Inadvertent Challenges

"Really? We have to do dressage AGAIN? FML."

Anyone who knows me knows that I absolutely do not like to be told that I’m not capable of something, and this only tends to make me work harder. At our most recent event, Tiger and I got a 41 in dressage and I was upset that our score was worse than our previous 36 since I felt that our dressage had improved significantly. I’ve been aiming to improve towards a score in the low 30s, but when I told this to my trainer she said that she thought I would never score better than a 35 with Tiger. Naturally, I took that as a challenge, and, much to Tiger's dismay, he was destined for a dressage boot camp.

The thing about my dressage with Tiger is that although progress has been slow, we have made steady improvements since he came to me. In spite of the fact that several people have mentioned wanting to see me on a ‘more cooperative’ horse, I’m just not ready to give up on him until I stop seeing improvement. On top of that, I’m a big believer in waiting a year to seriously evaluate a rider’s partnership with a new horse because it just takes time to get to know each other. I think this inadvertent challenge may have been just the kick in the pants we needed to make some more rapid progress and improve our partnership in the dressage.

I have to confess that I never wrote down my small goals after my last post, but I did think about them a lot; there are a lot of little things to fix in Tiger’s and my tests. However, as I started thinking about how to fix these things, I realized that there was a fundamental step that we had basically tried to skip over in our approach so far with Tiger’s dressage. We were very focused on trying to lift his back and keep him straight, but had never really made him accept the contact, and so it was an impossible task. Sometimes he was ‘round,’ but he was still very heavy in my hand and generally just slightly above the vertical. If I think about the training triangle that was drilled into me when I was younger, I feel stupid for overlooking this basic concept. But it wasn’t until I took on this challenge and started thinking independently about our dressage that I realized this.

I think that since I’ve started my ‘real job’ and can actually afford some lessons now, I’ve been so excited about taking lessons that I’ve devalued my own experience and knowledge base. In grad school, I rarely had lessons, in part because I didn’t think the expense was worth it if I was still making progress and wasn’t at the edge of my knowledge with a given horse. I’m not advocating not taking any lessons in a situation like my current one. There’s no way I would fix my positional issues without someone reminding me to ‘straighten your left wrist’ and ‘keep your shoulders back’ every few minutes. However, I do think that there’s something to be said for my grad school approach. There is a lot of my knowledge that I haven’t yet taken advantage of with Tiger, and I should use that wonderful resource I have! The occasional lesson can help remind me of past epiphanies and exercises to fix certain problems, but I should also be thinking independently about how to improve my riding and spending a fair bit of time schooling on my own.

We’re about 2 weeks into our dressage boot camp and still have about 6 weeks until our next event. Hopefully we can live up to the inadvertent challenge and break 35! Either way, though, I’ve learned to be grateful for the knowledge I have retained and to use this to my fullest advantage.