Month: June 2021

On Saturday afternoon my friend Stacy proposed that we meet at Dover and then go get Indian food. Which, if you’re after my heart, that’s the surefire way, it takes about 0% convincing to get me to go along with a plan like that. I didn’t need anything at Dover, but I’m always up to poke around and see what they’ve got. Plus, like… if they had some white breeches that I didn’t hate, I wasn’t opposed to adding a pair.

And then, a couple days before, I found myself lusting after a coat and shirt online.

They’re in the UK, naturally, because every damn thing I love is always from overseas. The brand’s size chart was a little wonky looking, and in centimeters, so I figured I’d do the responsible thing and actually measure myself instead of guessing at size. I measured… looked, and… huh. That measurement was a couple inches less than it used to be. So I measured two more times. Yup, that shit shrunk. This led me to go pull out all my Motionlite coats, which used to fit pretty well, and son of a bitch if they weren’t too big. Like… the bust and arms were saggy. I could fit an arm down the front of the coat. That’s not a cute look for riding clothes, y’all.

I mean, yes… since I got my spin bike in late February I’ve been riding it 6 days a week without fail since the day I got it because I love it. And I added weights 5x a week a couple months ago because turns out I really like that too when I’m in the privacy of my own home and not in a gym being leered at by creeps. I haven’t done it to lose weight though, I’m doing it because I took one look at Presto with a pro on him and was like “Damn bitch, you’re going to have to get a lot stronger if you think you’re going to stand a chance at riding that thing right”. And it’s true, I needed to – and still need to – get a lot stronger. He is a big horse that is A Lot to manage and I want to at least be physically up to the task by the time he comes home. I don’t even own a scale though (bad things happen when you give me metrics like that to obsess over, I learned that a long time ago), or even a full length mirror in the tiny house yet (who knows what I ever look like when I actually go out in public, I sure don’t have a clue). Plus like, 99% of the time whatever pants I have on are elasticized since I work from home these days. I did have to go buy new jeans a month ago and ended up with a size smaller than before so I knew there had been some changes in my size at least. Mostly I’m just excited that I can tell that I really do feel A LOT stronger, my core is noticeably improved, and my arms are starting to get some nice shape and tone. I totally failed to consider what these changes meant for my riding clothes though, particularly my show clothes.

Confession: I don’t put on real breeches that often, I usually wear my tights with the phone pocket when I’m riding at home. So after I tried on my coats I pulled out my whites and they were a bit sad-sacky too, although mostly in the waist. I always shrink from the top down (the boobs are the first to go, and that’s a-ok with me), I’ve got these big old child-bearing hips (that have never and shall never bear a child, thank you very much) and meaty thighs that always stay proportionately bigger than my top half. So now I find myself kind of in between sizes on breeches and all of mine are gapping majorly at the waist. I was hoping Dover might have some that either ran a little big or ran a little small and would fit my in-betweenness nicely, but no luck there. Mostly because out of the many racks of breeches there was only ONE model that I actually liked the feel of the fabric, but they were full seat with way too much silicone. I didn’t even try any on. We need to talk about fabric and how to use silicone appropriately, breech companies. It doesn’t need to look like you used 15 sticks of hot glue on the ass.

Since we were at Dover anyway, I found my way to the rack of Motionlites and tried on the size down from what mine are. I expected the smaller size to be too small still (because in-betweenness) but I’ll be damned if it didn’t fit way better. No more saggy arms or bust in the smaller size. DAMN. IT. My carefully curated collection of Motionlites – 3 to be exact – was undeniably too big. One of mine still had the tags on and another had been worn a grand total of once. I thought for a second that maybe I could just forget how much better the other size was compared to my current ones, but no… it was one of those things you can’t unfeel. Hence me coming home and listing all my coats for sale the next day. As soon as I sell the last one I will replace the navy and the hunter green ones with other size and we’ll call it a wash. All of this to say that if you see me with new coats and shit, or selling things, don’t be judgy… this is why.

I did order the pretty coat and shirt from the UK though, and since I sat kind of perfectly between sizes on their chart (OF COURSE I DO) I ended up just ordering two sizes of the coat and two sizes of the shirt. I’ll sell whichever ones don’t fit for what they cost me to buy it, and someone here will get the benefit of not having to pay UK shipping, and I’ll get the benefit of not having to make a decision and end up with the wrong size. Win-win?

I did buy one thing at Dover though, and that was a sun shirt. As much as I don’t like most of their house brand stuff, I do think their sunshirts are decent, and they had one in a gorgeous steel blue color that I loved. I wore it for my lesson on Monday and 10/10 would recommend, it’s my new favorite color sunshirt I think. Looks on point with navy.

I have a few other sunshirts I need to sell, as soon as I can wrap my brain around it. There was one boon in all of this unanticipated spur of the moment clothes-trying-on at least – my beloved yellow and navy Boy O Boy belt that hasn’t fit in like 3 years actually fits again! And looks smashing with the steel blue shirt/navy pants combo. So glad I kept it!

I need to get another sale post organized when I have the energy. Today is not that day.

Well guys, guess who’s entered in an actual event?

I got to looking at the weather forecast and the temperatures actually look pretty promising for the MeadowCreek show in two weeks. Mid 80’s in Texas in June??? That’s just not a thing. Normally we’re at or near triple digits by now. But indeed the temperatures are supposed to be pretty good, so I was like hmm… Henry could go run around the Novice right? He isn’t the fit, svelte Prelim horse that he used to be, but he still gets ridden a lot and he’s definitely plenty fit for Novice. I mean… is he “tuned up” at this point? Not particularly. Has he worn a bit more than like 5 times in the past 2 years? No. Do I ride him in my dressage saddle at all anymore? Not really. Have we jumped a full course in the past like month and a half? Negative. But even if we’re mega rusty he’s still an experienced event horse, Novice should theoretically be a pretty easy hop-around for him (the after-the-fact benefit of all those years of hard work).

Of course, the reason that the temperatures are staying so mild is that it won’t quit freaking raining. Like for real. Every other day it pours buckets.

Is there a chance of rain every single day in the 10 day forecast? Yup. But, ya know… worst case scenario the show gets rained out or if the footing is too muddy I can just scratch (Henry isn’t drilled and tapped these days, nor was he much of a mudder even when he was). This is clearly a very low key, low pressure affair. If we can go, great, if we can’t, oh well. We aren’t working towards anything, it’s purely just for fun.

But I did start to get a few things together. First, I ran my idea past my trainer who responded with a resounding “DO IT!”, and then I scheduled a jump lesson. It’s rained so much here that my jump field is just a soggy squishy overgrown jungle and that probably won’t change anytime in the near future. I had a jump set up in the dressage arena, but.. ya know… that doesn’t really mimic a jump course nor can you really jump at pace in a small arena. So we scheduled a jump lesson for Monday, come hell or (literal) high water.

Which meant that on Sunday, Henry got clipped.

I usually clip him every summer anyway, to help him deal with the heat, I just moved it up by a couple weeks. I used to be skeptical of the summer clipping thing until I realized just how much hair comes off some of these thicker-coated horses. It’s a lot more than you would think, especially over their back half. Henry always seems noticeably cooler after it’s all gone, so even if there’s nothing worse than clipping a horse while sweating profusely and getting it all completely stuck to you, it’s still totally worth it for him.

I can already tell that I’m cursing myself by even putting this much preparation and thought into it. The show is gonna rain out for sure now…

Anyway. After Friday night’s complete deluge (I haven’t seen rain like that in a very long time, it was INSANE) it was too wet/slick to ride all weekend so on Monday I loaded him up for our lesson with Henry having had two days off. Not a big deal at all, by age 14 he’s pretty much the same horse all the time anyway, with maybe just a little more dolphining in the canter depending on how wild he is. It was the first time I’ve hauled him anywhere in a while though, so there was some mournful screaming for the first few minutes before he settled into his hay.

My trainer’s place got a lot of rain too, so about half of her jump field was quite squishy. What I really needed though, was to jump some lines, and to just have more space to open the canter up to what it needed to be. We had two lines where the footing was good enough, a regular one and a bending, and enough space to get the pace, so it worked just fine. I warmed up, we popped a few singles while I tried to remember what the appropriate jumping pace was (it’s always more than I think, I’ll catch on to that eventually right? Probably not.), and then jumped each line twice. By the third line I remembered how to rev the engine in the corner, re-balance, and then maintain the canter out of it, and tada everything clicked back in. I will say though, I think it’s harder to see a good distance to a smaller fence – they were set Novice height – than it is a larger one. There are just so many tempting options, I want to sample them all. I swear it was easier when they were so big that your only choice was to just keep coming at it no matter what.

Mission accomplished though, and hopefully it’ll dry at least enough to jump a little bit at home in the next couple weeks. If not, well… we’ll wing it.

I’m still waffling on what to do about the dressage part. I’m very tempted to just do it in his jump tack and not really worry about it, mostly because the few times I’ve sat in my dressage saddle lately I’ve just felt really displeased with it, like I’m fighting it a lot. I was never totally in love with how the block hit my thigh (I have a pretty long femur and prefer something more forward), but I think after taking so much time away from it it’s become even more obvious how it’s not really helping me out. Of course, the thought of buying a new dressage saddle for Henry is like… hilarious. Why bother. Granted, if I’m not going to use the one I have I should probably just sell it. All it’s really doing at this point is sitting in my tack room depreciating in value. Not that I want to deal with selling a saddle, which is about as fun as getting a root canal. Anybody want a Devoucoux Loreak? *cries in equestrian*