Gunner's Training Blog

11/4/08

Last horse show of the season. Double point show, can't wait to see where I am in the standings. I got 2nd and 3 4ths. First round we had trouble with distances. Second round (2nd place round) we only had one ugly distance, and third round we had trouble with leads, he was only swapping in front because he was really really tired. In the flat class, we actually didn't place last!!!! We were fourth. I think it was because after the canter, the judge asked us to trot and one girl's horse walked. Mwahahah.


I have a clinic at 10:30 this morning. I really need to get off my butt and get ready to leave for the barn. I can finally drive myself because I have my driver's license!!! *dances*

11/7/08

Rode in the clinic. It was really interesting. We worked mostly on the flat and on lead changes. I've always had a problem with opening my knees, and I now know how to fix it by keeping my weight below my waist. Pretty simple fix and it looks a lot prettier. I'm a lot tighter throughout my entire leg. & apparently my normal trainer had me teaching my horse to do lead changes wrong. So I'm now back to stage one, and SHOCKER! Its a ton easier and he understands it a lot better. :] It was really slippery so we only jumped a little crossrail.

Congratulations on the ribbons at the show! Gunner looks like a fun ride, and he's gorgeous too. I especially like the picture of him cantering and turning toward the camera. I subscribed to your blog, can't wait to hear more about Gunner's training!

Thanks, Equestriann! He is a fun ride, he's such a good boy. I'm so happy about the show, we ended up in 5th place overall for the series, and I'm getting an award at the year end banquet!

11/9/08

Haha I'm a tad behind on updating this :] I'm home sick today, so I'll get everything updated today.

Got to ride in a really nice saddle. I share a saddle with my barn's owner because the saddle I own sucks, and the owner was riding at the same time as me, so I rode in another boarder's Pessoa. The saddle I normally ride in is big on me, and I end up with a bit of a chair seat, but this saddle let me align my hip and leg a lot better. I'm definetely going to be looking into a Pessoa saddle before next show season!


It looked really nice on him, too. I'm excited because the saddle's owner is going on vacation (and I'm riding her horse for her) so I can ride in her saddle all the time :]

Okay so this is a continuation of my last post. Youtube was being stupid and not allowing me to post my video because of some copyright crap. *sigh*

Anyways...

That day, the owners of the farm raked the arena!!! Yay!! The ground was so hard because they hadn't raked in ages!!! Which also means that we hadn't gotten a new set of jumps either. They set it up so that all the jumps were in the middle of the ring which is cool, but you have to let other people you are riding with know where you are going because theres a good chance of running into each other haha.

The barn owner had some friends over, and when she does, she tends to kinda show me off a ton and set the jumps a lot higher than she normally would lol so I had all these people that I barely know watching me jump a height I hadn't jumped in ages. It was great. Awesome course, great jumps!! :]

Then we jumped bareback a bit.

Yesterday Caroline, the barn's owner, decided to set up a pony gymnastic for her daughter and her pony and a horse sized gymnastic for me and Gunner. There were 3 bounces to 2 one strides. Started with just poles on the ground. At first she had them set really long for Gun, and he lunged through the first two bounces, gave up and trotted the rest. Then she shortened the length and we went through perfectly. Then she set them up as cross-rails and I did the gymnastic without reins in both directions. Then verticals were set up, but we didn't manage to get a good distance because he tends to bulge to the left and its really hard to correct that and manage to see a distance too haha. He managed to get out of it every time though, which was kinda amazing for only about the third time he's ever done gymnastics. He's going to be sore though because he had to really roll back on his haunches to get out of the bounces. We had a good day, and since the gymnastics are staying up for the winter, when its not too hard to jump, we'll be able to really get the hang of them. I wanna set one of the jumps up over 3' at some point. But we should probably work on the smaller ones first haha.

Week before Christmas:

Haven't worked much. The grounds been pretty hard or theres been freezing rain and all that fun weather. The couple of days that I have ridden have been a fantastic success though!

Naturally I have pretty soft hands, but lately I've been letting my temper control me and I've noticed my hand aren't as forgiving as they used to be. Which honestly scared the crap out of me. I don't want to use force! I decided I was going to change that. I've been concentrating soooo hard on using more my seat, legs and weight & all that jazz rather than my hands. Its shown amazing results so far. He's getting on the bit && STAYING THERE and becoming a joy to ride on the flat. Jumpings a ton better to. Its much easier to get a nice distance when he's being adjustable.


But... anyway:


Best of 2008 video.