Canter Transitions: September 30, 2007

AH! Last day of September...must get something posted! Must justify thousands of dollars spent on batteries for video camera somehow...here, a half finished canter comparison video will suffice!



I was stupid and failed to order another batch of Nic's magnesium supplement in a timely manner. I hope she is back to normal, now that I have it, before we see the Wonderful Wizard of WAZ on Tues. I'm pretty lazy, but sometimes my laziness astonishes even me.

In Which Nicole Plays Big Sister to Beckers: September 27, 2007

Nicole helped teach Beckers to go into the wash stall...Beckers is getting by with a little help from his friends...first Nicole demonstrated the wash stall won't eat you, but Beckers needed a little extra shove...

Canter Transition: September 26, 2007

RIP Number 2 Camera: September 21, 2007

Random horses in the forest pasture next to the farm. I didn't know it was pasture and thought there were horses loose in the woods. Ah, the sites one sees from the farm PortaPotty.

This one is stylized, but the original photo sucked (it still pretty much sucks. Too busy, not enough contrast). The one above is the only one that came out in the few I took before my faithful Number 2 camera broke. RIP, little buddy. 2nd camera casuality this year.

One can see, looking at the progression photos to the right that the photo quality plummets after March. That's when my Number 1 camera died. Fugi, 9 megapixel, manual focus, 30-400mm lens (something like that). That was a nice camera.

Camera Number 2 was an old Kodak 4 megapixel, 70-400mm lens, autofocus. The lag time was too long on photos, but it did the job when Number 1 broke.

Number 3 is a crappy Samsung 70-150mm autofocus, but its 7 megapixels, and small. It was cheap - you don't want to use expensive stuff to video horses daily because of the dust and dirt that gets in the camera. I may be shopping for Number 4 soon...

Nicole, The Puta Test, and the Dressage Paradox: September 20, 2007

One of the main paradoxes of dressage is that the sport, from an intellectual standpoint, is very easy to understand, but, in application, it's a much more difficult task to accomplish. This paradox is more apparent in dressage than with any other sport I’ve become fluent in over the years.

The overall main tenet of dressage is “ride your horse straight and make him go forward.” Intellectually, it’s an easy concept to grasp; the horse stays straight between the legs and hands, and maintains this relative straightness when on a circle. The forwardness keeps the horse straight, and the straightness helps keep the horse forward, which enhances the horse’s natural gaits.

From there, it’s easy to see how the rest of the fabric of the sport builds up and weaves together, how from riding straight comes the travers, comes the half pass, how from the 10m canter circle comes the 6m canter circle, comes the canter pirouette. There is no magic, no epic secrets, no biblical lore to it. Dressage really is nothing more than riding your horse forward and straight, and half halting when necessary.

Understanding this sheds some light on why I get so frustrated sometimes. Dressage isn’t a hard concept to grasp, but what is hard is accomplishing it when my skills are less than stellar and roadblocks appear in the form of tension in both myself and the horse. Finding exercises to eliminate those roadblocks, and ensuring they are exercises that the mare understands, is something that can only be done through trial and error.

Another roadblock is strength, or rather, that thereof. The smaller the circle and the more weight Nicole has to take onto her hind legs, the more difficult it is for her to maintain her rhythm and relaxation. I give the horse enough credit to know she understands the concepts as they are presented to her (she understood the concept of shoulder-in the first week I had her), but from her end, accomplishing them is difficult because she simply isn’t strong enough yet.

Nicole and I have something we like to call "The Puta Test," which is basically our litmus test to determine whether Nicole has improved. The test consists of this:

1. Get the video camera ready.
2. Wait for the mare to act crazy.
3. Ride normally, though the craziness.

If the mare looks more improved than the last time she acted crazy, then we've made strides in her training.

For example, a month or so ago, the mare wouldn't respond at all to half halts when she was tense. Now, I get some measure of response. By the same token, she would hollow her back and tense her neck, jut out her underneck muscle in the canter, and it would be all over. Now, she maintains some semblance of being on the bit even when she reaches the zenith of her discontent.

Lately she keeps falling through the outside shoulder in the canter. I'm trying different exercises such as spiraling in and out of a circle and riding a square instead of a 20m canter circle. Hopefully these exercises will help. With Nicole, riding in a square really seems to help; I try to apply that feeling on a straight line, albeit mostly unsuccessfully. Leg yields at the trot help too; it's easy to correct the outside shoulder in this exercise, which translates into better connection with the outside rein at the canter.

Trot Lengthening: September 16, 2007

The trainer I worked with today said something interesting in response to my query about whether Nicole is too far on her forehand. She said that a trot lengthening is, by definition, mostly on the forehand, because if it weren't, it would be a medium trot. To wit, the lengthening has a weight distribution of somewhere between 60% of weight on the forehand to 50% of weight on the forehand.

My concern is whether Nic has far too much weight on the forehand; what is reasonable to expect from her at this point? Having no point of reference, I can't discern this for myself. Word is the mare is going well at the level she is at. We will see when the next show season rolls around.

In Which Nicole Takes Up Ballroom Dancing in the Darkest Hour Before Dawn: September 15, 2007

Gives the phrase “dancing with your horse” a whole new dimension. Not sure this is what Guérinière had in mind…

It helps to have a sense of humor about the mare, and in a lot of ways writing about her is cathartic (read: keeps me from strangling her when she’s an ass), but it’s hard to not place some sense of self worth on the mare and her training.

Dressage is both financially and time consuming. Some months, I fork out more on Nicole than I pay for my home mortgage. I’m hardly driving myself into debt, but when I think about how I spend money hand over fist on the mare, and think about how alternatively I could enjoy a lovely beach home, or go to Europe 3-4 times a year, some part of me wants some justification for the financial liability I’m bearing.

It’s easy to say, “hey, I have a good job, make a good living, and gosh darn it, people like me, so really, if I suck at dressage, I’m not an overall loser.” But when you invest a healthy portion of your income, and spend a portion of your day in the pursuit of improvement, and when Twinkle Toes decides pseudo ballroom dancing is more fun than dressage, some part of your sense of self and ego is going to be at stake.

I'll say this though: When we have an influx of Mare Moments, as we've had the past 2 weeks, it tells me that something is about to improve. When we had our last slew of Mare Moments, last July, when we came out the other end, we had a more balanced canter, something that was pleasant to ride.

I think the Mare Moments are in response to additional expectations (such as increasing the amount of canter I ask for) and the building of muscle to meet those expectations. When I get to the point where I'm about to call in the professionals to ride her for me, I know now that it's "the darkest hour before dawn."

September 14, 2007

Nicole was bad today, so she had to stand in the corner.

I think she was pissed about having to ride inside (rain). I've been riding her in the field once a week (or every 2 weeks). She likes it.

Mare Moments: Sept 11, 2007

Will follow with new canter video soon.

Oddly enough, as it turns out, for a brief time in 2005, Nicole lived at the new farm I am moving her to. I spoke with the mare's old owner today, and she highly recommended the new farm, and said that Nic liked it there very much, and the care was excellent. So, whatever anxiety I may have had about moving her no longer exists, since most of my concerns were whether the horse would like the new farm.

Philosophy in the Tackroom, Part II: September 6, 2007

I have made a decision. I found a new barn for Nic, and I'm moving her for no reasons other than I want her closer to my home and because I want to be at a barn with a resident trainer. Currently, she is a 1.5 hour round trip away, and, reader, I'm tired of driving that far on the weekends, with the miles stretching as long and as frivolous as ants marching to who knows where. She currently is housed close to my workplace, but that convenience is outweighed by the distance I travel over the weekends.

I feel like this is a rash decision, as it has been very fast, and almost too easy, which always sets the alarm bells ringing in my head. But I found a nice place to move her to, with a resident trainer who is well respected, 15 min from Casa Maat. So, there it is.

I have ambiguous feelings about this move. On the one hand, the benefits (i.e., having her closer to me, having regular training sessions) are exciting, but on the other hand, leaving “the way we were” behind isn’t easy.

I've written in the past about Plato's Allegory of The Cave. One of Plato's main points is that the more one learns and progresses, the less one can go back to the place at which one began. It isn't a matter of choice. Ignorance is bliss for a reason; it's one less step towards the River Styx that is Enlightenment.

I'm a person that tends to look at situations with a kind of black-and-white finality - the closing of one chapter, the opening of a new one. That sense of finality is a heavy load; as I compare where Nic and I were a year ago, and especially the transformation over the past 3 months, to where we are now, the progression, albeit mostly intellectual, has been enormous.

Does water have second thoughts as it runs from the mountain, fresh but weak, to the field, to the sea, where it’s sometimes mire but sometimes clear?

When Pandora opened her box, and out popped Enlightenment, she had no idea of the Guernica it would breed: The “way things were” no longer suits the present or the future, and I can’t, with good conscience, return to a less-educated mindset as far as Nic is concerned. The pitfall of evolution is that some amount of simplicity is lost, and realizing one can't go back to the beginning, regardless of the benefits of progression, is a little sad, to say the least.

When I fired Trainer, and started taking lessons with Napalm, possibilities opened up; things (like suppleness) that seemed impossible with the mare made sense, and I could see a plan from how to get from scary and unbalanced to something resembling a trained horse. Simultaneously, I knew, regardless of how much happier I was with the mare, that the old self that believed that I was training my horse correctly was killed by evolution, a casualty of Enlightenment. Out of that fractured psyche a new self was born.

Leaving my current barn produces the same tensions. The water is murky but also clear; decisions more complex, but also more simple. Finding a new barn and making the right choice in that sense is a difficult task; but the choice to move is a simple one to make. Either we move, or we stagnate. Just as the newly deceased must cross the River Styx, enlightened evolution isn’t a choice, it is clearly a must for me, but paying the ferryman certainly isn’t pleasant.