Has Eventing Lost Its Soul?

There's a wonderful article by Denny Emerson in Chronicle of the Horse  that everyone who cares about eventing needs to read.  He raises a lot of great questions about the future of our sport and challenges anyone who cares enough to make themselves heard.  

Honestly, some days I can't even get my own bosses to return my call so I'm open to ideas of how to make my voice heard.  How do we go about getting the FEI to make eventing once again, "a sport for tough, sound, brave, galloping Thoroughbred-type horses, full of stamina, endurance, and generosity of spirit," as Denny so wonderfully puts it. Or should we?  

Time marches on and all things change I suppose, so maybe it is time to stop being married to the military traditions that started it all so long ago most people don't even know of the connection.  Frankly, I'll be lucky to go any further than Novice level, so it's not like I'll personally ever feel the pride of taking my horse out and successfully competing at the long form version with roads and tracks - it that chance will even exist a few years from now.  

What I do know is it will be a sad day for everyone who rides in the sport, no matter what level, when cross-country is no longer the meat of the sport but just another side dish...

To read the full article, click here.  

And seriously, post a comment with any ideas of how to speak out.  I'm all ears...

Ram Tap November Horse Trials - Sat 11/19/11

A new day dawning

So very, very proud of both Sherry & Nahmi today!  They're both showing commando style -- no, not that kind of commando.  They're both wearing underwear, but are showing without the help of a professional trainer to coach them in warm up.  Relying on their own skills acquired from hard work all year (life?) long, experience from past shows, and helpful notes/suggestions from trainers Susan Friend, Gina Economou and the ever awesome Brian Sabo, they're doing it on their own and really shining.

It's really inspiring to see them showing "without a net" as it were, flying or falling on their own wits.  At the end of the day, isn't that what we all should be able to do? Not at every show, but if the point of showing is testing your own mettle (and for the kind of $$$ it better not be for the .98 ribbon) we all should consider doing this on our own from time to time.  Just a thought...

Hair club for geldings?

Anyway, back to the ladies: of course Sherry had to be an over achiever, scoring the lowest dressage score of the entire show with a 20.  (For non-eventers, our sport is like golf, the lowest score wins.)  Nahmi had a really great, relaxed, flowing ride on the folliclely challenged Simon - see braid pic) and scored one of their best tests at a 35.  I was really happy not just with her ride, but her terrific attitude of looking at this as a building kind of test.  She achieved what she set out to do - bring a relaxed partnership into the arena - and will continue to push from there.  Considering it was such a brisk, chilly day that even the judge commented on it, that was quite an accomplishment for Simon!

Fortunately, the dawn's arctic breeze blew the gray, overcast sky away to give us a brilliantly sunny late morning for show jumping.  Simon's round continued on the same theme of learning and growing.  They had a rail and some time faults, so I suppose on paper it doesn't look as successful as rounds from previous shows, but Nahmi was extremely happy with the outcome and rightfully so.  Simon wanted to be a pisser in the warm up, but as Brian says she choose to disagree with his choice to lengthen to the fence with her upper body, resisting the urge to pull or or lock up her elbows.  Guess what, it worked!  In the arena, they rode straight to the fences, Nahmi's form was awesome, she made choices to get Simon to particular spots and achieved those goals.  A few wide turns turned out to be costly time wise but she had goals and met them -- what else could you ask for?

Poznan proved to be interesting and entertaining to watch in the warm up.  Every time another horse would jump a jump towards him, he went leaping about the place putting poor Sherry's back to the test.  At one point he nearly went over a coffin combination that was next to the warm up arena in his exuberance to show his disdain of other horses & riders.  All the rails stayed in the cups - good Lord, he cantered over one or two instead of jumping them - but they did have time faults thanks to his laid back style.  If only he was the over achiever that his mummy is...  Since her one and only goal was to finish with no time faults, Sherry was disappointed, but it's kind of hard to feel sorry for someone sitting in first place! :)

Sorry, no pics of rides as I was busy with the video camera.  Maybe videos to follow if Carolyn will be kind enough to link them here?  

Have to say, once again Ram Tap's staff and the facility make the unpredictable weather worth enduring.  The jump course was challenging but not daunting, the footing in remarkably good shape and everything running pretty much on time and according to plan.  For those who know me well, you know that the thing nearest and dearest to my heart is the bathroom situation.  Happy to report after touring nearly every port-o-potty on the place that they were all clean, had paper, had hand sanitizer and all in all a pleasure to use.  Thank you Ram Tap!

We walked the cross-country courses with a new companion - the course walking app.  (Have I mentioned lately how much I hate the word "app"?  It sounds like a burp gone wrong, but I digress.)  More on that later in another blog entry but clearly we weren't the only ones out there with this handy new device that measures the course and gives you minute markers as you walk.  Hard to tell, however, it people were using the app or just texting while walking.... (if you zoom in on the pic, you can just barely see it at work.) 

On a very sad note, our dear friend Larry Sawyer lost his eventing partner Caboose today. More than just a successful Intermediate and one star competitor with Auburn Brady in the irons, he was a friend and will be missed. 

Allowing Mistakes

Mistakes Happen!

By Carolyn Bahr

 It’s okay to fail. 

Mistakes can be good. 

Without fear, there is no courage.

The last was spoken to me by eventing legend, James Wofford.  I had just had the privilege to be the first and only rider to part ways with her horse on day one of a three-day clinic at Eventful Acres.  It was a spectacular fall, with my green horse, Junior, managing to duck out in a one stride gymnastic line of three oxers.  I got up, dusted myself off, mounted, and tried again.  His words help me ditch my embarrassment, self-recrimination, and yes, stage fright in riding with Mr. Wofford.

Perfection Rarely Happens

Being a closet perfectionist control freak (or not so private if you talked to fellow eTwisters), this summer was pivotal in my growth as a rider.  Discovering that perfect isn’t what it’s all cracked up to be, that sometimes, allowing mistakes can be the biggest learning experience of all.  Which was true for both my horse and me.

Most Eventers know teaching your green horse to have a “fifth” leg is necessary for both horse and rider.  The ability of your equine partner to save your ass is essential for safety and competitiveness, especially for an amateur.  But in order to achieve it, you have to be willing to give up control and allow your horse to make mistakes so he can learn.

Because, guess what?  No one is perfect, neither horse nor rider.  I really hate that.  I found that out at the clinic.  It was impossible for me not to rate Junior to the fences, especially when he came out like a fire breathing dragon.  And of course, the hotter and stupider he became, the worse I rode.  Talk about a never-ending cycle of embarrassment.  But I did learn from it.  The times I managed to shut my over-active brain down and do what Jimmy asked, Junior improved and I grew in my horsemanship.

Getting It Done

It wasn’t the weekend I was expecting, but it was probably the weekend I needed. 

The clinic was a second in my lessons learned this summer.  The first was riding my horse in his first recognized competition.  I didn’t want to do it.  I normally would have had a professional ride him first.  I was afraid I’d mess up and give my boy a horrible ride and wreck him somehow.  You know, the one ride that would ruin him forever?  It took an amazing amount of faith in my trainer, Susan Friend Le Tourneur, and fellow eTwisters, bashing me upside the head, telling me I could do this, that I sent my entry in as rider.

Learn From Our Mistakes

Did Junior place as high as he could have with a professional in the irons, most likely not.  Did my confidence shoot skyward when in a class of 16, I managed to finish in 6^th place on my dressage score and just three time penalties.  Absolutely!  By allowing myself the room to fail, I accepted a challenge and let go of some control.

Allow mistakes.  Give it a try.  It just might be good for you.

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.

The Greg Best Clinic At Flintridge Riding Club

Olympian Greg Best giving advice

It’s amazing to me how much you can learn at a clinic even if you’re just hanging out.  I went to the Greg Best clinic held at the Flintridge Riding Club Oct. 23&24 just to cheer on Cappa and Sherry.  With my pony (and riding) sidelined for the foreseeable future, I wasn’t really looking to learn any great revelations, but it’s interesting how much you absorb if you keep your mouth shut and eyes open.  (That, by the way, is probably not one of the lessons I learned, so don’t count on that happening too often!)




Here’s some of the “Best-isms” that I picked up:

Riding a jump course should be like riding a dressage test with 8 – 12 “elevated steps” along the way.  Each jump should be approached like a movement in a dressage test; if you biff one, get over it and focus on the next movement.  Like a dressage rider, you can make an error on one movement (in our case a jump), but if you focus on doing your job on the next element instead of lamenting about how you screwed up, you can still score a 10 on the next movement.  He also pointed out how the lines and the turns are connected, you can’t just ride the jumps, you have to ride the turns as well, it’s all part of the same dressage test/jump course. 

A rider’s job is to ride straight, with impulsion, and some third thing I forgot.  Hey, it was cold out there, give me a break.  Hopefully Cappa or Sherry will remember.  That’s it.  When he asked the three riders (Cappa, Sherry and a 10-year-old girl who as an obnoxiously good rider and student) what your job is over the fence, there was a lot of hemming and hawing before the most popular answer came up – staying out of the horse’s way.  Makes sense, right? Wrong!  According to Best, your job over the job is exactly the same as your job on the flat and in between fences.  If you have to correct for your horse’s left drift coming up to a fence, that’s still your job over the fence.  Feels like it all relates back to the idea that this is like a dressage test with elevated steps, not a journey tackling one obstacle after another.

Cappa was not so happy to demonstrate how much the shape and consistency of your back, especially your lower back, can influence your riding not just on the flat but over the fence as well.  It also dramatically affects your leg position; the more curled your back, the farther out in front your leg slipped.  According to Best, while a dressage rider wants their butt to stay connected to the saddle, a stadium jumper keeps their back more still, causing the saddle to tap the rider in the butt with the canter rather than keeping their buns in the seat.  (Mind you, that’s my paraphrasing; not his exact explanation but you get the picture.)  Though he did smilingly admit that for an eventer, whose main focus is “to survive” (his words that time) he could understand the need to sit a little deeper in the saddle to a cross-country fence. 

To me, it looked like a very light version of two-point, with your crotch being the point of consistent connection as the horse’s back and your saddle comes up to meet your butt.  By putting an upside down crop through Cappa’s belt so that is smacked her in the face every time her lower back moved, Best demonstrated both how important and how difficult it is to keep your back still.  As always, Cappa endured the torture like a sport!

Best pointed out that your back position is something you can practice while just sitting on the horse, you don’t have to wait to be in motion to work on it.  I’ve taken it one step further, trying to maintain that perfect posture now in the car, mowing the lawn, even while typing this.  And no, I’m not so dedicated that I have a crop hitting me in the face when I lose my position.

An interesting idea Best brought up was that just like when you’re driving a car, you need to slow down around turns.  Like a car, your horse needs that collection to maintain (or re-establish) his balance.  It’s the rider’s job to get the horse to move forward up out of the turn, however.  Gunning them isn’t the answer, much like gunning your car out of a turn is ridiculous, but getting back that forward canter you had before the turn is pretty important as you head towards your next jump (or dressage movement if you want to keep with that analogy.)

Along those lines, Best asked another crowd stumper (ok, except for Carolyn, who gets all these theory questions right) – what should your upper body do as you come out of the corner then?  Most of us went with stay still – wrong!  Best points out that if you lean forward, what does your horse do?  It goes faster.  So a little lean forward will encourage them to move up.  Conversely, a horse slows down if you sit up straighter and taller in the saddle – not if you lean backwards, which only drives them with your seat.  So sit up tall – and by that he actually means sit, have your body connected to your saddle, not hovering over it – to collect in the turn. 

It was a little bit of a mind blower when Best told Cappa and Sherry’s class that he doesn’t really worry too much about changing his speed to adjust for the next fence being a vertical versus and oxer.   Keep the horse straight, keep it moving, and that third thing that I forgot and that’s all you need to do.

Leaving no illusion unshattered, in Michelle’s class Best corrected a rider who looked at her next fence as she went over the one in front of her.  He knows that’s what we’ve all been taught, that’s what Pony Club tells us, but “they’re wrong.”  Again, thinking of a jump course in terms of a dressage test, you don’t see a dressage rider complete a move and then look 100 yards forward, they consciously ride every single stride.  In a jump course, how you ride the turn is just as important as how you ride over the jump (maybe more from some of the riding we saw this weekend) so you have to be looking at where you’re going in the next two strides, not ten away.  He advocates using landmarks when walking and memorizing your jump course, not just learning the jumps in the order they appear.  For instance, from jump #5 go around the corner and at the third tree turn left towards jump #6. 

I was truly impressed with how fast Best was able to get a handle on both horses and riders.  In no short order he pegged Poznan as being lazy and Jack as truly lazy.  Sorry girls, that’s what he said.  He liked them both, don’t get me wrong, but while it’s possible for a horse to have good initiative or bad initiative, Kong and Poppy had “no initiative on the first day and even less on the second day.”  It really didn’t seem all that unusual nor a bad thing in young horses.  Much of that, including Poppy getting over his “butterfly brain” is something that they’ll gain with maturity and training.  Now Cappa’s self-professed butterfly brain, hmmm…..

Apparently, after a week of rain and hand walking, Gordo apparently found his “on” button out in Flintridge’s cross country field.  Michelle bravely agreed when Best suggested removing his bit (holy socks!) and using a very simple English hackamore.  It’s really just a noseband with a place to attach the reins and while it seemed to reduce Gordo’s fussiness, it exposed a whole new steering issue Michelle didn’t even know they had!  Undaunted, she came back the next day with a similar simple hackamore (as opposed to the mechanical one with the long shanks) and had a beautiful go with Gordo over all the fences.  Ok, sure, collecting him back on the downhill line as a little tough, but she got the job done. 

Hats off to Cappa, Sherry and Michelle for great rides.  Kudos to Flintridge as well for a really well run clinic.  Despite the fact that their arena footing had taken a beating from the rain, the footing out on the cross country field was in great shape so they adapted and held the stadium jumping clinic out in the wilds where many of their riders aren’t used to going.  Special shout out to Chris Warner, who was so friendly to everyone during the clinic and kept a nice, warm crackling fire going in Flintridge’s massive fireplace.  Wish we had one of those at Day Creek for the damp winter days ahead!

Most importantly, many thanks to Greg Best for an entertaining and educational experience.  If you want to learn more, go out and buy his videos http://www.horseplaza.com/people/gregbest/index.htm. 

New List of Nicknames for Poznan that came as a result of the clinic:

Scuba – due to love of water. 

Scoobie – because Tina totally ruined Scuba for me – ask her to explain

The Dude – because of his sun bleached tail and surfer dude attitude

The Dude – re: The Big Lebowski (same name, different reason)

Let the name game continue this weekend at the Jimmy Wofford clinic…

Jimmy Wofford at Eventful Acres: Saturday

Jimmy Wofford Clinic: Day Two by Dr. Nahmi Jones

Day 2 was showjumping, but deconstructed.

We watched the preliminary group go from the comfort of the stands, while we enjoyed yummy french toast and fresh fruit. Have I mentioned yet how fantastic the food was all weekend? Many thanks to Carol Von Brandt, the wonderful woman who slaved over the hot grill all weekend to bring us our gourmet meals.

The emphasis was the same as the day before in the gymnastics. Steady rhythm through the lines, don't build to the second fence, soft in the upper body so we don't influence the horse to have a rail either in front or behind.

Jimmy broke the show jumping down into small logical pieces and the gradually introduced more technical questions.

I started out the day with my usual bad habits, locking my hips and elbows over the first few fences. As we warmed up I was reminded to incorporate the lesson from the previous day. Softer reins, then softer leg so I didn't chase Simon out the front door. Simon remembered also, jumping up more lightly over the fences with a softer neck. Wow Jimmy! This stuff really works! He just laughed "Yeah, the professor is actually simple, now you just have to ride him that way!"

Our deconstructed show jump course was a series of simple lines that progressively became to more technical. We jumped a 5 stride oxer to oxer line, then one stride rails on 45 degree angles then on to squeezes.

Jimmy had me concentrate on softening my arms by straightening my elbows every other stride on the approach to fences. By the time we moved over to the corner, the logical progression from the angle/ squeeze questions, I was slowly unlocking my body and Simon and I jumped the corner easily and accurately on this first try.

Jimmy's final comments after our last line of the day, "See those little adjustments you made to make the oxer come out right? That's what we call riding."  I have the proof on video, I may have graduated from duffer to rider. That's a good feeling.