Uffda

Another week creeping towards half gone... this time crap is making me feel old. I rode Friday and Sunday this week, and meant to ride yesterday. My beloved FH reminded me that perhaps if I am home sick with strep-like symptoms, maybe I shouldn't be riding, either... so I didn't ride. Instead I stayed home and we burned through most of a season of How To Get Away With Murder, which is intense and I love it.

Friday's ride was both naughty and nice - nice, because the baby horse was generally well behaved. We did lateral work, walk-canter and collection-extension work, and I don't remember anything spectacularly bad. In fact, she was quite well behaved, despite being kind of wet-about-the ears (literally) because she'd been out in the rain all day. 

The old lady mare, however, has a perpetual case of the zooms and somehow decided that every time we crossed the center line, we were doing a flying change. This is humerous, because Foxie can't do a real flying change, especially now that her hind end is messed up from the suspensory injury. Because I was holding her into the bend, she couldn't actually throw the new lead, so she was basically herp-derp-grunting while leaping randomly into the air. I was riding Fox in my usual set up of Thinline bareback pad and her french link pelham, but I really could have used stirrups for that ride. We had a 30 minute come-to-Jesus ride with lots of tension and Fox spent most of that ride not wanting to come through her back, relax her jaw or move at any gait other than a canter. 

That set of rides was delightful, half sarcastic, half not. 

On Sunday, I was in a bit of a rush; I had a birthday cheesecake and dinner to concoct, I had woken up later than I'd like with less sleep than I wanted due to a late night out with friends, and had forgotten that I had about 2 hours to ride before the Halloween party festivities and horse decorating were set to begin. I set up 3/4 of a pinwheel set up, with a low vertical, crossrail and a decent sized vertical. I breifly had to chase BB down when she realized I wasn't holding on to her while setting jumps (mostly because I got tired of dragging her lazy ass along with the jump standard) and when I took a few quick steps to catch up with her, the trit-trotted away like "NEENER NEENER I AM FREE!". I pretended to have a peppermint and she stopped dead in her tracks, and set off to ride. 

Even with a quarter sheet, Bailey was feeling the morning chill and was a bit up and hot. I do, sincerely, appreciate the fact that she enjoys jumping but cannot/will not/can't even fathom rushing the fences. In fact, when I try to rush her, she usually puts another one in. She's clever, and goes from about anywhere, though I do wish she was a bit bolder in chasing down the fences. She pricks her ears up, keeps her head up, and instead of accelerating like I'm used to, she waits for it to come. We played with getting a variety of spots  on the verticals once she was warmed up. I found that on the little vertical (probably 2'3 or 2'6... it looked weenie...) she was much more comfortable letting me push her into the air sooner. On the bigger vertical, she really wanted to bury herself at the base and I had to develop a very gallopy forward canter with clucking and major motoring and leg on the turn to keep her up and willing to get something that was a bit more free off the ground. 

It's odd - when she is more free off the ground and really flies, she feels awesome and I am perfectly pulled by the momentum and muscle memory to give her a great ride, proper release, and I stay very balanced. When she comes up from the base, a lot of the time she hits me in the chest with her withers and I feel like my leg tends to slide back. This problem is approximately 18,000x worse on XC, which I really can't do much with until next year...

I guess I need to get enough jumps together to get a decent gymnastic set up, and find a decent time to put it up!