Author: Amanda

blog roundup

Weekly Blog Roundup

Amanda2 Comments

Here are a few interesting, informative, thoughtful, or fun posts from this past week of blogging. (Actually it’s more like two weeks, since I missed last week and have a LOT of catching up to do!)

First things first: though I missed the signup what with being out of town, it’s 2pointober! I’ve been adding in some more two point to my own riding, even though I didn’t get to be part officially, and let’s just say it’s probably good I didn’t sign up. My baseline is hideously embarrassing.

LD Packing List from Topaz Dreams
❤ packing lists, you guys. The organization! The precision! This is a particularly good one, thoughtfully written, with lots to think about.

Origin Stories from Boots and Saddles
Love. Love. Love. Lots to think about, here. How do you tell your story? I went through a phase where every new trainer I worked with got the 10 minute story of my history with Tristan. Yeah, we’ve gone through a lot, but one time too many of telling that story and I started to think harder about how I presented our story. The last time a trainer asked me for my goals I said “I love my horse and I want to enjoy him.” That’s working for me now.

Am I a Show Home? from Cob Jockey
Really thoughtful exploration of how we interact with horses, and how we define our goals and relationships with individual horses.

(on a side note, check out Jen’s series of posts reviewing her recent event with Connor. awesome stuff, good analysis, good reading, and yeah, I’m a smidge jealous!)

Kill Them With Kindness from She Moved to Texas
I’m always amazed at how a little bit of anonymity brings out the asshole in so many people. Lauren’s post is a good manifesto for kindness on the internet.

The Evolution of Cavalry Tactics: How Technology Drove Change from Emerging Civil War
Not a horse blog, but still a very good one. This is the first in what promises to be an utterly fascinating series covering the changes in cavalry tactics in the American military during the Civil War. My master’s thesis was on the development of cavalry (really, dragoon) logistics prior to the Civil War, so I am anxious to read someone else’s discussion of a similar topic and see what comes next. This post starts with Napoleon’s tactics, always a good grounding!

dressage · endomondo

Friday Night Lights

Amanda1 Comment

Friday was meant to be a long hack, but on the first downhill stretch Tristan didn’t feel quite right. He was wobbling behind and not placing his front feet in good spots, and as a result he kept tripping. Finally, he went down to his knees and I had a long hearbeat’s moment of sitting and kicked my feet out of the stirrups to jump off – but he stood up again. I jumped off and handwalked him a few yards, but he was moving easily, and diving for grass, unconcerned.

We ended up doing a very easy walk around the field, and then I walked him back to the barn, thinking I’d do a dressage school in the indoor and try and get him moving more evenly. The indoor was busy, so I asked if it would be ok if I rode in the fancy dressage ring on the hill. Sure, trainer said, just stay on the raked rubber footing parts, don’t do any heavy work around the edges. Twist my arm!

So after about 25 minutes of walking we did a solid 20 minutes of trot dressage work, mostly getting him even through his hind end and up through his shoulders, keeping him from flinging those massive shoulders every which way and dragging me back to the barn.

The canter work was not great. He was antsy and prancy and I got tense and held him in. No, he won’t get a good depart if I’ve got a death grip on the reins! So I worked hard to hold him in my core and through my seat, not by holding on to his face, and giving a release even when he felt like he wanted to come around the corner, face the barn, and bolt for home.

Afterwards, he was warm and a bit sweaty, so I put him in an irish knit for 20 minutes or so, then switched to his regular fleece cooler, which was what he was going to wear until night check anyway. I went into the tack room, and since I had an hour before I was meeting the fiance for dinner, I settled in to clean some tack, with mixed success. My dressage saddle cleaned up nicely, and I conditioned it thoroughly. The breastplate was filthy, and I could not get the last layers of gunk off some parts. Boooo. I’ll do another round soon, I guess.

Before I headed out, I stuck my hand inside Tristan’s cooler to check on him and see if he could get grained before I left. His chest was still damp and tacky. 😦 I asked the barn manager to double check, and we decided that he had mostly cooled down with the irish knit, but the cooler raised his body temp again – as it was supposed to, in a way – and the last bit never dried when he warmed up. Next time, leave the knit on longer – or do a layer. Maybe I should’ve even grabbed his wool sheet from upstairs for a warm wicking layer. Still figuring out the sweaty winter coat thing!

longeing

Longeing: Re-Introducing the Circle of Death

Amanda3 Comments

I got to the barn last night and the ring was littered with random stuff: chairs, poles, jump standards, cavaletti blocks. The two lessons that had just wrapped up were beginners, and they were working on steering.

Sweet. Since I am at such a dressage-centric barn, I almost always err on the side of laziness and leave the poles in the corner. Now I had an excuse to play with them!

I longed in the halter only, and started off with some quick warm-up circles in an open area, then transitioned to a circle of death exercise. (We’ve done this more in-depth before; for diagrams, see this post.)

I started pretty aggressively, with poles set on the second highest setting of the cavaletti blocks.

The middle of these options.
I only set cavaletti on the outside end, to create an angled pole. Things started kind of ugly, with Tristan either ducking inside the circle or doing super-awkward dives and hops to the cavaletti in order to get over them. He hates to touch them, and will usually clip one only once, but he does resort to ridiculous antics to get over them. He’s a horse who “does his own footwork” in that he will get you over the jump, but he is rarely hunter-pretty at it without some serious work.
We had an argument about ducking inside the circle, that resulted in some bucking and cantering and kicking out, but after 10 minutes or so of going both ways, he started nailing the striding and taking the poles in stride, really stretching over his back and articulating his hock and stifle to do so. I made sure to give lots of praise for each one correctly achieved, and he clearly started gaining confidence and hunting them out, instead of avoiding them.
I then dropped the cavaletti blocks and dragged the poles to the outermost bounds of a 20m circle, and worked on cantering a bit. The first few were exciting – Tris slid right to the “base” of a pole and launched himself in a deer leap that would’ve cleared a 3′ fence, then landed bucking and snorting. He then proceeded to jump each one, awkwardly, in turn. Then he decided to drop to a big beautiful flowing trot stride over each pole. Finally, he took the poles in a canter stride and then started putting together an entire circle of even canter strides. It was pretty neat to watch.
I was pleased with his work, overall. Tonight: long hack with some uphill trots.
Also, to add, A Gift Horse is doing a giveaway of a Dapplebay t-shirt. I love those shirts. Go, enter!

admin

And now for something completely different…

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I will have some horse stuff to talk about later, but I’d like to take a moment to boost the signal on a project that is near and dear to my heart.

Louisa May Alcott and her family moved to a house in Concord, MA in 1858. Her father, Bronson, named it “Orchard House” after the apple orchards that surrounded it. It was in that house that Louisa wrote the book that would make her famous: Little Women. She blazed through the draft in one month, sitting at a little desk overlooking the front yard.

Orchard House is a truly special place. If any house can be said to have a soul, Orchard House has one. I worked at Orchard House in college, mostly as a tour guide. When I was promoted to opening and closing, I would often get to the house 15 minutes early and sit on the floor in one of the rooms, soaking up the atmosphere. I love that house like I love few other places in the world.

It’s a special place with a really special history, on both the emotional and the intellectual levels.

Right now, Orchard House is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary telling the story of the house itself, which dates back to the Revolutionary War and contains fascinating American history above and beyond the Alcott family, whose story is much more far-reaching than just Louisa’s literary career. The house has been a museum for over a century, and has a remarkable portion of original family furnishings and artifacts.

If you’re a fan of Little Women, please consider donating to the Kickstarter campaign.

dressage

Back in the swing of things

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Last night, the plan was for a short dressage school: long and low, pushing from behind, focusing on muscle-building.

I couldn’t stay in the indoor. It was too pretty. Rides in the outdoor are not productive, for a variety of reasons; or at least, they’re not the kind of productive that I wanted to be last night.

So I compromised, and we spent 30 minutes walking the big hay field to warm up. It was an absolutely gloriously beautiful night after a rainy morning, and though he was perhaps trippier than usual, Tristan felt great.

In fact, he felt so great, he bolted with me across the field. He got 10-12 good strides in while I sort of stuck to the saddle in disbelief. Then I thought about dropping the dressage whip to minimize distractions, but the idea of walking all the way back to fetch it late was incredibly unappealing. So then I hauled up on the reins and decided I was DONE. It was never a really serious bolt (trust me, we’ve done those!) and he was antsy and blowing the rest of the walk. So, if you’re keeping track, lunatic behavior two days in a row. Yay pergolide? (Hey, I’ll take it!)

We went back to the indoor and picked up a trot and I liked the feel of it a lot: not as loose and stretchy as I wanted, and not as forward, but I felt real power coming from his hind end. He felt solid underneath me in a way he hasn’t for a little while.

We did about 10 minutes of trot both ways, focusing on coming up through the hind end and the back, and then about 2 minutes of canter. He was blowing and a bit sweaty after the canter, which made me feel pretty rotten about his fitness, but so it goes – we’ll get it back.

I stripped tack and threw and irish knit on him and we took a walk around for another 15 minutes or so. He didn’t really need that; honestly, he would’ve been fine with a few minutes of walking and going back to his stall, but the weather was so lovely, and it won’t be for much longer.

Tonight: more of the same, with some short canter intervals, OR the night off, depending on how my thinking about the rest of the week’s planned rides goes.

barefoot · farrier · shoes

Tristan and the Farrier

Amanda2 Comments

I am still catching up on blog-reading, and SprinklerBandit’s post about Courage’s problems with the farrier made me realize I hadn’t done an update on Tristan and his farrier behavior in a little while.

Short version? Problems solved!

If you haven’t been paying minute attention to every word, you may not realize that about two years ago, Tristan got shoes for the first time, four all around. My trainer and farrier at the time jointly convinced me that he would move much better and that he really needed it. I agreed to try it, after 7 years of barefoot going, as an experiment.

The day before he was to get his shoes for the first time, he blew his abscess. Farrier put four shoes on him anyway, assuming it would blow over quickly. That didn’t happen. See the “abscess” and “surgery” label for that whole sordid tale.

Essentially, it looks like Tristan associated getting shoes hammered on with the pain from the infected piece of broken bone that was now erupting through his entire foot. He started acting up for the farrier, becoming nearly impossible to touch to the point of being violently dangerous. I worked with him for hours and hours on end. Eventually, we simply sedated him for farrier visits.

That reached its height with an absurd visit in which he blew through a double dose of tranquilizer and laid down in the middle of a farrier visit in a fit of…something cranky. The quick-witted assistant trainer/barn manager, M., sat on his head while he was down and the farrier finished trimming. Then they let him up and he was good as gold for the rest of that shoeing.

Things continued to go up and down, though they were never again as bad as that day. About nine months ago, the barn switched farriers – for a lot of reasons. It just so happened through a series of mixups, I did not get tranquilizer from the vet in time. I had emailed the new farrier (new-ish; he’d been doing other horses in the barn with great success, it’s just that we added the whole barn to his list. It’s kind of complicated) with a complete background on everything that had been happening. I wanted him to make a very informed decision about dealing with Tristan.

He wasn’t worried, and you know what? Tristan behaved. Not perfectly, that first day; as the farrier explained, he had to take a lot of short breaks and read Tristan’s body really, really well. He backed off when Tristan got nervous or fussy, and discovered that if he held the foot in a different way and used a slightly different technique in hammering the nails, Tristan was much happier.

Moral of the story: new farrier ROCKS.

That being said, it looks like we’ll be doing shoes for a while yet. New farrier also thinks that it will be some time before Tristan’s front feet can handle barefoot again comfortably, and I haven’t yet been able to put together a coherent plan for the transition. Maybe once the nasty abscess hole (still!1!!1!) grows out, we will take a swing at it and see.

But in the meantime, so glad to have my well-behaved pony back!

blog hop

10 Things

Amanda1 Comment

  1. Is there something you don’t like about your riding? Oh, yeah. Lots. Probably the #1 thing though is my total and complete lack of natural “feel.” People say things like “oh, his inside hind was lagging” or “his hip wasn’t moving fluidly enough” and I think my butt is totally numb. I’ve gained what little feel I have through lots and LOTS of hours in the saddle, and even then I am lightyears behind most people.
  2. Does your horse buck? Ummmmm…no. Not really. He tries, sometimes. He’s only gotten me off when I wasn’t paying attention.
  3. Is your horse head shy? He used to be insanely head shy – like, can’t even touch the halter without a hissy fit head shy. I still make a concerted effort to mess with his head every time I handle him. Now, that behavior is limited to being pissed about getting dewormed and occasionally fussing about his ears.
  4. Favorite barn chore to do? Watering. I like hanging out and watching the horses in their stalls/fields, and the slow satisfaction of watching the water fill up, plus the knowledge that they get fresh, clean water.
  5. How many times do you ride a week? 3-4; trying to get up to 4-5 or even 6.
  6. Who is your favorite pro rider? Of all time? Alois Podhajsky. Currently? Hmmmmm. Sinead Halpin has to be up there; Will Coleman is also a personal favorite for reasons only tangentially related to his hotness. 
  7. If one pro rider could train you for one day who would it be? David O’Connor. I’ve seen him teach and love his style.
  8. Favorite Facial Marking? Blaze!
  9. Leg Markings or No Leg Markings? Sure, but it’s not a dealbreaker for me. Tristan’s one white sock is a bitch to keep clean.
  10. Ever broken anything falling off? Fingers. Nothing more serious, knock wood.
longeing · massage · pergolide

Wheeeeeeeeee

Amanda2 Comments

You may have noticed an excess of non-current postings last week; sorry! I did that thing where you’re not supposed to tell the internet you’re out of town, so no one robs you. Or something. Anyway, I was off all last week for my brother’s wedding out of town, and I’m back now, and I have 567 blog posts to read. O.o

Last night, I swung by the barn to longe Tristan and loosen him up before his massage, since he hadn’t been worked in a week. The barn manager warned me that he had been a jerk on the way in – stopped to eat some grass, and when he was reprimanded started rearing and bucking. She said they’d had a discussion, which I am 100% ok with – good behavior is his #1 rule.

So I put him on the longe line and foolishly did not take that into account and he was a LUNATIC. Not even for Tristan, for any horse. I lost count of the good back-cracking bucks and kicks out and half-rears and sprinting around and whooooooo boy. What was supposed to be a 15 minute loosening turned into a 30 minute schooling, followed by 15 minutes of walking up and down the driveway to cool him out. I have some charming rope burns on my hands because I got complacent and forgot my “always wear gloves” rule for handling horses. That’ll teach me.

J. noticed immediately during his massage that he looks brighter, his muscle tone is dramatically better, and he just has a spark back to him.

We are at 5 weeks into the pergolide, and I’m declaring victory. 😀 Tonight I get on and see how he feels under saddle. This could be fun…

clothing

When do you get rid of breeches?

Amanda10 Comments

Every time another horse blogger posts photos of their beautiful breeches collection, I admit to a pang of jealousy. I can’t remember the last time I bought new breeches. I have 5 pairs that I have been stretching and stretching for at least 5 years now. 3 of them fit poorly, 1 of them I disliked almost immediately after buying, and that one remaining pair? Well, I love them. But I think they are done.

They’re On Course Cotton Naturals, and they are the most comfortable breeches I’ve ever worn. Ever. I love them. I would buy them again in a heartbeat, or at least I would if I could justify spending money on myself when Tristan is flinging new bills at me left, right, and center.

I can’t throw them away, though. In fact, I rode in them on Sunday for our trail ride. I love them that much.

I think it’s time, though. Here’s what they look like now.

Yeah. I know. And you also can’t see the hole over the right knee patch. Here’s a close up of the wear pattern on the inside of the thighs.

The elastic is just shot, and it gets exponentially worse whenever I wear them. And yes, that is a huge hole you see in the crotch.
I’m finally tossing them today, but I am very sad that I’m now relegated to not liking a single pair of the breeches I own.
How long do you wear your breeches for? Are you just as bad as me?