Blog Hop: The Simple Life

Another blog hop from Viva Carlos: Other than money, what would make your horse life simpler?


Money is obviously a factor, but my rarest commodity these days is having the time to ride. Grad school (even if it's summer "vacation" hah), my job, and my commute (which is an hour each way without traffic) all take away from the time I could be riding.

But actually it's amazing

A lot of the time I have to squeeze rides in super early or ride late at night or right before work. I usually try to make the short rides more intense with less breaks and the long rides less intense with more conditioning. Whatever I'm doing is working because he's definitely getting more fit. However, I'd like to have time to do more conditioning every day, we only get maybe 3 or 4 full long rides a week and I'd like to have six.

It also means that I haven't had the time for very many trail rides recently, I'm hoping to change that next week and take him to Harvey Bear.


The other thing that would make my life simpler is if horses could have tendon transplants. Rico has had severe tendon problems in both front legs. He's sound for now, but if he hadn't had these problems, I could jump him and trail ride him without feeling like I'm breaking him. I'd love to take him in an event, or go for a gallop, or climb a mountain... but until he's retired from high level dressage, I don't want to take that risk.

Or go to the beach again!

One day we'll gallop up a mountain over some logs! This horse is going to have one hell of a retirement.


My lesson the other night went terribly. I'm not really sure what to think about it and therefore don't have much to say yet. I'm going to take it easy with Rico this weekend (mostly because my brother is coming into town so my parents have all sorts of plans) and then reevaluate next week. It was disappointing but I'm in higher spirits today and this weekend will be a great pick-me-up.

We're going to a beer festival which I find entertaining. My parents, brother and his girlfriend, and my boyfriend all really enjoy beer (my dad brews it, my brother works for a beer company) and I can get through maybe one or two Coronas before I'm done. Luckily there's BBQ for me and everyone is grateful for a designated driver who won't be tempted by all the amazing beer.

Better and Better

Rico has been super lately! I've been doing a 3-days-on-1-day-off schedule which has been quite good for his brain, he's enjoying his ulcerguard (although not the administration process), and he approves of the conditioning schedule now that he's getting *scary* fit.

Most dressage horses don't need to be like... intermediate level eventer fit.

This... would be a little overkill

We're just sandbox fruits, no galloping necessary

Mine apparently does to get him hot enough for me to ride at this level. He's feeling stronger and more energetic on the conditioning schedule, and this is paying off quite a lot in the movements.

I worked on the piaffe, passage, and one tempis yesterday. Rico had gotten Friday off because poor boyfriend sprained his ankle so I took him to the doctor's and kept him company (plus we even made it to our concert, which was probably a bad decision given how much it swelled but we had fun! Even ran into my advisor and his wife there, which was fucking weird).


Saturday Rico was pretty excited to get out, even though my mom has been riding him a bit (yay mom!) so he doesn't really get full days off anymore. He was spooking a lot, especially at my neighbor's house which was confusing until a bunch of wild turkeys came running out in front of us. We herded them down the road.

In the arena I first worked the one tempis, since Rico seems to have a quota of how many he's willing to do before he wants to stop. I used the exercise we had done at my last lesson- a series of couplets with two tempis in between.

It worked really well! We were able to get to three sets of couplets (so six total changes) in a row. I'm being slightly limited by the size of my arena, but I think I'm primarily being limited by my inability to ride corners.

The piaffe and passage is improving still too. I've fixed the slow tempo problem in the piaffe but he still feels earthbound so I'm doing a lot of really quick half steps. The passage is getting more and more reliable. I can keep him into the bridle with a long-ish neck and I can even steer pretty well now! It's like learning to trot again.

The best part was the exceptional transitions we got. Those are normally SO hard for horses, yet Rico is really figuring them out quickly. I never worry about getting in or out of the piaffe anymore, and the walk to passage is only occasionally bad.

These pictures were so pretty from last month :)

Tuesday I have my next Tracey lesson and I'm going to bring her a show schedule and get her opinion on when I should move up and where. I'm exactly three weeks away from my first possible GP and I'm not feeling quite ready. Rico is getting better and better, but I can't take so few ones into the ring. I wish he was able to tell me what was going on with those. I feel like we have a block. Maybe this is just how long it takes!

Sitting

I consider myself an expert sitter. I can sit at a desk. I can sit at a table. I can sit while eating. I can even sit while I watch House of Cards (highly recommended), blog, and edit pictures from my vacation all at the same time. In fact, I'm doing that right now!

However, it seems like when a certain horse is trying to get on my level of sitting, I have a major problem with patience. 

I'm very comfortable in the pushing gaits. Give me an extended canter, I'll extend the shit out of that canter. Give me an extended trot, or a passage! I love a good passage. But please please don't make me do a piaffe or a pirouette or even just trotting without going 50 mph. Too difficult.

Love me some pushing

Tonight Tracey had some really great things to say about the Alfredo clinic. Apparently Alfredo came up to her later and told her how great I was doing, and that he was really happy with how fast Rico learned his piaffe and passage.

I wanted to work the ones and the piaffe and passage. I'll work the pirouettes later this week and some more lateral work later, but I wanted help with the ones since I seem to be stuck at 4 and to see what Tracey thought of how Alfredo had us working the piaffe and passage.


First we worked some of the basics. Rico needs to stay rounder in general, he gets a little hollow and drops his shoulders which Tracey says will lead to him being heavy again. Don't want that! It gets especially bad when I ask for collected canter so we played with that a bit too.

Then we did the ones. Tracey agreed that my rhythm is off in that movement and told me to stick to couplets for a bit until I got really good at them. She said that I should be able to do a couplet, then a two, then a couplet, then a two, etc. So we worked on that a bit.

After the ones we did some basics in the trot and this is where we found my main problem of sitting. I tend to equate energy with thrust. I want Rico covering ground and pushing. However, there is very little pushing in collection, there is sitting. So what happens is I cue for collected trot, get a collected trot, think that it's too lazy and slow, and push him over the ground.

This was a major breakthrough for myself in the way I think about it. She's totally right, I panic in the collected movements (pirouettes, piaffe, general collected gaits) and feel confident/comfortable in the ones where I can move Rico over the ground.

We played with the piaffe and passage and Tracey was happy. She said that she doesn't want his piaffe that much on the spot (as Alfredo did) because Rico was losing rhythm. We have homework to do half steps. He's also losing rhythm a bit in the passage, so we worked a little more roundness on the right rein and that improved a lot. She agreed that both were solid 6s and that Rico needs to be able to do them for longer (but not too long since we don't want him getting hurt).

Passage :)

Overall I was pretty pleased with how Rico is going! He likes his new bit (as does Tracey) and is staying better up in front of me. He's still not 100% yet but we're on the right track!

Lethargy Update: Scope Results (and Alfredo Pictures!)

I've been on vacation for the last week (which was AMAZING!) so I haven't been able to post. I did TRY to, but we had no internet so I was making attempts with my phone and it failed.

Today I managed to edit pictures from the Alfredo Hernandez clinic so enjoy those!

So dappled!

My favorite from those days!

Passage

More passage

So while I was gone, my mom was nice enough to both ride (!!) Rico for me and take him up to my vet to get his stomach scoped for ulcers.

The good news: Rico doesn't have massive scary bleeding ulcers that would cause him to be retired! Also, my mom rode him for 40 minutes two of the three days I was gone and both her and my dad (who rode Stretch, who my mom normally rides) said that he was perfect for them, even better than Stretch.

The iffy news: my vet had a lot to say that my mom tried to relay to me through texts which I was only able to get sometimes. Here was what I got out of it-

- Rico is getting older and thus losing muscle as I'm trying to put it on. Rico is now on a supplement called Core Builder which is a muscle building supplement.

- Rico had an old ulcer that was healing, so he's going on 2 weeks of ulcerguard and is now getting a pre- and probiotic.

- We're going to work on Rico's diet over the next couple weeks to get him enough fat, protein, and energy so that he can perform at this level for at least another few months.

Piaffe

Passage

I'm happy to report that Rico has been very good since I got back from vacation. He has been more energetic and much easier to ride. I have bruises all over my legs from wakeboarding (which I'm bad at), tubing (which I'm bad at), and generally being on a boat (which I'm obviously not used to) for the last week. Some of these bruises happen to be right where I hit the stirrup leather so I've been rather useless.

Passage with Alfredo's help!

More help to get Rico more on the spot

I did work on one-tempis a few days ago, which are the last of the *really* bad movements at Grand Prix. I can now get 3 of them in a row pretty regularly, and 4 on occasion (usually 1-2x per ride). The problem is that his ones are so different from Leo's. Leo was trained, obviously, so it was easier to do them and he had a much less boingy canter. Rico leaps up into the air during changes, while Leo is a tad flat (especially with me on him!). Rico's leaping means that it takes him longer to change than Leo. So what that means for me is that on Leo, I learned to move my legs quicker while on Rico, I need to slow them down. That's REALLY hard!

Because of this (and his learning curve), I feel like we're moving a little slow on this movement in my opinion, so I may see if Tracey can ride him at some point. If she can get more, it's probably my problem so I'll fix that ASAP, if she can't, it's his learning curve and we'll take our time.

Tonight I worked on the zig zag. I broke it down into elements and it seems like my left zig is going to be steeper than my right zag so I worked on evening them out a bit- making the right one a little steeper and the left one a little less steep. I need to get into a court to practice it soon so I may be visiting Heidi again soon!

Rico thinks that levade is fun too!

Passage

Piaffe

More piaffe

Lethargy Update: Changing the Way We Ride

On Thursday after the clinic, I took Rico up into the hills across the valley. I'm getting braver about allowing him to ride in the hills- I get really freaked out every time he walks up or down a hill because I think he's going to break. 45 minutes of passaging, piaffing, and canter pirouettes? Not a problem. Walking up a hill? Obviously going to break the horse.

More show pictures! Apologies for any repeats, I don't keep
track of what I post very well...

So I've decided that I'm going to be careful, but the poor horse needs a trail ride here and there!

He was a nutcase! He was so stoked to be out there and I regret riding him bareback in the hackamore because he was charging up the hills as fast as he could and spooking at everything. I was glad to see him excited about something for a change.


Friday night I rode him dressage and was going to address the issues we've been having lately.

If you've missed the last few posts about the issues I'm having, here's a brief synopsis. About three weeks ago Rico started to experience lethargy (very lazy undersaddle including randomly stopping during work). I have since changed a LOT of things, including his diet and workout schedule. We got blood drawn last week and found that he was slightly anemic. My two vets (local vet who I use for minor issues and performance vet who is further away and more expensive, who I use for performance issues) disagreed on what the cause was.

We think ulcers (getting him scoped on Wednesday and he's on ranitidine right now), general pain (getting chiro out in a week), a metabolic disease (running tests after ruling out ulcers), and general burnout from the work.

The horse loves to show though!

With the last possibility in mind, I've made a series of changes to the way I ride him:

I now have him on a conditioning schedule (change #1) which is set up so that we both don't have to do as much work in our sets, we just do more of the sets. So we did 20 sets of 2 minutes of work. This helped a lot because he usually starts to stop after 2-3 minutes of work, so I would just let him take a short (25 second) break before starting again. Twice we took longer breaks. He was pretty tired by the end (the last 4 sets we did stretchy trot) which was nice because lately I've been only able to get through 20-30 minutes of work without being frustrated.

I also have decided to make several changes to the way I ride him. Alfredo pointed out that I sometimes drop my leg off of him. I'll be riding along and just expect him to keep going even though I suddenly have no leg on. YES this is something I'd like him to do (two of the young horses I ride are like this and it's soooo nice), but I need to accept that this isn't Rico. If you're riding a horse that needs steady hands to go on the bit, and you drop the horse all the time, the horse probably isn't going to be on the bit. Not the horse's fault! Yours! So my first big riding change is to keep my leg more steady (change #2) with my calf on and then use the spurs to back it up.

Such a good horse

Then, Alfredo (and Heidi, and Tracey) pointed out that I use the whip too much. I never realize this until it's taken away and I'm forced to use my leg. This means that Rico is being over-exposed to the whip and it's meaning less and less, which means that I have to use it stronger to get a response (which I really hate doing). So I decided to flip it upside down and carry it like a sword (change #3). It's much harder for me to use this way (I can't just tap him), so when I did use it, it was when I REALLY needed to rather than just using it casually. Rico doesn't care about a whip being held like that since he was a driving horse, so it worked really well!

Finally, for the last few weeks I've been letting Rico get away with being slightly hollow during our rides in hopes of convincing him to go more forward (note: compromise doesn't work with lazy animals who can't have a full conversation with you). That's not working, so we're going to ride a little lower (change #4) and see if I can get him a little more INTO the bridle. This is a tough change for me because I hate heavy horses with a passion, but 3 months of crossfit has left me quite strong, so I'm no longer worried about being pulled on. If he's a little heavy in the bridle due to being pushed to the contact more, he's going to be more reliably forward because the moment he gets a little light, I can shove him back up there.

Slightly hollow/off the bit... 

These changes majorly paid off. Friday's ride we worked on my sitting trot (Alfredo and Tracey say that my legs move too much at the trot, so Rico is becoming dull to those aids, time to fix it- change #5) and his canter pirouettes. He tried to stop occasionally, but not quite as much as he has been, and we actually got through an hour long ride without me getting frustrated/sad/etc.

The pirouettes are coming along, especially now that I'm riding better. I'm no longer worried about the pirouette apocalypse (although perhaps now only worried about the pirouette crash of 1929) so I'm a lot more patient in the work. We worked primarily on biomechanics (meaning making them very large, I know I can always put them smaller but the mechanic starts to disintegrate so I wanted to work only on that).

To the left we worked on control and roundness. His left pirouette is good. He gets decent scores, but the judge at the last test said that he "labored" one step. He does this because he gets too short in the neck and a little hollow. I worked on keeping him round and being able to influence the inside hind leg to keep him more active.

To the right, we're always having issues. Most of them are mechanic issues, he wants to swap out his lead or get way too bent, and then he can't perform the pirouette properly. I started very large on the circle just moving him up and back, then we did some haunches-in. Twice during the workout he tried to stop, so I told him not to with the whip (which meant more since I hadn't used it the whole time). He was much better after that! It's just hard for him to stay sitting and active, I get one or the other. Eventually I felt like we had a lot more control, reliability, and the mechanic was better. I'm putting the full pirouettes on hold in this direction for a few weeks to allow him to gain strength within the mechanic so that way we can spiral them down into real, correct, pirouettes later.

Heading into our right pirouette which was utter crap

After the ride I was not as frustrated as I have been for the past three weeks! Rico seemed happy too. It's hard when I have to end on a bad note (which I still feel is better than ending on a VERY bad note when I've tried to fix the problem and then have it blow up in my face) so it was nice to finish up the pirouette work, do some stretchy trot, and then walk back to the barn.

Obviously I'm not ruling out anything physically wrong with him, but these changes will at least help me get through this weekend before I leave on vacation on Monday and he gets scoped while I'm gone on Wednesday.

Alfredo Hernandez Clinic (and Intermediare I Pictures!)

I finally have pictures edited from Friday! I'm working on a whole bunch more too from this clinic and from riding a friend's horse. It was actually good that poor boyfriend had to work this week rather than us going camping, since I have 300 pictures to edit. Yikes. But anyway, on to the pictures which I'll use to break up a big long post about the Alfredo clinic I went to!

Up centerline 

Such a great horse

All done!

First though, an update on Rico's health:

Welp, I changed Rico's bit, workout routine, my way of riding him, the number of days I do dressage, and how long he works. He's also on ranitidine and a diet with lower levels of grain and higher levels of fat, and...

He's feeling mildly better.

So I'm planning on getting him scoped next week while I'm at the lake with boyfriend's family. I'll have no internet and no phone and my horse will get a tube shoved up his nose and down into his stomach to take a look around and see whether he has ulcers or not. If so, I've decided that unless they're incredibly severe, I'm going to do a treatment. If they come back, he's retired, but hopefully we can keep him comfortable through the fall and then he's retired!

Warm up pictures are significantly better than the indoor
show pictures

More warming up

With this slight improvement, I decided to go to the Alfredo clinic Tuesday and Wednesday. I figured that if he has ulcers, they're feeling better with the ranitidine and change in diet. If he has to be retired, at least this (like our I1) is one last fun thing to do with him. I also figured that if it wasn't ulcers, I'd very much regret not going since Alfredo won't be back until September.

Smiling after he did tempis up centerline

Hanging out with the judge

We still have a questionable medium trot

Alfredo remembered us from November and was pleased to see how good Rico looked in his pi/pa since last time. In November, Rico had his first clinic with Alfredo and it was his first time doing passage ever and first time doing a real piaffe (we had done half steps up until then). Since then, we've gotten a pretty decent passage on him (still working out the kinks), and the piaffe is coming along. He also has semi-decent walk-passage, passage-canter, and pi/pa transitions.

Tuesday we worked the piaffe and passage independently. In the piaffe, I need to insist he does it on the spot now. Not a lot of steps, and in the show ring I can let him scooch forward a bit, but at home, it's on the spot for 5-6 steps and then out.

In the passage, Rico needs more lift, but not that much more. Alfredo warned me. Don't make the horse passage BIG, you do that if you have years to develop a passage. We have several months at the most. He said play it safe and get a six- Rico needs to be reliable and even, but not flashy. I totally agree, I don't want an uncontrollable passage in the ring, I want something rideable and something that I don't worry about being able to steer.

We warmed up with a little passage at the show, it's not big
but it's reliable!

Half pass zig zag!

More warm up passage

Wednesday we played with one tempis and transitions. Alfredo was so funny about me in the ones. He first told me to canter a bit for him and then told me that Rico didn't need me that much. He said "put your reins in one hand and do lead changes" so I did. No biggie, Rico has good changes. Then he said "give me one one!" and I was like hah yeah that's not happening.

But Rico did them, actually better with one hand than with two! Alfredo laughed at me and told me that Rico didn't want me so involved in the ones. Point taken.

Then we did transitions in and out of piaffe and passage, then some walk to passage transitions. My biggest problem was me taking my leg of between the piaffe and passage. That meant that Rico would halt, then do a halt to passage transition. Woops. I fixed that!

More like a reining spin than a right pirouette but we are
making progress!

Better in the arena!

Left one is far superior

Much better than the right

At the end, Alfredo said that he thought our piaffe and passage wasn't too far off from Grand Prix. He said to remember that it's all a learning experience, that I shouldn't worry too much about the score because it depends so much on the judge anyway (he said judges have different opinions on what is a good piaffe and passage, more so than they do with the other movements) and that I should go for the experience and bring him the test next time and we'll figure out how to bring scores up.

I'm with him for the most part. There's part of me who just wants to GO and if we score like shit, say "oh well!" and keep working. But the other part of me looked up my record last night and I have only ever scored in the 50s three times in my life. Twice with Rico (once at first level when I had hurt my back and went off course twice; once at third level when it was so windy that the arena letters fell into the arena along one long side and we had to make due without a long side) and once was my Grand Prix on Leo. Both of the scores on Rico were 59s... So it would be a new-ish experience to score so low on Rico, but I think I'd be fine with that.

More judge chatting

So cute!

But with how things have been going, I'm hoping we will end up making it to Grand Prix this year regardless of the score :) Fingers crossed that whatever is going on (physical or behavioral) is fixable. Especially if it was fixable in time for the first chance at the Grand Prix which is on July 13th, just over a month away- yikes. Second chance is three weeks later in August so we may wait for that one.

Alright, off to do some homework now. Yep. Homework. Didn't I finish my semester a couple weeks ago? Two glorious weeks of break. Now I'm taking a month long Programming in R class. Grad school never ends!!

Parents' new trailer which Rico isn't much of a fan of...

Such a good horse!