Making It All Worth It

Working with Rush is a lot like driving down a street with ridiculously long street lights. You can be rushing along, making mad progress, and then the brakes are engaged and you wait. And wait. And wait. And just when you've just about torn your hair out from the frustration
of waiting and making no progress, the light changes.

That's what it's been like since I started riding her. We'd get stuck on an issue, make no progress for a while, send me into spirals of frustration and despair, and then one day something would change (maybe she felt sorry for me) and we would catapult past the problem, making rapid progress in a relatively short frame of time. It's frustrating as hell, because nobody likes to plateau, especially when there is so much to learn.

But rides like the one I had last week are what makes it all worth it. Ever since the impending decision that Rush will get leased out this summer (more on that later) at a hunter/jumper barn, I decided it was time to get back into jumping bootcamp. Originally, when I had moved to the dressage barn I'm at, I had ambitiously decided to jump once or twice a week.. however, the size of a dressage ring being shared between three people is not exactly conducive to setting up jumps, and there's almost always someone riding when I am at the barn, so I opted for just doing flatwork instead of cramming jumps into an already crowded ring. Plus I only had two standards and a couple really odd large plastic poles, which Rush hits pretty consistently and are lightweight enough to be knocked down, so I was having to get off after every jump to reset it. Not worth it.

Last week, however, I scrounged up four cavalettis that had been hiding out behind some trailers and dragged them over to the ring (WHY ARE THEY SO HEAVY??). I set up a two stride line, a single on the other long side of the ring, and the last one when down a long diagonal. I honestly don't really know what I was expecting- we haven't schooled courses since before she went lame last year, let alone any two strides, so this was one of my "we'll try it out, see how it goes, and adjust from there" moments. And I'm glad I did, because BOY was she perfect!

I is a goobers

I might have to attribute some of her lightness and responsiveness to the transition work we had done in the previous ride, but she was listening and relaxed and not running to jumps, and it was simply a stellar ride. We warmed up on the flat briefly- she even offered a change (but then got a little excited afterwards), then hopped over the single both ways to warm up my eye. I trotted the course first (down single, up two stride, down diagonal, up single) and she was perfect- waiting, coming back from the canter when I asked her to, keeping a consistent pace- and I cantered the course twice after, both of which went quite smoothly. She changed her lead over the diagonal fence every time (that's my girl!) and came back quickly to a trot if I needed her to change in a corner. The only spot of trouble we had was in the two stride, as I had forgotten to shorten it for her stride. She kind of bullied through it each time, running because she didn't know if she could make it otherwise, but came back after the second fence every time so I didn't push it during the course.

After we finished the course work I took her through the two stride a few more times each way until I had convinced her that it was possible to get through it without running willy nilly. She just really doesn't trust her stride to get her up to things, so she gets fast instead of opening up and lengthening. I tried to correct this by giving her a really quality, forward canter up to the first jump, then half halting upon the landing (as an attempt to catch her before she started running) and giving a conservative release over the second fence in order to hold her together more. It seemed to work, as after a few times through she got the hang of it and was cruising through.

Then everything went to hell in a handbasket Friday, but more on that later.