Sunshine and Roses and LAUNCHING INTO ORBIT

don't overthink it

You know when something sounds like a good idea, but you sort of just know it isn't but then you do it anyways because you don't trust yourself and then it turns out to be a really bad idea after all?

Maybe it's just me.

Anyways. Last Thursday, I hopped on Courage in the jump tack. I was planning to just do a little two point and trot over some poles, but a fellow boarder left a couple of jumps up and even though I was alone, Courage has been fantastic, right?

It's a crossrail. What could go wrong?

Ha! Funny you should ask. We started by trotting over a few poles. Courage was a little up (aka "thought about cantering after the poles), so we just kept trotting them until he held a consistent rhythm on a loopy rein.

it's bigger than you'd think

Then we trotted to the little crossrail.

Courage LEAPED over it and landed running.

Sigh. That's what I get for not jumping much, right?

I took him back down to trot poles until he could do them nicely, then re-approached the crossrail.

This time he got to about one stride out and just flung his head up and RAN AT IT. And launched. And landed running. I could walk you through the whole cluster, but let's just say that there was lots and lots of flatwork and poles and jump changing and stopping to think and cantering in place and getting stuck and racing and leaping and we finally were able to trot over a crossrail without racing or leaping, but it was a solid 90 minutes of hard work to get there.

i'll take any excuse to look at this pic

The good news is that Courage is neither difficult nor scary to ride. At any point, I could stop and drop the reins on his neck and he'd go to sleep.

So on that fantastic note, we were all set for our first jump lesson of the year.

We were finally able to sync back up with S who did so much for us last year. Courage definitely showed all sides of what we've been working on lately.

Warning: video below is kind of boring. (jumping starts at 45 seconds).

the return of the possessed right hand

Basically, any time we cantered towards the gate or around a corner, he wanted to RUN LIKE HELL which I would then exacerbate with super creative BRACING. S called us out on it and we made some fixes, and then Courage was like "eff you right turns".

So the first part of the video is sorting that out and the second part is just going through our little exercise. It's all crossrails. There's no leaping or flailing, but that's where we're at right now.

that's better

It was so good to have some eyes on the ground. I haven't ridden in the jump tack much lately and I was making some pretty basic mistakes that certainly weren't helping us. Plus S was able to help us curtail the naughtiness while giving me strategies to enhance the good things.

I did change my stirrup leathers a while back and it looks to me like they need to be a hole shorter--my position is usually pretty kick ass and well, it's not.

Regardless. Jump lesson #1 of 2015 is now in the books.