DLB round 1: Fight!
May. 2nd, 2022 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickThere was honestly no fighting. It rained. My ride time got postponed an hour due to rain. The clinician was half an hour late due to a malfunctioning GPS. At the re-appointed time, the rain helpfully held off for an hour of riding. All things considered, it could have been worse.
So we started with the following conversation.
Clinician: What do you want out of this? (There are four lessons, one every other week, and I expect she's trying to figure out what I'd like for my nearly three hundred dollars of outlay.)
Me: Well, I don't show. And I kind of treat the training pyramid as an A La Carte menu. Can we just go sideways? I like sideways.
Clinician: ...
Note that clinician is a person who approves of and LIKES the training pyramid. She values the partnership between horse and rider. She is very interested in biomechanically correct work that is fair to the horse and within his abilities. She's not going to just let me go sideways with a willful disregard for the horse's welfare or whatever.
And I'm pretty-OK with that. Basically, if you want to go sideways and have it not look like shit, you have to achieve a decently solid gait FIRST. Like, if your walk is shit, you don't get to go sideways in it. (If you try, it's just a shitshow. #askmehowIknow) Fix the walk first and THEN you can go sideways. If your trot is shit, you can't shoulder-in, like, at all. You have to fix the trot BEFORE you go shoulder-in. So, you can kind of look at sideways as an... incentive to work more correctly? Like, if you don't work correctly, there is no sideways for you. At least, that's how I see it. For Real Dressage People, I suspect that going sideways is something you do so that you can get better at going straight. But wow, that's effing boring.
Anyway, when you start going sideways, you may need a smaller, more organized gait to get the sideways to happen. That big flashy sideways that dressage horses at the Olympics do? Yeah, that's not Baby's First Half Pass. Yours is not going to look like that AT ALL. You do sideways in your smaller, very organized gait so that you can build strength and flexibility and as you get strength and flexibility, you get to do sideways in a bigger, flashier gait.
(Why do I want to go sideways? There is no why. I am living my dream and following my bliss and I do not need a why. Fuck off with the why questions.)
So we walked and trotted circles. And that was OK. We can mostly walk and trot circles these days. Mostly. We could use more consistency and more thoughtful riding to help horse do his best. Ugh. Because, natch, I am not thoughtful or consistent. What really sucks is that I can tell when it's better and when it's not better but I can't reliably KEEP it being better all the time. Instead we wobble back and forth between "not so good" and "sufficient" and "really quite nice" without managing to reside in any one of those areas for more than like ten seconds. FML. Probably I do need more consistency and thoughtfulness.
So then we did exercises. We started with... in walk, as you're coming around the short end, turn onto quarter line using the quarter-turn thingies we've been working on at home only when we started doing them he was a teensy bit bent to the outside (because I was focused on 'BE STRAIGHT' to the point where I over-corrected) and that is NOT OK. Self, please to be fixing that, inside leg off, bent a teensy bit to the inside, outside hip directly under self, as per leg yields. So we worked on the quarter turn thingies until they were better-enough that we could move on. (Or maybe DLB felt my understanding was better enough to go home and work on it usefully or maybe she felt that we were completely useless and getting frustrated and needed a change of pace, idk. It do be a mystery. Clinician-ing is a legit business. Part of that is not driving fat middle-aged ladies on their woefully unsuited horses to tears ALL THE TIME because they won't return for more helpings of Jesus Fuck, Fat Middle-Aged Lady, you ride like ten pounds of shit in a five pound sack. So, y'know, there's a built-in filter there. Anyway, in my world of wishful thinking, I am CHOOSING to believe that DLB is relatively honest and trying to be truthful within the unstated framework of do not alienate the client so badly that there's no hope of repeat business.)
So then we quarter turned onto the quarter line BUT ADDED leg yields to the rail. In walk. And we did those. On those, we got legit compliments of "lovely" and "well-ridden" and "very good!" and such.
We can leg yield. We are, fwiw, pretty good leg yielders at this point. (I thought we were OK leg yielders when he was four, but wow, I knew absolutely jack shit about it and I had literally no idea what a good leg yield looked like. And y'know, I probably still don't have the best idea what a good leg yield looks like but I can at least see that what we do now is way better than what we did when he was four. Our current leg yield competency is literally fuckloads better than what we could do when he was four. Caveat: "fuckloads better" does not AUTOMATICALLY mean good. Depending on where you started, you can be "fuckloads better" (having made serious, visible, legit improvement) and still be... not any goddamn good.
*sigh*
In dressaging (and certainly in the eyes of DLB), you are supposed to be happy about your WONDERFUL PROGRESS en route to sucking less. About the journey. Mmm-hmm. The sad truth, though, is that you can WONDERFUL PROGRESS a whole lot and still objectively fucking suck.
Anyway, following our adequate leg yields, DLB has us start trotting along and turn onto the center line in a very organized turn and then (in trot) leg yield to the quarter line, whereupon we transition to walk WHILE CONTINUING TO LEG YIELD TO THE RAIL. So, like, our downward transition should not fuck up or interrupt our leg yield progress. And that goes fine. "Wow, these are so smooth!" "It does not look like separate elements." and "The whole exercise flows so nicely!" -- legit DLB quotes.
So then we trot along, turn onto the center line, leg yield (in trot) to the quarter line, transition down to walk (while still leg yielding), leg yield in walk the rest of the way to the rail, and upon hitting rail, pick up trot again. This is some organizing on my part to get this working (the trot-when-at-rail is more complicated that it seems like it should be, there's a straightening that has to happen that I wasn't expecting somehow despite the rail being VISIBLY RIGHT THERE LOL) but it's still sorta within our capabilities. We haven't drilled transitions-during-lateral-movements, like this is not a thing we generally work on at home, but turns out we can totally do them. And in two weeks when DLB sees us again, we're gonna do them a lot better because of practice. (The ability to work on shit and bring it back in two weeks is the whole entire reason for signing up for four weeks of DLB.)
Canter work? After the amount of leg yielding we did, there was not a lot of canter. I think partially he does not believe he can canter in an enclosed area such as a ring... and he's not really willing to try hard because there's nowhere to go. But also, abs were kind of tired after like six million quarter turns. (Nicely done quarter turns take a lot of abs.) I am not sure how to fix the lack of enthusiasm for canter in a ring, but I'll see what I can do.
Horse is doing well on the weight front and he's mostly shed out so I can get more serious about increasing his canter workload at home for fitness purposes. (I try to avoid sweating him up extensively when he's covered in inch-long hair.) Maybe that will help. Dunno. I thought we WERE working on it, but not a lotta dice, there. Ugh. We will work more on it. Clearly we are not doing enough.
DLB again suggested that we try endurance. She suggested this when the horse was a weedy and narrow four year old. She is now suggesting it when the horse is a non-weedy and non-narrow ten year old. I am having trouble hearing You should try endurance as anything other than You really suck at this and I think you would be happier doing something else or possibly I am getting tired of looking at your shitshow of fail, could you please find some other sport to pursue? but perhaps that is just me.
Also I am trying to think happy thoughts using my helpful THE CLINICIAN IS NOT OFFERING EMPTY PRAISE diagram.
It's really sad when this is the helpful diagram. *sigh*
So we started with the following conversation.
Clinician: What do you want out of this? (There are four lessons, one every other week, and I expect she's trying to figure out what I'd like for my nearly three hundred dollars of outlay.)
Me: Well, I don't show. And I kind of treat the training pyramid as an A La Carte menu. Can we just go sideways? I like sideways.
Clinician: ...
Note that clinician is a person who approves of and LIKES the training pyramid. She values the partnership between horse and rider. She is very interested in biomechanically correct work that is fair to the horse and within his abilities. She's not going to just let me go sideways with a willful disregard for the horse's welfare or whatever.
And I'm pretty-OK with that. Basically, if you want to go sideways and have it not look like shit, you have to achieve a decently solid gait FIRST. Like, if your walk is shit, you don't get to go sideways in it. (If you try, it's just a shitshow. #askmehowIknow) Fix the walk first and THEN you can go sideways. If your trot is shit, you can't shoulder-in, like, at all. You have to fix the trot BEFORE you go shoulder-in. So, you can kind of look at sideways as an... incentive to work more correctly? Like, if you don't work correctly, there is no sideways for you. At least, that's how I see it. For Real Dressage People, I suspect that going sideways is something you do so that you can get better at going straight. But wow, that's effing boring.
Anyway, when you start going sideways, you may need a smaller, more organized gait to get the sideways to happen. That big flashy sideways that dressage horses at the Olympics do? Yeah, that's not Baby's First Half Pass. Yours is not going to look like that AT ALL. You do sideways in your smaller, very organized gait so that you can build strength and flexibility and as you get strength and flexibility, you get to do sideways in a bigger, flashier gait.
(Why do I want to go sideways? There is no why. I am living my dream and following my bliss and I do not need a why. Fuck off with the why questions.)
So we walked and trotted circles. And that was OK. We can mostly walk and trot circles these days. Mostly. We could use more consistency and more thoughtful riding to help horse do his best. Ugh. Because, natch, I am not thoughtful or consistent. What really sucks is that I can tell when it's better and when it's not better but I can't reliably KEEP it being better all the time. Instead we wobble back and forth between "not so good" and "sufficient" and "really quite nice" without managing to reside in any one of those areas for more than like ten seconds. FML. Probably I do need more consistency and thoughtfulness.
So then we did exercises. We started with... in walk, as you're coming around the short end, turn onto quarter line using the quarter-turn thingies we've been working on at home only when we started doing them he was a teensy bit bent to the outside (because I was focused on 'BE STRAIGHT' to the point where I over-corrected) and that is NOT OK. Self, please to be fixing that, inside leg off, bent a teensy bit to the inside, outside hip directly under self, as per leg yields. So we worked on the quarter turn thingies until they were better-enough that we could move on. (Or maybe DLB felt my understanding was better enough to go home and work on it usefully or maybe she felt that we were completely useless and getting frustrated and needed a change of pace, idk. It do be a mystery. Clinician-ing is a legit business. Part of that is not driving fat middle-aged ladies on their woefully unsuited horses to tears ALL THE TIME because they won't return for more helpings of Jesus Fuck, Fat Middle-Aged Lady, you ride like ten pounds of shit in a five pound sack. So, y'know, there's a built-in filter there. Anyway, in my world of wishful thinking, I am CHOOSING to believe that DLB is relatively honest and trying to be truthful within the unstated framework of do not alienate the client so badly that there's no hope of repeat business.)
So then we quarter turned onto the quarter line BUT ADDED leg yields to the rail. In walk. And we did those. On those, we got legit compliments of "lovely" and "well-ridden" and "very good!" and such.
We can leg yield. We are, fwiw, pretty good leg yielders at this point. (I thought we were OK leg yielders when he was four, but wow, I knew absolutely jack shit about it and I had literally no idea what a good leg yield looked like. And y'know, I probably still don't have the best idea what a good leg yield looks like but I can at least see that what we do now is way better than what we did when he was four. Our current leg yield competency is literally fuckloads better than what we could do when he was four. Caveat: "fuckloads better" does not AUTOMATICALLY mean good. Depending on where you started, you can be "fuckloads better" (having made serious, visible, legit improvement) and still be... not any goddamn good.
*sigh*
In dressaging (and certainly in the eyes of DLB), you are supposed to be happy about your WONDERFUL PROGRESS en route to sucking less. About the journey. Mmm-hmm. The sad truth, though, is that you can WONDERFUL PROGRESS a whole lot and still objectively fucking suck.
Anyway, following our adequate leg yields, DLB has us start trotting along and turn onto the center line in a very organized turn and then (in trot) leg yield to the quarter line, whereupon we transition to walk WHILE CONTINUING TO LEG YIELD TO THE RAIL. So, like, our downward transition should not fuck up or interrupt our leg yield progress. And that goes fine. "Wow, these are so smooth!" "It does not look like separate elements." and "The whole exercise flows so nicely!" -- legit DLB quotes.
So then we trot along, turn onto the center line, leg yield (in trot) to the quarter line, transition down to walk (while still leg yielding), leg yield in walk the rest of the way to the rail, and upon hitting rail, pick up trot again. This is some organizing on my part to get this working (the trot-when-at-rail is more complicated that it seems like it should be, there's a straightening that has to happen that I wasn't expecting somehow despite the rail being VISIBLY RIGHT THERE LOL) but it's still sorta within our capabilities. We haven't drilled transitions-during-lateral-movements, like this is not a thing we generally work on at home, but turns out we can totally do them. And in two weeks when DLB sees us again, we're gonna do them a lot better because of practice. (The ability to work on shit and bring it back in two weeks is the whole entire reason for signing up for four weeks of DLB.)
Canter work? After the amount of leg yielding we did, there was not a lot of canter. I think partially he does not believe he can canter in an enclosed area such as a ring... and he's not really willing to try hard because there's nowhere to go. But also, abs were kind of tired after like six million quarter turns. (Nicely done quarter turns take a lot of abs.) I am not sure how to fix the lack of enthusiasm for canter in a ring, but I'll see what I can do.
Horse is doing well on the weight front and he's mostly shed out so I can get more serious about increasing his canter workload at home for fitness purposes. (I try to avoid sweating him up extensively when he's covered in inch-long hair.) Maybe that will help. Dunno. I thought we WERE working on it, but not a lotta dice, there. Ugh. We will work more on it. Clearly we are not doing enough.
DLB again suggested that we try endurance. She suggested this when the horse was a weedy and narrow four year old. She is now suggesting it when the horse is a non-weedy and non-narrow ten year old. I am having trouble hearing You should try endurance as anything other than You really suck at this and I think you would be happier doing something else or possibly I am getting tired of looking at your shitshow of fail, could you please find some other sport to pursue? but perhaps that is just me.
Also I am trying to think happy thoughts using my helpful THE CLINICIAN IS NOT OFFERING EMPTY PRAISE diagram.
It's really sad when this is the helpful diagram. *sigh*
no subject
Date: 2022-05-05 02:34 am (UTC)For Real Dressage People, I suspect that going sideways is something you do so that you can get better at going straight. But wow, that's effing boring.
lol
Why doesn't he like to canter in an arena?
no subject
Date: 2022-05-05 03:38 pm (UTC)As for canter, he canters fine on straight sections in a field. He canters PRETTY fine on straight sections in a field. ("Canter"... can slop along in a three-beat gait at a consistent speed and carriage without being frantic or weird. Basic canter. "Canter PRETTY"... can canter in a way that permits prompt, not-shitty leg yields from the gait without a change in profile or carriage. Looks nice. Horse Is Making An Effort.) He canters fine on a 20-meter (measured and marked out with eight cones to go around *just* inside of) circle in a field. He canters PRETTY with about 80% success on a 20-meter circle in a field. (Field is not especially level, pretty canter fails when ground changes slope due to balance issues.) Both leads work all the time.
He doesn't do a whole lot of arena work and I suspect that the 'visually confined' nature of a ring is not his fave. He's kinda "what's the point?" about it all.
To improve responsiveness to "Canter, sir." we are doing walk-canter-trot-walk (repeat). (We are not good enough for "canter-walk" transitions yet which is why there's trot in the downwards part.) But anyway, my focus is on clear, prompt upwards-es, regardless of "space" or "location". Length of canter effort is variable. Three strides, twenty strides, he has no idea. He has good understanding and effort on the upwards (sadly not in an enclosed area because we don't have one at home) and I'm hoping that this will help our "in a ring" issues. He does not seem frustrated or upset by the repetition, is not getting frazzled, and does appear to be handling the work so I'm hopeful.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-06 04:57 pm (UTC)Sounds like a good plan.