Taking a break from my own work or from family photo albums, today I want to feature another photographer’s stunning art.
Photo by Gigi Embrechts
Gigi Embrechts documents the dying tradition of horse fishermen in Belgium, and it’s truly worth the read. A stunning study of light and the amazing things we ask horses to do for us.
Have a happy weekend, all!
While I would love to be writing this post with champagne in hand, jubilantly exclaiming that the season of ulcers is over, apparently it wasn’t meant to happen today.
Instead, Foster stayed in all last night while his buddies went out, as part of the mandatory fasting that scoping requires. The constant nickering to me as I walked by his stall was killing me, but that’s just how it goes.
Then I got up quite early this morning, pulled up to the barn, and found out, Foster had mistakingly been given hay this morning. Boo- no vet visit for us today.
I’m not upset, as it’s an easy error to make, and the mistake was made early enough not to disrupt my work plans. It just means I’ll need to invest in some extra UlcerGard to get us through until our rescheduled visit. No big deal.
And so, the ulcer narrative continues…
In regrettable testament to the fact that I probably inherited both parents’ Type A personalities, I keep a diary for Foster. Even though this blog had been a wonderful exercise in tracking how things are going, overall success, stupid failures, and everything in between, it can be hard to really get an overall picture of what we’re up to.
Back in November, I decided that if I was going to think about moving up, then I really needed to hold myself accountable to how much I was riding him and preparing him for the things I would ask. Enter the diary.
And by diary, I really mean Google calendar.
Every day I ride, I insert a little placeholder for that day and in a few words, describe what happened. Did I jump, did I ask for collection, was he super pissy, etc etc. Everything gets labeled yellow so that I can go back and very quickly see how often I am riding in general.
As you can see, now that I am several months into this practice, the diary reveals a lot. It’s how I realized how under-prepared we were with jumping going into the February clinic, and is a pretty good indicator of when the ulcer behavior hit its peak.
Ulcer behavior in caveman terms such as “Super pissed dressage” and “Foster jump no good”, followed by his two weeks off
It also shows just how shitty February really was for us.
Very little yellow here.
As we get more and more fit, I hope the calendar will start to reflect truly 5 rides a week, and that two of those be jump schools. This has been a tool that has been vastly helpful and gives me lots of fodder for analyzing why things are going as they are.
Do any of you document your daily rides? Do you keep a calendar in your head or do you use some other device? Or am I reaching for a whole new level of crazy here?
Even though we are miles away from being ready to compete at an event again, thoughts of planning our season pretty much dominate my brain.
Novice @ CHP, October 2014 / PC: High Time Photography
I miss competing, and this dry spell combined with thoughts of moving up this year have caused a bit of self exploration- why do I show?
Personally, I treat competing as an opportunity to test our training. What I really look forward to at each event is the score- that quantitative (or in dressage, qualitative) feedback that shows how successfully we navigated a given challenge. I like to go to each competition with a number in my head, and at the end of it all comparing the actual score received helps me re-align my expectations or understand any gaps in our training. At the end of the day, I define success by how well we did compared to my original expectations for smaller goals- were our canter transitions as planned? Get an 8 on our free walk? Did we make time? Have runouts?
Novice @ Running Start, Feb 2014 / PC: Brant Gamma
For me, ribbons are a secondary treat. If we get them it’s great, and I won’t lie by saying I don’t enjoy being at the top. But in this area at many of the schooling shows we compete against professionals, so it’s hard to judge how well we do by placings alone.
Novice @ CHP, Nov 2014 / PC: J
We all have our reasons for competing in equestrian disciplines. Maybe your competitive nature needs a place to shine. Maybe you have something to prove, or you just want to test your abilities. Maybe competing is just a part of a greater plan, or you have a die-hard passion for satin ribbons.
Why do you show? Or if you don’t compete, why don’t you show?
It’s been a bit of a dead week at the barn, overall. Foster twisted a shoe Tuesday, and was ever so slightly foot sore, which improved slightly Thursday but was not entirely eradicated. Saturday he was back to 100% and so I asked him to really dressage, and get-in-front-of-my-leg-dammit. Using the advice from the clinic, when he started to tranter to avoid a more forward trot, I put more leg on, and if he broke into a canter that was fine, but he was going to go forward in that canter before coming back again. Now that I think he is strong enough to do a forward trot I do not want to teach him to escape it with some trantering nonsense.
Still no new media / PC: High Time Photography
Then yesterday I attempted jumping again. Thanks to having to move every single standard and pole in the arena, I was wiped by the time I had a course set up, and was feeling a bit weary thinking about riding. But once saddled up, I was glad I did and felt a bit more at home in the shorter stirrups than our last school. It took forever again to get him in front of my leg, and really I could only do about 5 minutes at a time before pulling up to catch my breath. I had an angled two stride line set up again, an X, a 2’6″ oxer, and I fixed the triple combination so that the distances were reasonable (2’6″ and 3′). After getting laziness again and again over the 2’3″ fences, I decided to pop him over the 3′ fence at the end of the triple line.
Probably what I’ve reverted to… except slower / PC: Hight Time Photography
Verdict? My horse only wakes up over bigger fences. When the 3′ rode well I then did the whole line and rolled back to the 2’3″ oxer, which ended up riding bigger than the 3′ vertical. This may or may not be because we found a long spot, and I grabbed for dear life with my legs which could have surprised the poor pony into a huge effort. In sum, still a whole hell of a lot for us to work on before we get back to Training sized courses.
This week is somewhat miserable in part to higher temps and humidity, but there is an end in sight! We have our [hopefully final] scoping for ulcers on Thursday!
Haha, just kidding.
But I have been thinking about medals recently. Not gold ones- bronze. As in two scores over 60% for First, Second, and Third level tests.
See, for the first time in my life, I’ve realized that Third Level might be possible for us. If you didn’t catch that, emphasis on the might.
Not anytime soon, or even in the next couple years, really. I just think this is one of those bucket list dreams that could be accomplished. At least at the moment, it seems far more likely than my dream of riding a camel. Any of you guys know a camel I can sit on? Didn’t think so.
In the last 6 months we’ve made progress towards the goal of completing a Second level test, which as a reminder introduces the following movements:
All of these have been started, with the exception of canter-walk transitions, which we will start once he is really strong again. The rest will need some major polishing in order to be test-ready, but I don’t mind a bit of polishing. But even in our lessons, a few of the Third level movements are coming up for discussions. When changes were mentioned, I was flabberghasted. Me? Changes? Other movements we are actually practicing. Half pass and turn on the haunches happen in our lessons more and more often.
It will take a village to get there, but it’s awfully exciting to this eventing DQ to have a long term goal added to the list.
PS this post marks the 300th post on A House on a Hill! Woohoo!
I’m going to make a lot of guesses in this post. I’m guessing that, if you were like me, you probably didn’t have many girl friends growing up. “Typical” girls didn’t understand your competitiveness, your drive to succeed, your connection to ‘a dumb animal’, your need to be strong and your willingness to get your hands dirty, literally, to achieve your goals. If you did have girl friends, they were likely other “horse girls”, or strong women who recognized your ‘ganas’ and respected them instead of fearing them.
It’s no surprise that we as horse women relate so well to other horse women, and less to the domestically correct ideals of old that society continues to offer us. Cook dinner every night? Maybe when I get home from the barn. Keep everything spick and span? Ha, have you even seen my car? Smell like roses all the time? If the name by which a rose also goes is Foster, sure.
Still, to say that all horse people will immediately befriend one another is to paint that picture using only rainbow colors and maybe those fuzzy animal stickers we coveted as children. Many of us are sportsmen as well as horsepeople, so there is always going to be an array of opinions and competitiveness that makes everyone being everyone else’s best-friend-forever just impossible.
So when we find another horsewoman (or to be fair, horseman) that then becomes our best friend, well, that’s something special.
Photo by High Time Photography
It takes a special person to not only put up with, but enable hours of conversation on one subject (duh, horses), supports you in your many goals on your path to personal equestrian world domination, and then still probably won’t judge you for the mysterious stains or smells you bring to the party. That person that makes the effort to watch your rides at shows, and hollers and whoops at the end of your dressage test, even if their ridiculous jubilance draws looks from passersby. And if that person can’t be there, you know they are going to call you the second you get done, that they care enough to want a play-by-play of how a line rode, or your iffy canter transitions, even if that stuff will bore most people to tears. And you would do the exact same for them.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I really discovered this rare breed of ‘horse friends’. Much of that I owe to my collegiate dressage team, which first introduced me to the concept that collegiate or not, being an equestrian is much better when it is a team sport. 10 years later I still keep in touch with those girls, and the memories of silliness and bonding are more important to me than any show of my college career.
When I left college, bought Foster, and moved to new farms, I thought those kind of relationships were unique to the college experience, and so a thing of the past. But once again I found kindred spirits, and started new adventures, and with those people I made new memories. We have cried, we’ve been scared, we’ve been brave, and we’ve (I’ve) certainly embarrassed ourselves a few times, and it’s been glorious. The only thing that makes these different than the days before is that now we are old enough to imbibe in an adult beverages to celebrate, or drown our sorrows, or attend the local schooling show.
Being an equestrian is not easy. And I don’t mean just that riding horses isn’t easy. Living with and loving animals so breathtaking, and yet so fragile, means that we constantly are living lives of highs and lows. The ride will always be sweeter when you find someone to join in the journey.
This post’s cliché title brought on by my thighs and calves, which are somewhat unhappy with me after my attempted jump school this weekend.
But first, let’s recap. The last time I actually jumped was February 11th in the winter clinic at the Carolina Horse Park. The last time I kind-of-attempted-jumping was March 16, in which my calendar entry for that day (anyone else keep a ‘diary’ of their horse’s activities?) says “Foster jump no good”. And I remember that ride- it was the day after I scratched the CT due to his bad attitude and likely ulcers, and I wanted to try jumping just itty bitty things to see if even that would improve his attitude. News flash: it didn’t. We couldn’t jump a 2′ vertical on a 30 meter circle successfully.
Looking derpy with his noseband off center
So almost two months later, and a crap ton of gastrogard, we tried jumping again.
I was a bit schizophrenic setting up the arena, as I knew I wanted to keep it small but couldn’t decided how small to go. So I left the cross rail intact, made a somewhat soft angled two-stride line out of two 2′ (2’3″?) verticals. There was a one stride to a two stride made up of 2’6″ verticals in the arena that I left up, but it walked long, so I was a bit skeptical of it but left it up for kicks anyway.
For whatever reason, it took me about 15 minutes of walking around in my jump saddle before I felt comfortable enough to get going. Let me tell you, after being a DQ for the last few months, those stirrups felt really damn short. I also really feel like I (or my saddle, but it’s probably just me) slide left far too easily. I got over it though, and focused on weighting my right heel, warmed up, and took the cross rail.
I swear it was angled, really
Well, I won’t go into a ton of detail, but he was great. (Me- not so much, yikes where is my leg?) From the X we made a figure 8 over the small verticals before taking the angled line, which rode like a dream. Will definitely make be making the angle more severe for next time. After that I added in the 2’6″ brick wall fence, and really felt Foster bloom- he lifts his tail, he canter becomes active, and you can just tell he’s enjoying himself. We did that a few more times and then added in the 2 strides to another 2’6″ vertical, which as predicted rode so long that I didn’t bother with it again.
After about 20 minutes of actual work, Foster was puffing, I looked like a tomato, and on top of that was actually getting a bit light headed from the exertion and the heat. Called it a day and gave the pony lots of praise and attention for being happy and not killing me.
The jumping session really cemented how much he has changed thanks to the Gastrogard, but also served as a reminder of how much we (I) have to go to get back into shape!
In the past, I have mentioned that I have a lot of respect for my mother’s opinion regarding horses. As a horsewoman, breeder, and entrepreneur, much of her life has been spent around horses. Growing up in England, she competed in showjumping and other English disciplines, before coming to the states and starting a business in reselling off-the-track thoroughbreds. She then started a breeding business, standing stallions of varying breeds- including but not limited to Belgian Warmbloods, Trakehners, Connemaras, and more.
The cornerstone of her breeding program, Hadrian
Even though growing up on the farm I got to see much of this first hand, it wasn’t until a conversation we had earlier this year that really opened my eyes to her success. While not in her nature to name-drop, we started talking about many of the people she has had business with over the years, and the list was impressive. Susan Beebee (eventer) and Jim Koford (dressage/Art Deco) both boarded stallions at our farm at one point, and she regularly dealt with and sold a couple horses to Daniel Geitner (showjumping/hunters), just as examples. So here are some images documenting the bi-continental journey of one horsewoman! Thanks mum, for teaching me so much and infecting me with the horse bug.
Starting young (middle child) at a horse show in England
Showing as a kid
Pony jumpers
A handsome Grey in England
Competing alongside her sister in England (left)
Late 80s perm and a cute bay
I’d take this chestnut home if I could!
Another family love – german shepherds
Ribbons with one of her favorites, Blue Boy
Schooling Blue Boy
Schooling Blue Boy
OK, so not of her, but of one of the OTTB’s, and my brother hanging on the gate
New Millenia, New Discipline! Dressage on her own Bud Light
Another current family horse, Cochise
Happy Mother’s Day, and have a great weekend!
Monday night we had our first lesson since mid February. Since Foster is starting to feel so much better, I’ve been adding slightly more work and asking a bit more of him with each ride, but continue to feel his hind-end weakness as a result of having so much downtime. So I scheduled the lesson in order to have a professional assess the weakness and the program I have come up with, to see if I am heading in the right direction.
no new media- who wants to come play photographer for me? 🙂
To make a long winding story short, all is well. After riding him for 15 minutes, Eliza agreed that if you really leg yield him to the left his weakness gets prominent, as he takes uneven steps getting worried about it all. Otherwise though she was happy with how he felt, especially his canter work. She felt that it was exactly right to insist that he do things correctly, and just keep it in short sessions until his fitness returns. It will be hard for him to stay straight for long periods until the strength comes back to that leg, but the only way it will get stronger is if he uses it.
Also worked on making him use his abs at the canter and really lift his back, instead of cantering ‘even’ like this
I also got the all-clear to practice walk-canter transitions again, which I am excited to hear. And for now, any and all lateral work at the walk will be great for him. In the past week I had started re-introducing shoulder-in and haunches in at the walk, so it will be fun to practice half pass and renvers in addition to these movements. Rein-backs as well will officially become [a small] part of our routine.
The Rein-back. [gif by Citron Vert]
Overall I am really pleased with how things are going, and am hopeful that the next scope will reveal a happily ulcer-free pony. Just two more weeks!!
Red on the Right 