Day 2 Stadium Jumping

by Nahmi Jones

When you feel nothing....add

Jimmy's sage advice for Simon

Jimmy's lectures are free form which is cool. He opens the floor for questions about anything that is on our minds. Today's lecture led to a discussion about seeing one's distance.

To paraphrase his take on the subject: If you feel the fence leaning away from you, you're going to be long, better add leg. If you feel the fence leaning towards you, you're going to be short, better half halt. Then every once in a while, it just feels sweet and you don't have to do anything to get to the fence and its a good day.

But what if you feel nothing? Then you're on the perfect half stride kid.

Isn't it wonderful when you can take what you just learned in lecture and apply it to your riding to solidify the learning process the very same day? Yeah, grrreat.

We warmed up for stadium jumping and started to string together a course in Jimmy's ring of related distances. I was just getting over the pucker effect caused by facing a whole course of Prelim sized fences when on the approach to the second line....nothing, yup I felt nothing.

My solution to the nothing feeling was to drop my shoulders and pray--Simon, please get us out of this!--oops...no surprise...no go. And this was how I demonstrated for the class what the perfect half stride looks like. Jimmy pointed out that we get that nothing feeling because our brains can't sort out whether we're long or short on the perfect half stride and that the solution is to fill up the empty feeling with ANOTHER STRIDE. Ok, got it Jimmy, another stride, not prayer.

We went on to complete the exercise in the ring of related distances. There was a 4,5 and 6 stride line set up in a ring and we were to connect them with circles in between each line. This simple stadium course allowed us to practice asking for the correct leads over the fences, adjusting stride length in lines with related distances, and balancing in the turns (or in Simon's case, regaining some semblance of control), all the details we were going to need to have a clean, flowing stadium round.

I finished the day with the wonderful, confident feeling of staying softly connected with my horse as he stepped lightly over a series of large fences. And lots more details to add to the homework list.