In the Details

In addition to working hard on my own position (need. lesson. must. move. first.) and the key movements of First level, TC and I are adding another layer of detail to our work. 

As I climb the levels once again, my main goal is to take it a little slower and do it a bit more right. It's really hard to balance chasing medals and taking your time to create a horse with minimal training holes. I mean, there is obviously such a thing as going way too fast (where it is detrimental to the horse/every ride feels like a huge fight) and going way too slow (like with TC, too slow for me is taking more than a year per level unless something outside of training delays us).

But with Rico, I was very much on a time limit with his age and soundness, so we probably went a bit faster than we should have. I mean, he literally went from PSG to GP in a year. But I also worked my ass off, had a trainer who very much was dedicated to the basics without shortcuts and hey, he also never scored in the 50s in that time (we have exactly two scores at 59 on our record, one was when I was trying to ride through a back injury at First level and the other was at Third level when it was windy and half the arena letters fell over and he was very skeptical about that).

Me as a kid stupidly trying to ride through a back injury, young
Rico is like "why is this my life, why am I so off the bit?"

TC is not on a time limit necessarily. If he starts taking more than a year per level, I will reevaluate why that's happening. Is it because of me? I sometimes can't ride enough and all last year didn't take many lessons so that slows us down. Is it because of outside circumstances? Moving means that we'll be missing our opportunity to show for a while because of both finances and having to get settled in a new place. Is it TC? Hopefully TC is the world's most sound horse from now on but it could be that another injury sets us back again. Or it could be that physically the work becomes too much for him and he needs to find a new owner who will be happy at the lower levels. But he is my GP prospect so hopefully that's never the case. 

So when I think about the levels with him, I think about not just doing enough to get through a test to grab a score (which, tbh, is how Rico was trained for a long time), but thinking about how the work we are doing now is going to affect the rest of his training. Good turns on the haunches and good shoulder-in at Second level mean good full canter pirouettes at Grand Prix. Taking my time to put the changes on correctly means that I won't spend a full year or more making them clean. It means that he won't struggle with the tempis even further on. Taking my time to really develop the half pass correctly (so using my inside leg and sitting to the inside from the start, even though I hate those things) means that later on at the GP level, we won't struggle with the steepness of the zig zag causing us to lose cadence.

I like Nicole's quote for this: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I may be slogging through the lower levels right now at a pace slower than I could, but theoretically the movements will come on faster and more correct later on.

Ask me how I know, it took a long time to fix our half pass

But there's lots of little things too, that show up in every test. Halts, rein backs, canter to trot transitions. Every single test in the upper levels has these little movements that the horse has been doing for years. So why did I keep getting 6s and 7s on these movements on Rico, who theoretically had been trained to do them so long before? 

So with that in mind, TC and I are adding another layer of detail to our rides by really focusing on the movements that I know will haunt us forever. I figure I can't do enough of these movements early-ish in his training.

Trot-halt-trot

Starting at First level, these transitions are no longer allowed to be through the walk. So that means no walk steps at all in or out. For a long time, TC could not halt to trot. I don't know if it was me (probably) or him (also probable), but he always wiggled out of the transition and then picked up an equally wiggly trot. The trot to halt was always quite weak, and honestly remains that way, but we're getting good ones sprinkled in.

For the most part, fixing my position has been the key to getting that transition down. I realized a bit ago that I let the structure of my position go when I did a downward transition from the trot, so fixing that and keeping my backline engaged meant that I could really keep riding into the downward. For him, it's all about strength. He just needs more of it. But he's also getting a fair amount of praise when he gets it, or even gets close, so that's helping a lot. 

Canter-trot transitions

The canter to trot transition exists in tests for a very long time. I think almost all (if not all, I'm not going through all the tests right now though) of the tests require at least one canter to trot transition. There's no reason why, by First level, this can't be at least a 7, if not an 8, and remain that way for a long time. This was a stupid place I lost points with Rico because he'd always stutter into the trot and think about walking. It wasn't until I was prepping for PSG with Tracey that she pointed out that it was ABSOLUTELY ridiculous to lose points on that transition (and like, it was also evidence that he wasn't really balanced/in front of my leg/collected/through).

TC isn't terrible at it, but there is a few moments of me having to pick him back up afterward. And I'd love to be able to canter right away after it, I feel like I'm gambling in the simple changes through the trot sometimes. So we're working hard on those.

Rico always halted a little out behind, but at least he's square

Trot-halt-rein back (eventually trot out of rein back)

Rico struggled so much with this at first. There would be times where I'd ask him to rein back and he'd go super wide behind and inch himself back. There were also times where I'd ask him to rein back and he'd just rear. Makes sense looking back, I wouldn't release pressure when he took steps back (because they weren't good enough), but I sure as hell released pressure when he reared. We did get this down real well by the time we were at Fourth, but why lose points at Second?

TC is also kind of the worst at reining back. His go to maneuver in general is to stick his head straight up in the air. See something scary? Head in the air. Asked to do something new? Head in the air. So when I asked him to rein back, head in the air. We have done a TON of work in hand with this, and now he's kind of putting it together undersaddle too. Rein back != head in the air. Please. He's still taking weeny steps back and likes to start reining back the second he's halted, so we have a long way to go, but it's coming along.

Walk pirouettes

I guess these aren't exactly the basics, but they're almost always double coefficients moving up the levels and they're present for a long time. I went through a bout at Third level where Rico and I just didn't score very well. I nailed it down to bad walk pirouettes. I'd literally have no major mistakes, just a misstep in one walk pirouette and my score would plummet. Gah.

So I've been working on them quite a bit with TC. The reason why we're starting this like... a year or more before we'll need them is because of how slow his fucking walk is. It's taken me quite a long time to get him marching in the first place. For the longest time he had two walks: a very slow funeral march and a jigging mess. We can get the more forward march now, which is great. But he also needs a more active walk that covers less ground for the pirouettes. If you get him too amped, he just trots when you ask for it. So it's taking a long time to even get a walk that is capable of doing walk pirouettes. The good news is, we have schooled them, and when the walk is good, they are perfect. So it's more working on his walk than working on the actual mechanic of it. 

TC, I've seen your future and it involves a lot of cantering very
slow and going in very tiny circles

Hopefully all this work on these little details ends up giving us a bit of a leg up arithmetic-wise later on. For now, it's just about filling in holes when they're really shallow and only causing us to trip over, vs when they are very deep and we fall way down into one.