Last dressage clinic for the year
Oct. 27th, 2019 04:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickTwo steps forward and one step back, or maybe one and a half steps back. Possibly two steps back. Fucking dressage clinic.
Okay, so recent rider-based goals were Sit Up Straight and Do Not Grind With Heels. I've been working on this and it's kind of going OK. I got compliments from DLB on position, effective use of aids, proper position of legs, supportive and appropriate riding, yadda yadda yadda. I guess that's going well. It's about the only fucking thing that is.
I've been doing road work for Bird lately because of the Field of Shit issue (it should be ok by Monday, we had to stay off of it for 30 days) and I can't get a decent round trot out of him on the road work. He's too busy looking at shit. *sigh*
And my legs are all wrong now. I mean, I guess they're "righter" but they're not what I'm used to having and I feel less effective than I was with the heel grinding shit. Also, with the changes in rider position, fancy trot is broken. Round basic trot is kind of iffy, it comes and goes, and there is no fancy trot at all. Ithink HOPE it will stabilize once I get some more field work under our belt. I can probably work back to fancy trot over the winter. But I had fancy trot and then I (allegedly) improved my position and now there is no fucking fancy trot.
I am having a great deal of trouble perceiving this as "improvement".
At clinic we walk. The walk needs to be about 2/3 of the walk we do out and about on roadwork. The walk we do on roadwork trends towards lateral and it is too big of a walk. It is not the walk we are supposed to have. Also, DLB thinks Use Aids To Get More From Horse is wrong advice that was wrongly written on my stupid dumb-ass dressage tests or else I didn't properly understand it. Because I am a fucking sackful of hammers, here is the exact phrasing on The Dressage Test: "Start to use your aids to get more from your horse" and also "Nice steady test, now use aids and get horse connected over back".
Not sure what I was to have gotten from this except that the judge thinks I am not getting enough effort from the horse's work. Not enough bending, not enough power, not enough. So I embarked on a month and a half effort to get more out of the horse, the which DLB says is all wrong. So that was a waste of my life and my horse's life and just... fuck.
I got the 2/3 walk. We are stable in the 2/3 walk. It's fine.
We trot. The trot needs work. Horse steps into a smallish Remedial Jog trot, which then shapes into a Better Trot over the next ten steps or whatever. This is wrong and sucky. Horse should step into Better Trot right off the bat. Better prep, better posture, better whatever. I need to work on it. But the trot itself is fine once it's buffed. Compliments on the trot from DLB. It's not fancy trot but it's a round trot and it's stable and shit because we are not on the road.
We canter. I need to be more upright. I need to not have that little collapse in the chest/sternum area. UP STRAIGHT. I can't push with seat, the seat must remain quiet. I am not allowed to shove him along. If he can't hold it without shoving, he can't hold it. Give up, try again. He must hold the canter without any shoving at all, without any slouching at all. I get compliments on the, like, five strides of canter we can manage before falling out of it and collapsing like a one-horse shay. *sigh* This is going to take work. We suck at canter in this new position. Horse can't hold it. He just isn't there. I'm not there. Neither of us has a damn thing.
DLB is all Wow, Awesome, So Great, This is Lovely, blah blah blah. And then she's "And yet you do not seem as enthusiastic about this as I am." No shit, lady.
Look. After four fucking years, I finally decided to put my goddamn heel down and stop grinding it against my horse's sides. I finally decided to sit up straight. I finally decided to work towards installing a decent and respectful response to leg aids and to usefully employ a beater stick. Like, I am working at these goals. I am trying hard, consistently, every ride. I work at it hard so that I can do it more-correctly in my shitty approximation of improvement. And now I got nothing. Nothing works. I'm back to generic round trot and horse can't canter anymore. But I look slightly less-shitty than I did. This seems like a bad trade-off or at least a not entirely encouraging trade-off. Certainly it is not a trade-off wherein I am all gonna be WOW YAY GREAT AWESOME about it.
I tried hard to use my words to express my feelings about this. I am not sure I was successful. It is fucking frustrating to work really hard to try to do better and watch everything fall apart. Again. I do understand that there is no guarantee of correlation between Level of Effort and Amount of Results. Only idiot children think that Working Really Hard always leads directly to Success. I'm not fucking stupid.
And after my first go at explaining, DLB is like "But this is better!!"
No, DLB. No, it is not better. Right now it's a handful of shit and no amount of yay-enthusiasm is going to fix that. I will MAKE it better but it's going to take about six months.
And then I'm to the talky part of the clinic, wherein DLB is like "Well, you did all the things I wanted and you did them repeatedly and appropriately and it was all lovely. I don't have anything else for you. You have met all the expectations I had for you."
Uhm, okay. And how fancy is that? Do I get money back because I have met all the expectations and you have nothing further to offer me? (Of course not. Don't be stupid.)
However, as we're going into wintertime and I have like a shitbucket of riding time between now and the next time I will see DLB, it'd be nice to have some things to work on while I'm doing my shitbucket of riding. This lack of things to do can maybe be fixed by Using Words. I tried that. I tried the Using Words thing. That was not particularly helpful.
I tried AGAIN with the using words. I asked a simple yes-no question. "Can I Fucking Stop With The Fucking Intro Tests And Move On To Training So That I Can Fail There?" *sigh* Well, OK, that's what I wanted to ask. It's not what I actually asked, because I am a fucking pussy.
"I don't really want to spend another year showing Intro," says I. "Is it appropriate to start thinking about Training?," asks I. (This was what I actually asked. Note that it is a question that may be answered appropriately with either a "yes" or a "no".)
DLB says "Well, your horse will tell you if he's ready or not. If he doesn't have the strength to hold the canter you'll just be spending money for people to tell you what you already know."
Now, I'm not good at reading what people mean when they don't say what they mean. It is not my best skillset. However, I don't think I'm far wrong to take this as a soft "no". It's the kind of "no" that you give floppy middle-aged adult ammie riders so that they don't be upset about it. It's the soft no that allows the FMAAAR to say "Oh, no, I am not failing to progress, I am waiting for my horse to tell me he's ready."
Mmm.
I suck at this.
In four years of effort, I have demonstrated that I am incapable of getting a horse consistent enough and strong enough and steady enough to progress beyond the super-dipshit level of dummy beginner dressage that they fucking invented for Americans because we suck even worse than the Europeans at this.
I've been trying pretty hard. Not just the money, but the plugging away in the face of no clue regarding what we're going for, why we're doing the thing, the taking it on faith, the cargo-culting my way along...
All along, DLB takes my money and says happy and encouraging things that are all wow and amazeballs and hooray and whatnot. She says nice things about my progress and she's effusive about how much progress there has been. Endlessly, she says nice things. She's quite cheerleadery about it all, in her way.
But.
But.
In spite of all this progress, and how wonderful and amazing and great it is, the horse and I are still not ready to move on to Training level tests. Allow me to summarize this in a graphic for the people who process things visually:
Fucking empty cheerleader praise. You can't pair Wow/Great/Awesome/Wonderful/So Much Improvement praise with "still not ready to move up" FOR FOUR YEARS without one of those things being complete and utter bullshit.
I hate this.
Okay, so recent rider-based goals were Sit Up Straight and Do Not Grind With Heels. I've been working on this and it's kind of going OK. I got compliments from DLB on position, effective use of aids, proper position of legs, supportive and appropriate riding, yadda yadda yadda. I guess that's going well. It's about the only fucking thing that is.
I've been doing road work for Bird lately because of the Field of Shit issue (it should be ok by Monday, we had to stay off of it for 30 days) and I can't get a decent round trot out of him on the road work. He's too busy looking at shit. *sigh*
And my legs are all wrong now. I mean, I guess they're "righter" but they're not what I'm used to having and I feel less effective than I was with the heel grinding shit. Also, with the changes in rider position, fancy trot is broken. Round basic trot is kind of iffy, it comes and goes, and there is no fancy trot at all. I
I am having a great deal of trouble perceiving this as "improvement".
At clinic we walk. The walk needs to be about 2/3 of the walk we do out and about on roadwork. The walk we do on roadwork trends towards lateral and it is too big of a walk. It is not the walk we are supposed to have. Also, DLB thinks Use Aids To Get More From Horse is wrong advice that was wrongly written on my stupid dumb-ass dressage tests or else I didn't properly understand it. Because I am a fucking sackful of hammers, here is the exact phrasing on The Dressage Test: "Start to use your aids to get more from your horse" and also "Nice steady test, now use aids and get horse connected over back".
Not sure what I was to have gotten from this except that the judge thinks I am not getting enough effort from the horse's work. Not enough bending, not enough power, not enough. So I embarked on a month and a half effort to get more out of the horse, the which DLB says is all wrong. So that was a waste of my life and my horse's life and just... fuck.
I got the 2/3 walk. We are stable in the 2/3 walk. It's fine.
We trot. The trot needs work. Horse steps into a smallish Remedial Jog trot, which then shapes into a Better Trot over the next ten steps or whatever. This is wrong and sucky. Horse should step into Better Trot right off the bat. Better prep, better posture, better whatever. I need to work on it. But the trot itself is fine once it's buffed. Compliments on the trot from DLB. It's not fancy trot but it's a round trot and it's stable and shit because we are not on the road.
We canter. I need to be more upright. I need to not have that little collapse in the chest/sternum area. UP STRAIGHT. I can't push with seat, the seat must remain quiet. I am not allowed to shove him along. If he can't hold it without shoving, he can't hold it. Give up, try again. He must hold the canter without any shoving at all, without any slouching at all. I get compliments on the, like, five strides of canter we can manage before falling out of it and collapsing like a one-horse shay. *sigh* This is going to take work. We suck at canter in this new position. Horse can't hold it. He just isn't there. I'm not there. Neither of us has a damn thing.
DLB is all Wow, Awesome, So Great, This is Lovely, blah blah blah. And then she's "And yet you do not seem as enthusiastic about this as I am." No shit, lady.
Look. After four fucking years, I finally decided to put my goddamn heel down and stop grinding it against my horse's sides. I finally decided to sit up straight. I finally decided to work towards installing a decent and respectful response to leg aids and to usefully employ a beater stick. Like, I am working at these goals. I am trying hard, consistently, every ride. I work at it hard so that I can do it more-correctly in my shitty approximation of improvement. And now I got nothing. Nothing works. I'm back to generic round trot and horse can't canter anymore. But I look slightly less-shitty than I did. This seems like a bad trade-off or at least a not entirely encouraging trade-off. Certainly it is not a trade-off wherein I am all gonna be WOW YAY GREAT AWESOME about it.
I tried hard to use my words to express my feelings about this. I am not sure I was successful. It is fucking frustrating to work really hard to try to do better and watch everything fall apart. Again. I do understand that there is no guarantee of correlation between Level of Effort and Amount of Results. Only idiot children think that Working Really Hard always leads directly to Success. I'm not fucking stupid.
And after my first go at explaining, DLB is like "But this is better!!"
No, DLB. No, it is not better. Right now it's a handful of shit and no amount of yay-enthusiasm is going to fix that. I will MAKE it better but it's going to take about six months.
And then I'm to the talky part of the clinic, wherein DLB is like "Well, you did all the things I wanted and you did them repeatedly and appropriately and it was all lovely. I don't have anything else for you. You have met all the expectations I had for you."
Uhm, okay. And how fancy is that? Do I get money back because I have met all the expectations and you have nothing further to offer me? (Of course not. Don't be stupid.)
However, as we're going into wintertime and I have like a shitbucket of riding time between now and the next time I will see DLB, it'd be nice to have some things to work on while I'm doing my shitbucket of riding. This lack of things to do can maybe be fixed by Using Words. I tried that. I tried the Using Words thing. That was not particularly helpful.
I tried AGAIN with the using words. I asked a simple yes-no question. "Can I Fucking Stop With The Fucking Intro Tests And Move On To Training So That I Can Fail There?" *sigh* Well, OK, that's what I wanted to ask. It's not what I actually asked, because I am a fucking pussy.
"I don't really want to spend another year showing Intro," says I. "Is it appropriate to start thinking about Training?," asks I. (This was what I actually asked. Note that it is a question that may be answered appropriately with either a "yes" or a "no".)
DLB says "Well, your horse will tell you if he's ready or not. If he doesn't have the strength to hold the canter you'll just be spending money for people to tell you what you already know."
Now, I'm not good at reading what people mean when they don't say what they mean. It is not my best skillset. However, I don't think I'm far wrong to take this as a soft "no". It's the kind of "no" that you give floppy middle-aged adult ammie riders so that they don't be upset about it. It's the soft no that allows the FMAAAR to say "Oh, no, I am not failing to progress, I am waiting for my horse to tell me he's ready."
Mmm.
I suck at this.
In four years of effort, I have demonstrated that I am incapable of getting a horse consistent enough and strong enough and steady enough to progress beyond the super-dipshit level of dummy beginner dressage that they fucking invented for Americans because we suck even worse than the Europeans at this.
I've been trying pretty hard. Not just the money, but the plugging away in the face of no clue regarding what we're going for, why we're doing the thing, the taking it on faith, the cargo-culting my way along...
All along, DLB takes my money and says happy and encouraging things that are all wow and amazeballs and hooray and whatnot. She says nice things about my progress and she's effusive about how much progress there has been. Endlessly, she says nice things. She's quite cheerleadery about it all, in her way.
But.
But.
In spite of all this progress, and how wonderful and amazing and great it is, the horse and I are still not ready to move on to Training level tests. Allow me to summarize this in a graphic for the people who process things visually:
Fucking empty cheerleader praise. You can't pair Wow/Great/Awesome/Wonderful/So Much Improvement praise with "still not ready to move up" FOR FOUR YEARS without one of those things being complete and utter bullshit.
I hate this.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-29 01:16 pm (UTC)Not that it needs to be said, but I hate this too.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-30 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-30 09:20 pm (UTC)It is
possiblelikely that I am something of a whiny bitch when it comes to dressage clinics.no subject
Date: 2019-10-31 02:22 am (UTC)