Or – Happy No Stirrup November, everyone!

Normally I don’t really participate in this kind of stuff. I have enough struggles in my riding without introducing new and better ways to make it even harder. But something came over me yesterday. Some kind of “I will do this and I will be a better rider!”. Why do I do these things to myself? Who sold me on this hype?

First of all, I was in my dressage saddle. Which… I don’t even want to say this in public but I’m riding in it so much these days that I’m actually more comfortable in that one now instead of my jump saddle. Clearly this whole dressage thing has gone way too far. Anyway, getting ON the horse was the hardest part. Why is the cantle so high? Why is the mounting block so short? Why did I take my stirrups off BEFORE I was mounted?

I did about 10 minutes without stirrups before I wanted to work on a few little things that I thought would go better if I had them, so back on they went. It was fine, my legs were already a bit grumpy anyway. I figured this morning would be rough, but I woke up feeling surprisingly great. Until about halfway through my morning run, when I debated just laying down in the middle of the road and waiting for morning rush hour.

Part of it is that it’s still so hot. I kind of just wanted to die this morning when it was 75 degrees with 95% humidity at 5am while I was running. Don’t get me wrong, that’s way better than two months ago, but still… it’s NOVEMBER. We had like 2 days of brisk, fall-like weather before it was back into the mid to upper 80’s, where it’s gonna stay for a while. Henry and I were kind of enjoying being able to breathe, and not sweating profusely. He is about as unenthusiastic as a horse can get at the moment, and it looks like I’ll be body clipping him AGAIN (for approximately the 9 thousandth time this year) next week.

We’ll see how much no stirrup work I actually do this month. I think for a lot of people this is their off season, but we still have shows going on and I still have a lot to do. For instance, we’re headed to a small local show on Saturday to do a couple of dressage tests. Yeah, dressage ONLY… Henry is gonna be pissed. I briefly entertained entering Training A and Prelim A, but our sitting trot work is still pretty inconsistent. Some days Henry is solidly “there” with me, other days we struggle with tension. I didn’t think it was ready to roll out in public yet. So Training A and Training B it is.

On Sunday I’m going to try to pop over to Dressage Trainer’s barn and audit the Charles de Kunffy clinic. There is entirely too much dressage in my life right now.

It’s officially NOVEMBER (holy crap) which means that if you want to order awesome, custom Christmas presents for people, now is the time. I post every year about Hamer & Clay because it’s one of my absolute favorite companies that makes some of the absolute best gifts for horse people or animal lovers in general. Plus it’s a small business. Plus the artist is a horse person. Plus they’re super affordable. It’s a winning combination all around.

For those who aren’t familiar with Hamer & Clay, they make custom ornaments or magnets of horses, dogs, cats, unicorns, or just about any other animal you can imagine – real or imaginary.

Every year when I decorate my tree, my H&C ornaments are my favorite thing to put on. They make me smile every time I see them, and they’ve also been a huge hit every time I’ve given one as a gift (which is a lot by now).

Part of what makes them so great is the impeccable attention to detail. Color, markings, distinguishing features, tack details and color… H&C does some pretty incredible things with clay.

If you don’t put up a Christmas tree, or if want to get something that you can enjoy year-round, I highly recommend a magnet! You can stick your favorite animal on your fridge, or on your file cabinet at work (not that I’ve done this or anything) and get to see it every day.

The thing about H&C is that she can only make so many ornaments in time for Christmas, and orders are filled on a first come, first served basis. If you want to make sure you have them before the holidays, get those orders in NOW! Just in case you need any incentive to do that, H&C has offered a coupon code exclusively to my readers. SHOP THROUGH THIS LINK (which applies the code likemagic to your cart automatically!) to get 30% off  *TODAY ONLY*.  

And while you’re thinking about holiday orders, remember that this Friday November 3 is the deadline for custom holiday orders from Boy-O-Boy Bridleworks and It’s a Haggerty’s sunshirts! If the Bonnet Fits also posted this morning saying that they only have room for FIVE more bonnets in time for Christmas delivery!

Oh, and don’t also forget that the Two Socks Designs saddle pad giveaway closes on Friday as well.

I simply cannot resist TAAHH’s blog hop asking us to showcase our first horses!

I was a certified barn rat when I was a kid, spending as much time as possible at the barn, working off lessons, grooming at shows, and sitting on as many horses as my trainer would allow me to toss a leg over. Old, young, crazy, quiet… whatever. If it had 4 hooves and a tail, I was happy. In those days I rode at an A show hunter/jumper barn, and as the years went on it seemed like all of my peers got their own horses. I had a couple lease horses for a while, but mostly I just rode whatever sale horses we had in the barn at the moment. I fell in love with one in particular, and when he was sold to another girl in the barn I was pretty devastated. Enter Charlie.

Although that wasn’t his name to start with. This tall, scrawny, neurotic TB had come from one of the horse trader guys that my trainer got a lot of his sale horses from. Who the heck knows what the horse’s backstory was, or how he ended up with a horse trader. He was bodyclipped (really badly) when he arrived but he came with no name, so he was called T-4. The horse trader’s name started with a T, and whichever ones came without names usually got a number added on to the end. Except my trainer forgot that we’d already had a T-4, so really Charlie was T-4-II. Instead my trainer started referring to him as “the brown horse” which I morphed into Charlie Brown… thus Charlie. I started riding him right off the bat, and he proved to be quite the interesting horse. He was older, probably early to mid-teens, yet he acted like a horse that hadn’t been off the track for long. He weaved, he roared, he rushed the jumps, he ran off with me at least once per ride, and sometimes for funsies he’d go flying backwards when you put your foot in the stirrup to mount. He was quirky as hell.

But the horse could also jump, and he loved the job. Granted, getting him stopped at the end of the course usually required running him into something, but he would jump anything from anywhere and never touch a rail. This barn rat was smitten. The best part? Nobody else really wanted to ride him. I had him all to myself.

Eventually the pressure ramped up for us to either buy him or he was going to be shown to prospective buyers, and my parents agreed. He may have had more than a few screws loose, but he was mine, and that’s what really mattered to 16 year old me.

My trainer made me show him in the hunters and eq a few times (I can only assume this was for his own entertainment, because lord have mercy) before we switched over to the jumper ring. I preferred the jumpers anyway, so I was super happy with that, and Charlie brought home more than his fair share of tricolors.

After high school I moved to Maryland to be a working student, and Charlie came with me. I’m pretty sure he weaved for all 1500 of those miles on the Equine Express semi, because he unloaded looking absolutely skeletal and more than half-crazed. But he settled into pasture life in Maryland pretty well, and together we started learning the ropes of eventing. We went to Full Moon, and Jenny Camp, and Elysian Hills, starting at BN and then moving to N. I only had a jump saddle and all of my hunter show clothes, so we stuck out like a sore thumb, but we did it. Eventually we moved back home and tackled our first Training, where I literally fell off at jump #3 (a big table that he for some reason decided to bank, throwing me over his shoulder). In those days Training riders could get back on after a fall, so once someone caught my horse for me, I got back on and we finished the course. It was only when I got off afterward that I realized he’d stepped on me and I had cracked a couple of ribs.

Our dressage was always borderline hideous, and he legit had THE BOUNCIEST TROT of any horse I’ve ever encountered in my life, but that horse was nothing if not tryer. He taught me how to be brave, humble, patient, and persistent, but most of all he taught me what it was really like to love and appreciate a horse. He might not have looked like much to an outside observer, but he meant the world to me.

Over the years he mellowed a lot and seemed more settled with his life. Eventually Charlie went to the retirement farm when his hocks could no longer hold up to the job, and he got to live out his days with his best TB friend, eating all the grass he could possibly desire. One day he was found dead out in the field, likely of a heart attack or aneurysm, and seemed to have passed quickly and peacefully. He was buried beneath his favorite tree.

I always wonder where Charlie came from, what his story was, and what happened to him along the way, but mostly I’m just glad that he found me. Nothing would have been the same without that crazy old nut of a horse.

Yep, it’s true. Because riding is so easy, and clearly I have mastered it.

For those who would like to see that picture a little bit bigger:

That’s the fat green ass of talent, right there, y’all.

Or really that’s what happens when you pick all the way to the base and lean up the neck and your saintly horse is like “omg for real stop it”. Somehow I didn’t fall off, I think only because Henry decided to wheel around left instead of right. I still ended up sitting on my right stirrup somehow. It was graceful.

So, uh… as you can see, we had a jump lesson this weekend. And despite that truly brilliant moment, it was actually a good lesson.

I’m still working on getting (and keeping) that good uphill canter all the way to the base, which I’m fairly certain is something I will be working on forever and ever and ever. With Henry it really requires riding every single step, working on getting the hind end to take a slightly longer step than the front, and thinking about slight haunches-in around every turn to always keep the inside hind under him. It’s hard. It’s exhausting. It requires every brain cell I have. It was a lot easier to just lope around smaller fences on the forehand. But every once in a while we get it right and it’s like OOOOHHHH THERE IT IS.

And then, ya know… it’s usually gone again by the next jump. Baby steps.

Trainer put the jumps up a bit bigger for this lesson, since it’s our last jump lesson before Texas Rose in a couple weeks. We jumped a bit over Training height, which is what I always need. Gotta get to the show and think the jumps look small. I’m glad that these days Training does always look small, and Prelim doesn’t look particularly huge either, which is good for my confidence. I make less stupid mistakes when I’m confident.

I said LESS.  Let’s be realistic here.

I’m really happy with some of the lesson video, and not at all happy with other parts of the video. I still see a whole lot to work on, and I’m kind of hit or miss with my efforts at this point. But I guess that’s to be expected when you make changes… there’s a strugglebus of a learning curve. Sometimes you’re inside the bus, sometimes you’re underneath it.

I’m looking forward to capping off our season (as paltry as it may have been) at Texas Rose, then spending a few months trying to keep polishing everything up. This year was about moving up and not killing myself in the process, and it required a lot of “next level” finesse and work when it comes to my riding. Next year I’d like to… ya know… be at least a little competitive at the recognized shows.

Or at least not almost go flying over my horse’s head. That’d work too.