To give you a little look into our history together, I'll recap some of our relationship. I started riding Tubby in May. At that time I was getting the basics down with some of the other horses in the barn; I could walk, trot, canter, and jump single jumps fairly consistently, and now it was time to meet a bigger challenge: riding a horse with a lot more movement and "oomph." Enter Tubby, my big, beautiful, bay dreamboat for the last few weeks.
When we started, I could barely trot with him. His trot is very springy and rangey, and my muscles were much weaker and more jiggly. I had a very hard time stabilizing myself as I posted the trot. Forget about sitting his trot-- I was bouncing all over the place. Also forget about cantering as I could only get two or three strides in before I lost my balance and threw off his. It wasn't pretty.
After a few less-than-stellar but still-working-on-it lessons with Tubby, I ended up injuring my left knee (not at all in relation to riding), and I had arthroscopic knee surgery to try to repair it. After surgery was a few weeks' waiting period before I could run, dance, ride, or do much of anything fun. When I got the go-ahead to ride, I quickly set up my next lesson.
My first lesson back was with Evan, a big, beautiful, gray sweetheart (I'm lucky in that the barn where I take my lessons, River Bend Jumpers, is chock-full of gorgeous and huggably-sweet horses!) and we were quickly back in the swing of things. My next lessons were with Tubby, who I could suddenly somehow ride much better than before. I could sit his trot, I could canter all over the arena, including over ground poles and around obstacles. There was a little lull in our progress for a lesson or two, and I rode another horse, Rio (also gorgeous, also extremely well-trained, also... just believe me when I say that literally every horse I've ridden is this barn is myfavoritehorseeverwhoican'tlivewithout), without a large amount of success as I hadn't yet mastered coordinating my aides. Last week, I was back with Tubby and we did extremely well (not perfect, but much much better than we had done) and we were able to successfully jump over our first in-and-out--- which, I must say, made my year.
That brings us back up to Wednesday's lesson, in which we worked on navigating a small course of jumps.
Wait--- that isn't right.
....SMALL COURSE OF JUMPS. That's more how it felt--- like I couldn't believe it, and I was so excited, and so completely thrilled with the result.
Were we completely successful jumping every single thing we were pointed at?? ...Let's not get too carried away. I can say that there was a lot wrong with some of our pacing (he just makes going fast seem so slow), as well as some difficulties in finding our lines, and also some equitation faults. The point isn't that we've suddenly come up from nothing to being a flawless pair over fences--- the point is that our hard work is paying off, becoming more hard work ahead of us, and it's becoming more fun than "work." All those old adages that people use when they're stuck in a bad rut... They do work-- and we're proving it.
