she does it. That's probably the one part of the video I like best, and it lasts about 6 seconds! We then move into an iffy haunches-in away from the camera, and were then supposed to trot a couple of strides in a straight line (which never happen) before moving off into a large half circle. We then come back across the arena in a leg yield, where her hind end first trails, then gets ahead of her front legs...*lol* We're going too slow-I should have asked her to pick up the pace. I was then trying to get a circle in shoulder in, but she barely gets it-you know when it happens when her hind legs cross. She knows how to do this a LOT better than that! I could feel that she wasn't trying. Then we leg yield away towards the other wall of the arena, and I should have either stopped at the quarter line or gone all the way to the wall-I let her get away with cutting the corner too soon. We come back towards the camera, then do a shoulder-in into what was supposed to be a circle, but I give up in frustration and start to post again. I almost didn't post this video.
So we worked on fixing it, and by the end we were moving along better. An improvement here:
Her trot was a little more energetic *in general*, using herself better *in general*, though when I asked her to pick herself up, at times she'd still say, "Oh, ok-I'll walk." And I'm like, "No, I said TROT." I used to carry a dressage whip when she got into this mindset. I might have to do that again-she had gotten a lot better about this. All I have to do is carry it-she'll stay at a trot. We do some zig-zag leg yields going away from the camera, which are not very good, but I'm really happy with our long leg yield across the diagonal of the arena to the quarter line. I need to make her go STRAIGHT for a couple of strides after ending our lateral work, though-you can totally see where she blows through my aids and cuts into the circle early at the very end!
I'm looking at getting a Wintec Pro dressage or Wintec Isabell, and am watching a few on eBay. These saddles fit Lily well when she was leaner. I'm worried the Alta Escuela is not fitting well right now due to Lily's weight loss-it actually feels downhill when we're riding, which is how the wide tree felt the very first time I tried it on her with Sarah's saddle back in FL-it was too wide at the time. It's making posting really hard, because my hips will bump against the pommel, which I know jars Lily. The dressage saddle will give me something to ride her in that fits while waiting for her to fill out again. Plus we can actually consider showing in the dressage saddle...a couple of the riders at the barn show dressage, and there are some local schooling shows close by. It would be easy to tag along for that kind of thing. I just like having goals to train towards; I don't really care about winning...though yes, I did get pissed off when that klutzy rider on the fat dun pony with the Western jog and hexagonal circles back at the Parkland show was awarded higher scores! (Yeah, that was 2 years ago and I'm still holding a grudge...lol And if you have any questions about my circles, watch this video.)
This was my favorite video, taken during our initial walk warm-up:
I'm grinning like an idiot. All I was doing was shifting my weight to one side and the other, absolutely nothing else, and that's what she did! My mare is awesome. :)
Some canter work (as you can see, this is what Charles finds most interesting of my riding, so he always films a lot of it...*lol* He basically caught ALL of our canter work on video...) This is Lily's "forward" canter..it's hysterical how fast if feels, because her strides are short and quick, but how slow it looks...because her strides are slow and quick! It's so lateral, and it's always been like this. But this is one of the reasons why I've expected lower marks in competitive dressage:
Please excuse the blurriness at the beginning of this clip. We were having some camera issues with focusing in dim light, but if you wait a sec it clears up.
Canter-halt!
And some stills:
Lily looks very cute in this one (it's funny how wide her neck has gotten...even if she didn't have the roached mane, it would still look wide), but I was talking to Heather, who had stopped by to chat. And since you can see it up close, we were using the mullen mouth pelham. I switched out my rope reins for a pair of rubberized web reins with stops. It was odd; I always feel like I'm so much more in her face with regular reins, but I wanted to give it a whirl after riding Jez in regular reins.
We did it! Charles came to the barn with me on Monday, and filmed most of our 30-min workout in separate clips. I did a lot of the stuff I've been talking about here so you guys can actually SEE it. Of course, Lily had had Sunday off, and was UP, and somewhat distracted with the horses playing in the field outside and the comings and goings of the outdoor arena. So our figures are not as perfect as they have been, and she is slightly above the bit because she really wanted to ZOOM, but MAN her leg yields!!! Sorry-there is a lot of video with leg yields after I realized we were doing them so well! (We have mirrors in the indoor, but they are small and set in the far corners, so you can only see yourself from the front as you're coming down the rail.) It has taken us 8 months to own them like that-due to poor instruction, Lily had come to HATE them at the trot (see March in 2012 in Review). Now we look like a real dressage pair when we do them. :D My greatest pride in that is that I taught both of us how to do them like that, single-handedly.
But first, I want you guys to be able to also see how far we have come!
Our first (and only so far) show, back in October 2011. Dressage Intro Level C, riding in a snaffle with NO contact:
These were taken May 2012, after the clinic in Stuart, FL with Manuel Trigo. We had just started using the Spanish bit. I was having a really hard time with the double reins (they are flopping against her neck half the time), but she was pushing off from behind correctly maybe 75% of the time, and looking more like a First Level horse thanks to the low port on the bit. Thanks to that bit, she is also doing a lot of head tossing (why I never posted these videos on here before-I wanted to fix the issue before showing her off), and you can appreciate how pissed off she is about lateral work-she is constantly wringing her tail! Also, her body-she was just started to beef up muscle-wise. We had just started this more advanced stuff-collecting at the trot and canter (this was her at her most organized at the time at the canter, without getting flat and fast) and springing forward into a more medium trot when asked down the long sides of the arena. She was irritated with all of it because it was HARD for her! For this series of videos back in May I had her do a much more intense workout because I wanted to see what we looked like when doing all of the little exercises we'd been practicing. In our regular sessions, I was only asking for one or two of these and mixing it up with regular w/t/c work.
Fast forward to the videos below. This is a typical workout for us. Sometimes we do less, sometimes we do more. She is usually a lot more on the bit. I forgot to do the trot-halt-back-up-trot exercise-I wanted to see that one on video! But I had something else planned for us for later and I didn't want to wear her out. She was in the soft rubber pelham, and like I said above, she was responsive but fairly distracted-she usually focuses a lot better than this, and she usually looks a lot prettier, too-nose a lot more vertical. The open arena door behind Charles faces the big field, where all of the horses were clustered at the gate, and you can also see the outdoor arena from there-there were a couple of riders out there too. Lily kept looking that way, and at Charles himself where he was sitting on a stool with the camera. Judy had mentioned this a long time ago-from the ground you can't tell when Lily is nervous/zoomy. Actually, you can't tell when I'm nervous either, as you'll see in the videos in the next post. But you can certainly feel Lily's tension when she's "up"-you get the sensation that she's going to fly away from underneath you at any second, hence my old nickname for her "Lilybird". Judy never realized that this was a frequent sensation during my first lessons with her, until she actually got on Lily herself and got thrown. She was astounded by how cool and collected we look, even when we're both feeding off of each other's nerves. It was enough to make her change the entire way she had been teaching us.
I wasn't nervous in these videos in the indoor. Lily was distracted, but listening. If you pay attention, you can see a couple of times where she seems to try to get fast both at trot and canter, and suddenly slows down. Sometimes she swishes her tail or tosses her head in protest-this is because I've half-halted her to bring her back. I was doing a LOT of half halts with my seat in these videos.
As an aside, I can't get over how much I LOVE my Alta Escuela saddle-I've never had suck a kick-ass dressage seat or leg before. I always had a tendency to sit in more of a chair seat. You can see it in the videos from May 2012. What a difference a saddle can make!
Ugh!!! I haaaate being sick. I'd been feeling really run-down for the last couple of days, which is why I didn't ride Christa this week-I was using all my energy just to keep Lily and myself in training. Wednesday night I woke up at 1:00 am with a raging sore throat. I wasn't able to fall asleep again until 4:00 am...to wake up at 5:00 to go to work. As the day progressed, my throat got worse and my skin started to burn. Thank God we were slow. By the end of the day, I could barely speak, it hurt so much; swallowing was a mission, and I was moving weird because it felt like my clothes were on fire. I could not sit down because being still made me just want to curl up and fall asleep. It was a very horrible day. I rounded the night techs as quickly as I could and rushed to the truck to get to the doctor's ASAP. I've had strep throat before, and it felt just like that; I needed antibiotics or the pain would keep me up all night again. It felt like I had a branding iron between my ears and throat.
Charles came with me to the doc's. It's a large walk-in clinic about 15 minutes from our house, the only place in our area that is open late and on weekends and holidays. They saw me back on the 4th of July when I broke my toe. A big plus about this place is that it is owned by a human criticalist who actually sees patients himself, and they have an on-site lab, radiology room, and pharmacy. Luckily, there was only 1 person in front of us and the wait was not long. The strep throat was confirmed; I was talking in a whisper at that point. They gave me the antibiotics right there, I took a whopping dose of ibuprofen, and then we went to the barn. Charles picked Lily's stall while I slowly set up her feed, walking like an old lady, then showed him with hand gestures how it is done so he could do it for me tomorrow (today). Setting up her feed is kind of like a small science project with her supplements. (I ended up sending him to the barn today with all the instructions written down and a diagram.*lol*) After that we stopped at Pollo Tropical to pick up some of their Caribbean Chicken Soup. If you have a Pollo Tropical close to you, you need to try this soup. It's like your hispanic grandmother's homemade chicken soup, with plantains, corn, yuca, pumpkin and chicken so tender it falls apart when you stir the soup with a spoon. This soup always makes me feel better when I'm sick.
Today the throat is better but I'm still febrile. I texted the barn manager last night to let her know my current state of health, and word got around the barn quickly. Dianne was nice enough to do Lily's stall for me this morning. She even sent me a picture of her so I could see her today:
My little babyface :) Isn't she adorable? Thank you Dianne! This made my day.
And here is the video that I was talking about in this post a couple of weeks ago, that Charles took for me. Yes, we still have A LOT of work ahead of us, but one of the main reasons for the existence of this blog is to record Lily's progress. Sure, I could put draw reins or a chambon on her (a trainer in this area has all of her students using chambons for riding. *cringe*) and get her head down 100% of the time, but this will create problems in her back and neck, and cause her to develop her muscles incorrectly from forcing her body into a position it is not ready for. I'm in no hurry; I'm just looking forward to see her develop properly through correct and timely training. And no, I'm not completely dissing the use of artificial aids in the training and development of a horse, as there are people out there that have great success with them (and I've used them myself in the past but couldn't see how this would benefit the horse in the long run-I wouldn't want my head forced down for an entire workout session), but I've seen way too many horses ruined by their incorrect use, or sometimes simply overuse.
You can see the moments where she drops her head and reaches for the bit, and also how her head swings from side to side when she's happy (but not on the bit). I still have a bad habit of riding with very little contact after so many years of riding hot TBs off the track. We're working on that too.
So that is the end of today's report. I'm going back to bed.
First video of us together!! It sucks because it was taken by placing the camera on top of the wall that lines the arena, and I miscalculated how wide the shot was, so there are significant periods of time where we disappear from view and you can only hear her hooves. Oh well. At the beginning she does a near-perfect shoulder-in, and we do a couple of steps of leg yields. You can also see that she is, indeed, a pretty nice mover. This is the trot that we have been working hard to achieve for a while now, and this was the first time she really nailed it for the entire session.
