It may be Sunday now, but I am still a little sore from last Tuesday’s lesson. Or, well, more from carrying out all the materials needed to build our little jumping course. Since we had a double jumping lesson, our instructor had put together a course consisting of 10 fences. Ouch. Lots of fun to jump, less fun to drag out and even less fun to drag back in afterwards.
As I had hoped, I was put on Murphy. I haven’t jumped him in a while, and he’s definitely my favourite for being in the paddock. Gamir can get a little hasty, and Fleur a little ditzy. Though given the warmth, Fleur would probably have been half asleep. In which case Murphy is better anyway. Though, he seemed to feel the heat too, or perhaps it was his upset stomach. You see, he was obsessed with the little piles left by the other horses all lesson, and when I asked about it my instructor explained that he’s currently lacking some bacteria or something so he’s munching on the poo left behind by some of the other horses. She thinks it may be because they had to move him to another field than his regular because he’s a hungry pony who eats things he shouldn’t eat and gets allergic reactions to them. In any case, he was a little low on energy, which of course meant quite a challenge for me in terms of not becoming overactive when riding to ‘help’ him along. But overall, I did okay (after a few reminders ;P).
The course, which we first jumped in pieces and then put together, consisted of five jumps 8 meters apart along one side, three jumps on a slight curve along the other side and two jumps in the middle, along the centreline, which we jumped on a serpentine. The first five we used both as a slalom course (jumping every other fence) and as a straight-forward sequence. The first time doing the slalom, I missed the second jump as I didn’t have enough forward drive to get a good turn. Fortunately, rather than just going faster next time, I had a chat with my instructor, who reminded me not to confuse actual speed with forward drive. I really need to hammer that into my head.
When we did the five jumps straight down the line, we were asked to get two strides in between in each fence and we were warned this wouldn’t be easy. Since Murphy has a fairly poor canter and isn’t exactly long-legged, I didn’t think it would be that hard. Heh, silly me. I came in at what I thought was a fairly short canter (in reality, it was probably just slow ;P), and would have entirely missed getting the two strides between each jump if it hadn’t been for Murphy. He may have a hard time both lengthening and shortening his canter when asked to do so, but when faced with a set of jumps he had to figure out how to approach the best way, he shortened himself beautifully and got the distance just right for each of time. My instructor said it was great, but I had to tell her it was all down to Murphy, and she agreed he’s very clever that way. He did the same later on, when we came in rather fast (towards the end of the class, when he was getting rather more energetic), and managed it just as well then.
Another highlight of the lesson was the last time we jumped the curved line of three fences. The first few times were okay, though I always have issues with coming onto a line at a trot. Since my canter rhythm is as poor as it is, I need a solid one established before the fence instead of having to pick it up in-between. And with Murphy having a less than stellar canter, its not a smooth transition. To make it even worse, the path we had to take to get onto this line included a loop back. Basically, we trotted down the same side that the fences were placed along, and then at the short end circled back to turn onto the curved line. It worked okay as we did it as part of the course, but then we got the option to finish off by jumping that line once more. She put up the fences a bit, and because of this I wanted to make sure I had enough speed (yes, that mistake again ;P).
The first jump, at a trot, came out a little awkwardly, and as I felt Murphy go into a rather lax canter, I tapped him with the whip. He picked up the pace, and I ended up totally out of synch with him. The second jump we didn’t exactly do at the same time, so I just had to drop the reins to avoid tugging at his mouth. Fortunately, he’s a very honest little horse, so he just did the last one on his own more or less. Fortunately, because that’s not a good way to finish off for me, she wanted me to do it again when the others had finished. By then, she’d put the jumps up even higher at the request of some of the others, and asked if I wanted to jump them at that height. I said that as long as Murphy is happy to jump them, I’ll tag along. We did get to do this one without the loop back, though, and at a canter, and now it worked beautifully. I kept pretty still and let him do his job, and he sure did.
After we had finished, my instructor talked a little to me about my cantering again. She said that my sense of rhythm is better now, and I generally managed to keep from being overly active, and wondered if she should start nudging me more about correcting the canter during a jumping course or if that’d stress me out. I used to get very flappy (arms and upper body) when asked to do that, but I said I think I can manage that now. We’ll see if that’s true the next time we’re jumping.