Everybody Jump! Jump!

I just started a new schedule at work -- for the next month, I work nights (8pm-8am), so that frees up a little daylight for riding :) As I told my trainer, I'm scheduling my sleeping time around my riding time this month...maybe not my smartest idea ever, but we'll see how it goes (right now I'm on night #2...).

I kicked off this month of "daytime riding" with a mid-day jumping lesson on Surf yesterday. We started off with some flatwork, and working on getting surf to be more responsive off my leg aids. Surf gets very pissy when I nag at him with my spur...which has a tendency to happen as he is one L-A-Z-Y horse with a real aversion to going forward at times. We've been instead working what Lisa Wilcox calls "boxing" -- using the flat side of your entire leg rather than poking at the horse with a spur. When the horse does not respond to a subtle leg aid, you take your whole leg away from the saddle (from the hip), and clap the flat side of if against the horse. Can be done with one or both legs. This took a lot of practice for me, as I just was not that coordinated :) Plus, try doing this at the canter or gallop :P finally it seemed to click with me, and it got a much more effective...and less irritable...response from Surfie. Then it was on to jumping!

Jimmy W had come down to teach the day before...I couldn't get off work to get a lesson with him...but his gymnastics were still set up and my trainer had gone through the patterns with several horses, so we decided to spend some time on the patterns with her. The first exercise was similar to one we'd done last time with Jimmy: vertical - 1 stride - vertical - 1 stride - oxer - 2 strides oxer. However, to spice things up this time, we jumped some of the fences in the grid backwards...or without ground lines...to work on keeping my eye on the top of the fence, and not depending on the ground lines for security. Not having ground lines was very difficult for me, and led to some awkward jumping until I really kept my eyes on the top of the rail. Something that Jimmy and Julia (and Betsy, who I rode with in NC)are very big on is keeping your eye on the top rail of the jump -- different than what I was taught growing up that you pick a point somewhere in the distance (ie: arena fence, tree outside the arena, etc) to look at and you focused on that point rather than on the jump. J & J both are big on watching the top rail of the jump through your horse's ears...and once you can't see the fence anymore between their ears, you're looking for your next jump. It took me a long time to get over wanting to look down when you get to the point that you don't see your rail anymore :) Grids are good exercises to work on this method of looking at your jump, since when you no longer see the first jump, your eye goes to the next element in the gymnastic line...and it forces you to look at each element individually as you go down the line...which helps with the anxiety provoked by turning into a gymnastic line and seeing a sea of white poles stretching out in front of you! for the next exercise, we added to the first line by jumping through the line, then having to come out of the line, roll back, and canter single verticals...with no ground lines :( After that we popped through some bounces and moved out into the cross-country field!

I haven't jumped any xc fences in a month, and we're doing Training next week, so I wanted to get out and put a few things together...and to work on my fear of jumping up banks. Yes, I have a TERRIBLE fear of jumping up banks...especially banks out of water. Now, this is an irrational fear in some ways, as jumping a bank is no different than jumping a vertical...same concept. However, when riding Sprite, he chested a bank out of water and flipped over...luckily tossing me 25 feet through the air so he didn't land on me. Since then, I've had a fear of banks...especially out of water...and I tend to ride them like a backwards monkey. J's solution to this is for me to jump banks, lots of banks, every time we jump...nothing like a little exposure therapy. We worked on paring a varity of other fences with the single up bank -- jump the tires to the up bank, big ditch to the up bank, etc. then moved on to adding a fence after the bank to make me get myself back together after the anxiety of jumping up the bank. Finally we put a few little courses together that involved something even worse than the single up bank...the double up bank! Aaaaaah! I just need to remember that they jump FINE as long as I do the following:
1. keep my leg on
2. sit up
3. keep shoulders BACK! I cannot lean at the bank, or there's no way to get up it!
4. give with the reins, but not with my arms
5. BREATHE!
(and in the case of double banks)
6. half-halt, balance, then leg and send him forward to the 2nd bank
it's really not rocket science...and I'm getting more comfortable with them. We also spent some time talking about ditches...I don't have a problem with them, per say, but I've had some ditchy horses in the past. We talked about how ditches are a "rider fence" as they scare riders more than horses. To horses, a plain ditch is just another canter stride...and a ditch in combination with a fence (ditch and wall, trakhaner, etc) serves as a takeoff point for the horse. So, for those huge ditch and walls...the bigger the wall, the wider the ditch, as the horse needs to take off from far enough back to clear the wall :)

We've got 2 more lessons next week, so there should be more updates soon! Huey is doing well post-hock-injections...just slow work for a few days then back to work! We got a new coggins pulled, so here's hoping Huey is show-bound soon. Sprite has his "audition" as a therapeutic riding horse next week, so I need to put in a little elbow grease getting the little guy all spiffed up :)