Who is good with barn names?

Where have I been? I’ve been at work. I’ve been teaching and riding and learning about advertising and struggling to run a successful business when my definition of success changes all the time. What brings me back to my blog, now, all this time later? One, I miss it. I miss being able to review my thoughts and hear other comments and even to feel so much a part of this community. Two, there is a new thing to write about, so I feel better about coming back to this world to share what I hope to be learning in the future.

I have been on a horse-shopping adventure three times in the last four months. All three times we’ve come back with a horse after a more or less challenging hunt - one was for a lesson horse, one was for a client’s first horse, and one was for a talented Junior.

About a week ago, one of the first horses we sat on for Talented Junior called me up and said, “I’ve had a bunch of people come to ride this horse, but no one rode like you. I’m moving into high-end dressage horses, and this horse is going to take another year or two. If I’m going to put another year or two into a horse, they’d better move like an international-quality motherfucker. Do you want him? Let’s get creative.”

I watched the video of me riding him the first time. I watched the video the trainer had sent me of her riding him. I thought about it. I vetted him. He’s very sound. He is five. He is... gorgeous. He will never storm around a cross-country course with me, but everyone who knows me recognizes that my ambitions have drifted towards dressage for a while now.

I have a small army of mentors around me and this stunning creature.

When the trainer pulled him off the trailer and I looked at him again I was drawn to his eyes. His dark, liquid, barbie-dream-horse expression.

His trainer is coming by to give me a lesson today with him so that I can start to get to know him.

I intend to write about my journey with him because if he’s my horse I feel more comfortable sharing my journey. It might be worth writing about in more depth at some point, but as I’ve grown as a professional, my relationship with blogging has changed a lot. I don’t want to talk about my clients -- necessarily -- because I need to talk to them. Sometimes I think that they have important lessons that I might be able to summarize... I also think that I don’t want to blog as if I am being too patronizing, too “I know better than you” because honestly, I’m not convinced that’s the case. I’m a pretty good trainer of what I do - but I’m still learning. I’m excited to grow. I hope that this new horse is an avenue to a lot more growth.

ALL THAT TO COME TO THIS POINT:

This horse needs a barn name. 

Let's take a look at him.

He's incredibly cute, yes. He has a lot of hair.

Important to note that I have a strongly "The Little Mermaid" theme amongst my ridiculously large herd of horses. I have a 'Flounder'. I have a 'Sebastian'.

This horse is currently going by, 'Shark'. It's cute! But I don't want to keep it. Phooey with the assumption that it's bad luck to change horse's names.

He is a little nasty in his stall. I haven't gotten into any trouble at all, but he pins his ears when you walk past and he acts extremely menacing. He's eager to go to work, though, and completely cheerful under saddle.

The three most popular options for this creature are

1) Bruce (from Finding Nemo, the "fish are friends, not food" shark).

2) Gaston

3) Maximus

We'll have to do some pros and cons, right?

Bruce maintains some homage to this beasties 'Shark' heritage, and stays... sort of... along my nautical theme of equine herd. But it conjures an image of a dad sitting in an armchair to me, for who knows what reason.

Gaston is my favorite. I've been arguing the pros and cons of this character's story arc all day. He's an awful character, but the general consensus seems to be that no one ever motivated him to change by doing anything other than rewarding him for being awful. Also, he has a ton of expression, dedication to a goal, and he's fairly athletic... which is great for a dressage horse!

Maximus from Tangled... is actually pretty much the horse I have. The trainer who owned him told me that once he has decided to partner with you, he'll do anything to protect you and he's super brave. She told me that once out on the trail she came across a guy walking six collie dogs and this gelding started slinking toward the dogs like he was going to trample them. Plus, the expression of the cartoon horse devouring that flyer is the exact expression this horse makes when I walk past his stall. But the con is that I've recently known an Andalusian gelding named Max, whom I loved dearly, so I feel weird about a name which will inevitably turn into 'Max'.

Anyhow - I'm excited to be writing again in this Blogger window and I look forward to everyone's thoughts about what I should name this new era in my riding career! 

Flounder explores being fierce

The only thing I can promise is this: I know, with every fiber of my being, that Flounder thinks he's doing the same thing as Freddie.

Flounder investigates Scary Thing

Flounder notices something scary in the distance

Flounder bravely trots to investigate

Flounder realizes he's in over his head

Flounder gets the fuck outta there

Flounder investigates from farther away

A Flounder

I'm developing a reputation for half-told stories and a lack of follow through on this blog. My drafts folder will attest to this... Perhaps tales of a more modern horse will invite me to post more regularly. Goodness knows my friends heckle me enough about it.

So let's jump in. March 2017 I found myself needing a new lesson horse. Chente was... not sound, and hadn't been ridden since Christmas. I didn't have a huge budget, but I did have two clients horse shopping so I was already in the habit of closely trawling the many sites looking for suitable horses.

Something about this collage enticed me... or was it the age? The price? We'll never remember now

A horse named SharkBait popped up and he was a little young but sounded fairly level-headed and so my assistant and I hopped in the car and went to ride the fellow.

Mostly I remember that he had a gravitational pull towards the mounting block, that I immediately liked his canter, and that when my assistant got off him she handed me the reins and said, "if you don't buy him, I will."

After analyzing the video, taking a bunch of unnecessary screenshots, and talking with my friends, I made an offer and he was delivered a few days later. Before he was delivered, my sister and I had quite the conversation about him.

"You can't have him be named SharkBait," she told me.

"It's bad luck to rename a horse," I replied.

"It'd be like telling a kid to go get WILD LIGHTNING or a horse named VISIT THE HOSPITAL."

She sort of had a point. Luckily for me, she also had a solution, and so he was affectionately dubbed Flounder.

I hated it and planned on decided on a different/better name for him immediately, but that didn't exactly materialize and I think we're stuck with the name.

Upon unloading, he pretty swiftly settled in and announced that no one had ever steered him before in the history of steering.

We knew he had no experience with jumping of any sort, but it also turned out he had no experience looking at the ground at all.

We also spent some time with him and discovered that he is the biggest lovebug and wants nothing more than to get in my car, find out what the heck it is I do when I'm not feeding or petting him, and sleep with me.

Generally located his feet and going where he was supposed to go continued (continues?) to be a problem, but I made the executive decision that exactly two weeks after we unloaded him at home he was going to a horse show with us to compete in the cross-rails division. As much schooling as a pack of teenagers can accomplish in a week led us to this stunning example:

At the show, he was a little nervous so I led him over all the cross-rails the first time, but by his second round, he was boldly jetting around in the way only a Flounder can.

But have no fear, persistence pays off! Flounder has gone on SO MANY adventures since that very first show.

From camping with my sister and her friend, to being the best bareback camp horse in the world, to being a freakishly aggressive friend with other horses,

being braided for the first time and looking HECKING CUTE,

to potentially starting to grow up a little, my baby Flounder has been in the background for over a year now.

Even going through the photos to make this post, he appears mostly trotting through the background in other horses videos.

Not that he has minded, no, this horse has thrived on MildNeglect™ over the time I've had him. He won an optimum time class last weekend and has placed in quite a few hunter classes over the summer. 

And pretty much, well, that's pretty much a Flounder for you. 

In a frame, round, on the bit

After a handful of trainers told me, more or less, that Moxie wasn't really "on the bit", it required a lot of thinking about what "on the bit" really is, and let me to ask such questions as: how do we take a horse from just-broke to dressage horse? How do we teach them to go "on the bit"? What does that phrase even mean?

I think that many people have different definitions of on the bit, and I also know that your understanding of on the bit can change pretty dramatically as your feel and education increase. I'd like to share some of my granulations of the concept to share what I've learned in the last year.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

In a frame is when the horse's nose starts to drop, closing the angle behind the poll. Sometimes this is a 'steady frame' (ie the height of the poll isn't changing, nor is the angle behind the poll) and sometimes it isn't.

Round is when a horse is taking steps under their body with their hind legs, and lifting their back.

On the bit is when you close your leg and the horse goes to the bridle, or when you reach forward with the bit and they follow it where you put it. In my mind, on the bit is both in a frame, and round, and a little bit more.

I see a lot of management of 'frames' in horses, especially in green horses who haven't quite figured out how to balance their steps without flinging their head about, but sometimes even in school horses with riders who sort of forget to keep a lid on the connection.

I think that frame-management starts to disappear as the horse becomes rounder, using their body in a healthier manner and controlling their balance, but you can still sometimes see riders with quite round horses go to push their hands toward the bit and ask for a stretch, and it all goes out the window with the horse shoving their nose up and against the hand.

A horse that is truly on the bit has activated all of the seeking reflexes and is bringing the back up into the rider's seat, is reaching from the neck into the bridle, even within collection.

Cool, right? Sounds awesome. I want my horse seeking the bit, softly swinging over his back, eager to reach downwards and forwards when I close my leg and gently push my knuckles forward. I'll discuss what helped me and Moxie with this concept the most in the next post, but I am curious - what are your thoughts on the distinctions I've laid out above? Do you use the terms differently, and if so, how do you define them?

One week in, three trainers later

A few rides later, and I was still struggling somewhat to get a handle on Moxie, but definitely starting to feel better.

Megan came out to help me first. She watched me ride her around, she might even have gotten on her, I can't quite remember now. There were some big things that we worked on, and it turns out I pretty much just needed to take that lesson about sixty times.

• Moxie liked to go around in a pleasant frame, but it wasn't really connected or through. Once you asked her to connect in a lower place, she got pretty uncomfortable and would try to evade the contact in all sorts of ways. We worked a lot on riding her a little lower, a little more connected. I immediately proceeded to pervert this advice into real messy riding, but that's okay.
• Moxie doesn't oscillate very well at the canter, so Megan wanted me to really exaggerate the correct movement of her head and neck. She told me to imagine swinging my elbows through my torso, that the torso could stay still and the elbows could swing through me. 
• Moxie was also a little "zippy", and Megan wanted me to be sure I wasn't allowing her to blast around as a replacement for forward. She had to move off the leg respectfully, not zoom off into another planet. 

This is an excellent example of how I perverted Megan's advice. The reins are longer, so Moxie is lower in the connection.... right?

There's a trainer in the east bay that I've helped off and on for a year or so - it started because I'd often told her I'll sit on anything, so she had me ride some particularly challenging thoroughbreds and give me lessons in exchange. It works out really well for both of us. She's a silver medalist and pony clubber who has evented through preliminary, and she comes at a lot of the work with a really unique foundation of groundwork, so I learn a ton from her. I texted her pretty much straight away and asked if I could bring Moxie to her for a lesson.

The arena at A's barn is a little bit spooky to my senses, and bringing Moxie there showed me one of the best things about this mare: she pretty much unloads anywhere and asks, "what are we up to today?" In all the places I rode her, there was only one arena she struggled to settle in.

Moxie, clearly disturbed by the arena.

The biggest takeaways from this lesson were:

• Moxie has a very tight canter without much flexion in her joints, so A prescribed lots of leg yielding in the canter to start to loosen her up. 
• I really wanted to pull her onto the bit, so A had me do a half-bridge with the reins so that I couldn't pull my inside hand back, I could only open the rein. 
• The saddle that Moxie came with was a no-go for me. We tried making it a bit better for my seat by raising the front, which improved my ability to get my leg on her, but I never really got comfortable. 

A blurry and embarrassing screenshot of me attempting to counter flex the mare in the canter

Cantering after we'd raised the front of the saddle. Still not exactly on the bit here...

Not one to give up at TWO trainers in one week, I scheduled a lesson three days later with a new-to-me trainer that a vet friend had recommended. "She's life-changing," my friend told me, "she'll just change one little thing and you'll wonder how you ever made it through before." 

This trainer has a pretty good track record of producing students, and she has an energy that is astonishing. She is wildly positive and encouraging, saying such things to me as, "I'll make you sit like a queen," and "oh, that's easy. You just look over there and voila! That's a leg yield." 

She makes dressage feel infinitely conquerable. I did end up riding with her again on my journey with Moxie, but this was the only lesson I had for a long time with her due to scheduling challenges. 

She told me, flat out, that Moxie was not on the bit at all. That I needed to get through to her, put her in a lower place. She had me do some mild counter flexion in the canter, coupled with leg yielding the canter to get her more flexible. She told me to move my arms in the canter as if I were the one moving her head up and down. 

After this whirlwind of lessons, I had some pretty good exercises in my toolkit, along with a better view of what I needed to be doing to help improve Moxie. I'd determined that of the three saddles I'd shown trainers, none of them worked all that well, but I did find one that was the best for the time being. 

In full disclosure, the photos shared at the top of the post were actually pulled from a video taken a week and a half AFTER all these lessons. 

Back to the beginning

When this post gets published, I will probably be packing Moxie's things up, putting her in the trailer, and taking her back to meet her owner. It has been the craziest of years with this wonderful horse, and I've learned so much with her.

I've struggled to write much about her over this year, not for lack of things to say, but because I didn't want her owner to feel like I was maligning her in any way. The mare is quirky as hell, and I took a few dozen lessons on the basics, but the reality is that none of what was accomplished could have happened without everything Moxie knew how to do before she came to me.

It's a cool story though, with lots of scraps of notes taken from various trainers, plenty of adventures, a bunch of shows, and levels climbed! Now that she's going home again, I feel a bit more comfortable sharing the struggles and growth we went through. All that said, let me set the stage for the beginning of our relationship.

When her owner pulled in, it was pouring rain. We'd had one of the wettest winters in recent history, so while it wasn't surprising that it was raining, it did make the tour of my mountainous farm a bit more challenging.

My mom had come from Michigan to spend mother's day with me, her first solo trip to visit me in the four years I'd lived out in California. She's never been much for horses, but she later told me that when we led Moxie past my car, she could see how special a horse she was.

Mom and I had lots of adventuring to do, so I didn't get the opportunity to ride Moxie those first few days but the excitement kept rising and rising until my baby sister begged for a photo of Mom riding a horse, so I took my chances. I talked my mom into coming to the barn for a little while and riding, so of course, I put her on Moxie.

Both my mom and the mare were a little confused about one another

She told me I should get on and show off a little after she'd ridden, and since that had been my plot all along, I swung my leg over and within two 20-meter circles realized I had no idea how to ride this horse.

She lurched through her transitions and left me behind every time, even though I thought I was bearing down enough to stay with her. I couldn't quite ride her onto the bit, and instead felt like I was just pulling at her face. The canter swerved to and fro as if I had far too finely tuned steering and absolutely no way to manage it. I got off pretty quickly and took her back to the barn, feeling pretty demoralized. What had I gotten myself into with this horse I couldn't even steer? How was I supposed to accomplish anything with her?

I pretty quickly scheduled several lessons, the results of which I worked on for over a year...