Jump On It

At my lesson last week my trainer and I were talking about a clinic coming up at one of the big H/J barns in the area.  It's with Melanie Smith Taylor, an Olympic gold medalist and World Cup winner.  Trainer really wants to me to do it, but since there's no way McKenna would be ready for even the 2' group in a month trainer suggested Tia.  I hadn't even thought about riding/taking another horse, and while I'd still like to do it I don't have the $$.  But I am planning on going for one of the days to audit.

Trainer and I then talked about me just riding Tia a little, maybe doing a lesson or two on her to get my jumping legs (or should I say eye) back.  The really nice thing about working with the same trainer for 10 years now (holy crap makes me feel old!) is that she knows I need to jump a height consistently or else it gets big and terrifying.

So on Thursday I grabbed Tia and off we went.  She had run around like a crazy mare in turnout, which is very odd for her, and was nice and forward when I got on.  She only has one person riding her 3-4 days a week currently, but its an older ammy who just plunks around over some cross rails and showers Tia with treats, so she's a little out of shape. Tia is a completely different ride than McKenna and I felt a bit like a fish out water for a good chunk of the ride. But we managed to do a halfway respectable w-t-c. 

That's a big scary fence....really

Saturday in between the rain showers I was able to do a quick jump school.  I had a cross rail, a 2' and a 2'6" vertical set up.  But as we were warming up that 2'6" started to look very big and scary so I lowered it to 2'3".  We were a little more in sync for flatting and trotting the cross rail and then moved to cantering the verticals.  I was actually really surprised and happy that I was able to just let Tia go and find the distance herself and stay out of her way.  We had a few fences (especially a tightish turn to the diagonal fence where someone wanted to bulge her shoulder out and get very crooked) that I had to micromanage but we were able to get some pretty nice distances and flow.  I still felt a bit like a sack of potatoes on Tia, but for not jumping anything more than cross rails for 7 months I was really happy.