Jumping Lessons

For the last month-ish, I've been taking jumping lessons! 

On this fish

He is the best!

I used to jump a lot, I'm closing in on the point where I've done dressage for longer than I've jumped, but I have actually still jumped for longer than I've done dressage. I grew up doing pony club (C3-TR and A-DR) and lots of local schooling shows. When I was sixteen, I leased Stretch (who we then bought) and did a year of "B" and "A" circuit shows on him. We did the hunters and the equitation, but also a few jumper classes. Nothing fancy, all in the 2'6 to 3' divisions. When Stretch needed some time to recover from a stifle injury, I leased a couple of event horses back to back and evented at Novice for a year. 

Rico and I jumped a bunch after I bought him. I taught him to jump and we did a combined test once, but mostly just jumped for fun. He could jump 4' like it was a cross rail and he and I jumped a single 4'6 oxer, which remains my biggest jump ever (I have no intention on trying to go for that again lol). I frequently schooled the 3'6-3'9 stuff on him when I was jumping him seriously. 

I then worked for an eventing trainer for a few years and in that barn, I was working over fences on lots of different horses, mostly Training but some Prelim too depending on the horse. I evented a young stallion from his first event through Novice and quit before his Training debut. After that, I took on a client's horse and schooled him to Novice, and even entered him in a horse trials before he had a freak accident and needed to rehab. 

This lesson was a tough one but it was fun!

Around 2013, I started to focus completely on dressage with no jumping in my schedule. That was when Rico was gearing up for the FEI levels and I was in graduate school so really had no time for two disciplines. Plus, I wasn't about to jump Rico while he was headed toward the Grand Prix. And afterwards, I started riding TC and never really missed jumping. 

I realized during those years of doing upper level dressage that I'd never found jumping all that fun. There was a certain point where the jumps just got bigger and scarier and my trainers just told me the same things and I got kind of bored. Lessons where the only thing I'd learn is that I shouldn't take my leg off when I didn't see a distance at an even larger fence than the week before were not intriguing. Dressage was super interesting though, as I learned canter pirouettes and piaffe and passage. The upper levels looked fun rather than scary and I really wanted to get to the top of a sport. I always figured I'd jump again eventually, but that always felt like a long while off. 

Flounder and I listening closely

But then I realized in the last few years that I'm getting older. I mean, you know this your whole life but it kind of hits differently in your 30s maybe? I dunno, I'm very much still young enough to do things like start jumping horses again after ten years but I probably don't have another ten years of being young enough to do things like start jumping horses again after twenty years. I'm not quite as stupid bold as I used to be but I'm still pretty bold. 

I had this moment of realizing that... if I wanted to jump again *one day* then I should probably start jumping again now. It really hasn't been that long since I started winding down so the muscle memory is still there theoretically. And I knew that if I could get my sea legs back early enough, I could jump for a lot longer than if I waited any longer. 

He is the actual cutest

Just a couple weeks earlier

I'm lucky to have a super quality jumping trainer as one of my best friends and for her to have the best possible jumping horse to knock the rust off on. You may remember Flounder as the horse I rode in that intro schooling HT that we won despite no preparation. And Kate is frequently featured in this blog. She listened to me talk to her at length about jumping again one day for a while and then offered to teach me on Flounder. 

Kate has blown me away in my few lessons back to jumping. She is such a good instructor (not that I didn't already know that), she and I do the Mary Wanless workshop together each year and her Mary skills are very present in her jumping instruction. She can take something I know how to do in the dressage and show me how to utilize it over fences. For example, using my slingshot to change the way Flounder jumps, distributing weight through my thigh to immediately make me feel more secure, and keeping my bear down on over fences (which my body finds confusing because my jumping pre-dates my bear down). 

She's also great at understanding what I'm going through and walking the line between helping me with some basic stuff without making me feel like I'm a beginner again. In some ways, my jumping skills are still rather well developed. It's like riding a bicycle to an extent. I still have a pretty decent eye, I still have a good leg, I can even kind of still do my auto release from back in the day when I remember to do it. But in other ways, a lot of my high level instruction came in dressage tack and the shorter stirrups make it tough for me to figure out how to do the same things in jumping tack. And I'm definitely rusty! My old bad habits are still present and probably a little stronger than they previously were but Kate is knocking those out one by one. 

These are all from the same lesson, Google Photos
is being weird so I have limited pictures right now!

I'm really excited to continue jumping. We skipped last week due to a clinic and my own insane burnout. But this week we will pick back up and I'm excited to see what Kate has in store for me! I told Kate that my main goals are to get secure enough to do a grid without hands and to school cross country at some point. Even with just a few lessons, I'm feeling like I'll need to make some new goals soon because those are coming up quickly. 

And just to clarify in case anyone thinks I have ideas for TC:

I will not be jumping TC in any kind of a serious way. This for a variety of reasons, but mostly because when I bought him, he had the beginnings of side bone and the vet told me that he was not suitable for jumping due to this, jumping will speed up the development of it. 

It doesn't mean that I haven't done lots of cavalletti with him or jumped him over small cross rails and small logs on cross country, but if I decide to jump for real again, it will be on another horse who is better built for the job. TC will remain my dressage and trail horse! I have no plans to switch over completely, but I am closing in on the ability to have two horses so one dressage/trail horse and one sporty eventing pony (with three good gaits so we can cross over to the dressage shows) sounds like a good time to me.