Remember how excited I was last week about the dark purple breeches? Yeah well. They accidentally sent me burgundy. Burgundy is not purple.

Which wouldn’t be bad, because they’re beautiful breeches, but a) I already have a pair of burgundy breeches, b) they do not measure how their size chart said they did, so they’re too small, c) the company (QJ Riding Wear) is in Australia. I emailed them to see what they wanted to do, since not only are they not the color I ordered, they also don’t measure as advertised. They were not very helpful and asked if I thought I could just sell them here. They seemed to have no interest in getting me my purple pair that I was so excited about, or rectifying the mistake. I said I would try, and that was the last I heard from them. No gold stars for customer service. Or maybe I’m just accustomed to how fabulous Riding Warehouse is to deal with and my expectations are too high.

Too bad, really, because like I said, I quite like the breeches. Very very Animo-esque and a gorgeous merlot color. If anyone is interested in them, I’ll sell them to you for a bit less than what they cost with shipping from Australia to the US. They are AUS size 14, which was supposed to have been their equivalent of US 30/32, but the waist measures just a hair under 30 so they’re really more like 28. A slim-fitting 28. They have a sock bottom, silicone knee patch, and silver detailing at the back zipper pockets. I’ll sell them for $75USD including shipping anywhere in the US.

And I guess I won’t be getting the purple, since the company seems uninterested in my plight. Boo.

It wasn’t a total loss of a week for breeches though, because I got my hunter green Ovation Aqua-X breeches in the mail and absolutely love them. The color is stunning with my chocolate brown boots, and I like the new sock bottom a lot. As usual, they fit me perfectly. Ovation to the rescue! Maybe someday they’ll make the Aqua-X in dark purple…

I also bought Presto his first rope halter (or as I like to call them – MANNERS), and ordered him a yearling size in rainbow. Because he’s my unicorn, and I can torture him however I want.

I can’t wait to see him give me that patented Presto side eye while he’s wearing that thing. I won’t even be able to take him seriously.

Still trying to decide if I should bother buying him a winter blanket or not. He’s pretty impressively hairy, I dunno that he’ll actually need anything to keep him warm. But then again, it might be nice to at least have a waterproof sheet on standby, just in case…

No, not these kind of horse toys:

I’m looking for suggestions more along the line of these:

But better. A lot better.

A couple weeks ago when Presto was stuck inside due to weather, he decided to take his angst out on the wooden support structure in his stall’s run. He’s not the first to go for those things, but he went at it pretty hard and heavy there for a few days, despite having a huge pile of hay to eat. Bored Presto is Bad Presto.

Michelle tried spraying the wood with all the different things known to man to deter chewing. Presto is a) smart b) not a quitter, so he figured out that if he could just endure the flavor long enough to lick it off, his problem was solved. Eventually she wrapped all the wood in a few layers of chicken wire, and that finally put a kibosh on the chewing. The wood beams were saved, and now turnout is possible again, so it’s not such an issue anymore.

Presto will likely find himself stuck inside again at some point though, with winter coming, and I’d rather he not find other naughty things to eat or do.  He has a Jolly Ball, which gets played with a little bit, but it’s not interesting enough to keep him truly entertained. He hasn’t been super impressed with the big horse sized ball either. His diet is very very very carefully managed and balanced, so I don’t want to get him any of those stall toys with treats or food either. Plus he’s so smart I don’t think those would last long anyway.

I’ve heard of different homemade type horse toys, involving milk jugs or soccer balls or ropes… has anyone made anything like that before? Did they work? Or are there any horse toys out there on the market that helped at keeping a particularly smart and hard to impress baby horse entertained for more than 5 minutes?

For Day 2 and 3 of the clinic, Trainer was riding Henry. She’s just getting back into her normal riding routine post-baby, and really only has young horses at the moment, so she hasn’t jumped anything of much size or technicality for like… a year. Henry is kind of perfect for helping a rider knock the rust off, because he’s got a high tolerance for mistakes, but at the same time he’s a HUGE tattletale. If you do something even slightly wrong, you’ll know it. Basically they got a little bit of a teacher-student role reversal this weekend, and Henry got to return the favor to someone who has really been so instrumental in bringing him (and me!) along over these past couple years.

Her stadium lesson on Saturday went a lot like mine. Lots of working on rocking the canter back onto the hind end and lifting his ribcage UP to his withers, and lots of working on her own body control. Henry seemed kind of pissed about stadium 2 days in a row when there were a bunch of lovely XC fences just outside of the arena, but he tolerated his torture with nothing more than large amounts of Resting Mare Face. It was pretty fun to watch the lesson progress and see Trainer finding her “sea legs” again as things went along.

The weather was quite miserable, so freaking humid in the morning that everything had a layer of wetness to it. The day ended up being 92 degrees with 60% humidity by the afternoon. Seems pretty excessive for mid-October, Texas. Henry had to spend a while under the hose to get cooled down when he was done. I was glad that I had clipped him the day before the clinic, although I’m not sure how helpful it really was considering the humidity.

Sunday was cross country day, finally something Henry was happy about. They started with little exercises, eventually stringing together some courses and then some harder combinations. A lot of the focus was on the ability to quickly bring the horse back from an open XC canter to rebalance for more of the shorter bouncier stadium canter that is required for combinations… a little bit of a struggle in the beginning with Henry, but eventually she got it done. He was pretty pumped to be out and jumped everything she pointed him at, regardless of mistakes. The first time he leaped into the water I’m pretty sure he was screaming “CANNONBALL” as she had to quickly gather her reins back up to make the turn for the jump out.

Really cross country day heard a lot of the same concepts repeated from stadium day… especially “put him up into your outside rein”. Like if I had a dollar for every time I heard outside rein all weekend from Ashley, for real. She ain’t wrong, though. Another thing she really stressed was that it was important to keep a conversation going with your horse all the way around, instead of just sitting up there like a bump on a log (“bumps on a log don’t go cross country”) or setting your pace and then just kind of expecting the horse to gallop along on autopilot. It was important to continually check in with them, make sure they were with you, make sure they understood what you wanted, make sure the balance was always there and ready, etc. It really helped the horses not just perform better, but they seemed more confident in the exercises.

At the end, Ashley’s main takeaway for Henry (both for me and Trainer) was that either we could let him go around and be an average cute little horse, or we could really ride every step, create the powerful canter, improve the balance, and then suddenly he was a machine. Or more accurately, she said it like “MA-CHEEEEN”. He performs to whatever level he’s ridden, basically. Ride him averagely, and he’s an average horse. Ride him well and he’s a great horse. Which really is absolutely 100% accurate, so I need to make myself be a better rider so that he can be a better horse. What else is new?

But now I feel like I have a lot more specific tools in my toolbox to get that done. When we got home I unloaded Henry from the trailer and immediately drove out to my jump field to set up some exercises while everything was still fresh in my mind. I will be riding around thinking about straight bouncy canters, outside rein, my core, separating my hands from my body, quicker reaction times, and riding his girth uphill to the base. Maybe we’ll actually even succeed and get better.

Either way, I can’t recommend Ashley enough. She isn’t just a naturally talented rider, she’s also a really excellent teacher, and it’s hard to find both of those things together. She can very clearly get her points across and knows exactly when to push and what to say to get the results she’s looking for. It’s also really obvious that she cares a lot about what she does and she really gives it 110% of her effort and attention. I’ve been to a lot of clinics with a lot of people, some of them really big name riders, and none of them were as useful to me as she was. It wasn’t one of those “one size fits all” things where there’s one exercise set up and every horse does the exact same thing throughout the day.  Instead everyone got exactly what they needed, individual attention, and specific exercises to help them with their particular horse. Nothing cookie cutter about it. Those of you in Area 2, I’d definitely look her up and try to ride with her. But if any other folks out there are thinking of bringing someone into your area for a clinic, for sure look at Ashley! 10/10 would recommend.

Well, y’all, I think I found my new favorite clinician. I also got my ass completely and thoroughly kicked. It was awesome.

Since I was letting Trainer ride Henry in the actual clinic on Saturday and Sunday, I had a private lesson with Ashley on Friday evening. I have to admit that I didn’t really know a whole lot about Ashley going in. I knew that she had taken an OTTB all the way up through 4*, and that my trainer said she’s amazing, and that she’s worked a lot with Buck and Kim Severson. I had quickly perused her faceboook and Instagram, like a proper internet stalker, but you never really know someone until you see them in action. Over the weekend I got to know her more, and it seems like she’s ridden horses for just about every BNT, plus she rides timber racers, plus she coaches the Randolph-Macon eventing team. I don’t know where she gets the energy, but omg she has a ton of it.

I went out for my lesson and we did the usual “tell me about you and the horse” thing, then we went right to work. I got about one lap into canter before the feedback started. And never stopped. Right off the bat she nailed me for my canter being too long and weak, so we spent a while working on me properly getting him back on his hocks and getting him bouncy yet forward and straight. Since he’s kind of a downhill horse she wanted his poll to stay a little bit higher, and think about bringing his ribcage up toward his withers. That alone helped tremendously. Ashley has a really good way of wording things that make you easily visualize what you’re trying to do, and therefore you end up automatically applying the right aids to get it done.

From there we moved on to a grid of bounce canter poles, to further cement the idea of getting the horse light on the forehand and driving from behind. As we went, she built the grid up, and really focused on my position and how it affects the horse. Especially my inability to really separate my hands from my body. When my hands go forward, my shoulders tend to follow, and vice versa – when I actually sit up, I tend to lift my hands with them. I’ve always had an issue with this, and I struggled with it here too. I’ll definitely be spending a lot of time at home over tiny bounces and small jumps, working on making all my parts more independent.

It didn’t take long through the grid before Ashley could easily see my biggest issues, and what the likely effects of them are. Basically she said that my reaction time on the backside of the fence is slow and I don’t get him rocked back enough, which means he probably gets long and flat and has rails in the combinations, etc etc. I mean… she pretty much perfectly described our stadium round at Meadow Creek a few weeks ago. Creepily accurate.

So we started doing some courses, many of them with some tighter turns to really force me to use my outside aids, get my shit back together sooner, and keep him back on his hocks. At first there was mixed success. She is really really insistent on riding EVERY step and really producing the horse’s best canter and best shape. It’s work, y’all. There wasn’t a single stride where I could just sit there and be like “whee I’m on a horse”. Yeah no. If that happened I flubbed the exercise and got the dreaded “No, start again!”. So, like… sit up and ride the damn horse EVERY STEP. Duly noted.

The biggest things she said that really stuck with me were 1) I tend to get a stride out and think my job is done, just kind of sitting there the last step. That means he’s weak off the ground that last stride and doesn’t jump up and around with as much power. I have to be sure to really hold him with my core all the way to and through takeoff, so that we aren’t losing it all in that last step. 2) The best thing she said to me all weekend (that is my new mantra) was “ride his girth uphill to the base”. So basically think of really lifting his rib cage and riding him UP all the way to the fence. Ride everything like it’s uphill, keeping him back on his hocks and making sure the hind legs stay active and underneath his body. For some reason the words “ride his girth uphill to the base” just made the whole feeling really click, and it worked out extremely well.

 

While it was definitely never perfect, it was much better by the end. He just really needs that help from me to get the proper canter, and to keep it all the way to the jumps. And I need to stop collapsing my core at the base. And use my freaking outside leg. No big deal right?

For a 45 minute lesson, I came home with a ridiculous amount of homework. But I also feel like I came home with a much better understanding of what we need to be working toward, and how my horse really needs me to ride him in order to be at his best. Definitely some epiphany moments there. Ashley is a magician. Her eye for both the horse and the rider is pretty incredible… a lot of the time you get one or the other, but it’s hard to find someone that sees so much minute detail in both. Totally worth it!