Training Level For Life?

Despite my many attempts and setbacks, I have still yet to show above training level.

I can make a lot of excuses. Hip surgery, some serious tightness and loss of flexibility post surgery, a lot of test anxiety, and a semi feral horse.

But in the end they are just excuses.

Semi Feral Horse Looking Crabby

Before the most recent accident with Chili, I had started taking lessons with a local dressage instructor. One, I needed an instructor in the area that would travel to my barn and two, sometimes you need things expressed in a different way.

This instructor loves spicy, little opinionated horses and that's pretty much what this semi feral beasty is. An athletic overthinker who ends up running the show. What became evident with my first few lessons was a few major takeaways:

• The basic principles of training level tests are not conducive to an anticipatory, overthinking horse
• The more "complicated" concepts that were introduced in my lessons like shoulder in, haunches in, and ten meter circles, the more rhythm and relaxation we achieved.
  
• Making the horse think also relaxed my own body. I had to think more about the movement and what I needed to do as a rider and less on predicting my horse was going to anticipate, jig, canter early, spook, or any other number of events
• My horse that I felt was always running in the canter, wasn't really running. Once I started asking her to carry her head up and out of a training level frame, I was told to keep asking more from her canter. Suddenly, I found her back would lift, I would have a sweet spot to sit, and there was a lot more power. I had always confused running with quick, rather than I was letting her essentially dump on her forehand. I just didn't have the tools to fix it at the time.

So I suppose my major takeaway that when we conquer our current injury, we have our sights set on first or second level. This little semi feral is too busy thinking in our tests. I am too busy thinking about her thinking.

In the end, we are that naughty child in the classroom who acts out because they are bored.

So here's setting our goal of a first or second level debut when this pandemic settles down. Let's skip this anxiety, keep our schooling goals high, and get out of this low bar of training level for life that I had set.