As a side note, I feel like I'm destined to have a beer with Tom Petty at some point in my life. I think he could hang.

Today I got to work between the pillars for the first time!

It is a shame that the experience was so brief!

Also that, at the time, I was doing my best Beaker impersonation. 

The important thing is that neither I nor the horse hit either of the pillars (which look pretty substantial. Think: the sort of pipes you would find on the interior of a submarine sunk into concrete blocks below the (probably expensive, but not my favorite) footing.) As an added bonus, I stayed on! Through that, and also through a couple of subsequent opportunities for me to work on my best Muppet impersonation. Which was long enough for us to do some 10m & 20m circles in both directions, try a bunch of walk/trot/halt transitions, etc - "work through it", basically. Which also gave me enough time to reason the situation out. My thought process went roughly like this:

"The horse is counter-flexing like mad when I try to bend him to the left, and I don't give a flying fuck what the instructor says about my wall of aids, that isn't just my wonky rein management and ineffective legs. Dude cannot bend to the left to save his or my life, and he wasn't like that when I rode him a couple of days ago, and I don't give a good goddamn what the instructor says, it has nothing to do with stiff and hollow. Or even submission! This horse isn't right. And he's a powder keg looking for a match. And this instructor has a blind eye for this fucker that Stevie Wonder would scoff at. I am getting off and hand-walking him out. And no, I'm not gonna feed him sugar cubes! What, are you people nuts?!" 

I didn't explain it quite so eloquently at the time, and I'm sure I didn't look composed or classy, but I didn't let myself get browbeaten with the whole "you need to learn to ride through this" spiel. No, actually, I don't. I'm not the professional. I'm the one writing the checks. And everyone at that facility has had ample opportunity to see me ride and work with horses. They can draw their own conclusions. I will be there Monday morning as per usual for my lesson with Mr. Mustache and Thais the Good Egg, with shiny boots and a big smile. I've got ten more rides coming to me, and I'm going to take every one. Put me on the dead schoolie horses. Heck, put me on the sorta crazies. I don't care. But I don't need to learn this lesson twice.

I Will Stand. My. Ground. And I Won't. Back. Down.

And yes, Mr. Mustache and Thais the Good Egg are both fabulous, as are many of the other two-foots & four-hooves I've met over here. This particular equine/human pair aren't bad either. It's just not a good situation and I'm not going to play along with something that A) I think is dangerous, and B) doesn't seem right. (In the interests of fairness, I should point out that the instructor does have a very long history with this horse, and that, while the horses are all well taken care of, and there are a fair number of older guys still in active work, I don't get the sense that they've turned one of the back pastures into a horse version of Boca Raton for the retirees. So, the stakes are high for them. But I'm going to file that one under Not My Problem, since I'm a little more concerned about not having to figure out my health insurance coverage in the emergency room of a foreign country.)

I do swear up and down and backward and forward that, in the future, the angst and worry is only going to be about the trauma of shoulder leading in the leg-yield and "circle needs more round."

Speak to you soon!

-Beth

Just like Destiny's Child, I'm a survivor.

I've settled into the routine, and I'm having a good time, in my own overly intense way.  

There was some confusion with the booking when I got here (the stables operate quite a bit more independently of the hotel than the website/booking agents would have you believe.) The riding instructors/barn staff were surprisingly reluctant to accept my pre-booked riding program. ("Perhaps once a day is better?" Doubtful expression. "That is a lot of riding.") Since, as noted above, it's all about me (and horses), this sent me into a mild paranoid panic ("They can tell I don't know how to ride! Whaa!" etc etc.) But then I figured out/learned three things, and now it's all (basically) good.

#1 - The staff in the stable works for a set number of hours a day. One rider getting a twice daily hour-long "group" lesson for two weeks just adds to their workload, without any payoff. (I am thinking of gifts to get my two main instructors as thank-yous, since they've been great.)

#2 - The stud farm and hotel are both owned by the state. Economically, things over here are just as bad as they are pretty much anywhere else in the Western world. The hotel was brought under private management, and now it isn't doing very well, although I personally think the lack of financial success has as much to do with the general economic climate as it does the management. (It could use a face-lift, a targeted advertising campaign, and probably less staff, but what do I know about hotel management?) There is some uncertainty about keeping the "lessons for tourists" side of the stud farm going, and there is enough enough talk about scaling back the operation there that some people are concerned about long-term employment. So I get why they aren't super-excited about investing themselves into the program. 

#3 - There was some genuine concern about my ability to keep up with the program. I'm scrappy, and I work hard, and I'm a nice person, so they've all genuinely warmed to me. And I'm getting a tremendous amount out of it. Having said that, I grossly underestimated how physically and mentally taxing it would be taking two lessons a day, every day. I should know that an hour spent in the saddle noodling around on my own is quite a different kettle of fish than riding in a lesson, and I am way underprepared for all of this. But, in my experience, there are a lot of things in life that you can't really prepare yourself for, and you just have to dive in and flounder for a bit before you start to get the hang of it. (And yes, I do use that logic to justify all sorts of possibly not-wise decisions.)

I've been learning loads and taking notes. The biggest improvement is probably in my leg position. I've learned that keeping the horse "between the aids" is not a figurative expression, it's completely literal, and while I'm still not successful at doing so almost all of the time, I've had snatches of it, and just getting a picture of what that is like makes this whole trip worth it. I did get a lunge lesson, and I totally rocked out on all of the posting trot arm moving around exercises. My sitting trot is still pretty wretched (mostly due to having to work too hard at moving with the horse, and then getting tired. Yes, I'm pretty sure that I'm doing it wrong.) My seat at the canter is improving, though I still pop out of the saddle a bit during transitions (I think that more than anything makes my instructors die a little inside every time they see it. But I'm working on it!) And I'm knocking off one of the goals I set for myself in my training journal for 2013, which is learning how to ride with a whip (though that is its own topic.)

We walked into the local town, Sežana, a couple of times. I'm heading into Trieste to get a rental car sometime before the weekend, since we are miles away from anything, and the pubic transit situation is United States bad. 

Culinary highlights so far: 

The best gnocchi I've ever had in my life, no joke, with gorgonzola sauce that held its own. 

Calamari stuffed with prosciutto and cheese. I find calamari to be pretty hit-or-miss, but this would've made a calamari convert out of anyone.

Okay, another day, another dollar. Off to ride!

-Beth

That Don't Impress Lipizzans Much

This is the part of the story where our hero wails, "What on earth have I gotten myself into?"

I had my first two riding lessons today. I don't know what I'm doing here. I don’t know how to ride. It’s possible I will never learn how to ride. But I did get to meet these two lovely horses: 

Siglavy Thais, born in 1999. 

On the tall side. Smarter than most humans.

Neapolitano Bonadea, born 1990.

Recently put into semi-retirement from quadrille duties,

even more recently gelded. 

Short and sassy. As forward as he wants to be.

There are, shall we say, many areas that have been highlighted for further improvement. I've jotted down some notes, but I'm gonna sleep on it before dwelling further. I am bone-tired. Tomorrow I get the day off to regroup/rethink my life. Husband is doing an admirable job of both keeping himself entertained and ignoring my existential crisis of the day. 

Learn to ride or die trying,

-Beth

One of the many cats lying around. 

He's also not terribly impressed.

Greetings From Slovenia

Hullo everybody! 

We have arrived. The trip was uneventful, which is an excellent quality for a transatlantic journey to have. The setting (peaceful, wooded, hilly) is pretty enough in the snow, but I suspect it is full-on beautiful in the spring and summer. I knew that Lipica was close to the Slovenia/Italy border, but I didn't realize that it is literally right on the border. The nearest town is 5km away, which will make for a decent afternoon walk once I get my riding schedule down.

This is definitely the off-season.  We are possibly the only hotel guests. I am the only tourist listed on the board for riding lessons. Which is perfectly fine by me - I might give myself a couple of days to settle into the twice a day riding routine and then see if I can schedule in a couple of extra lunge lessons on the side. (That may be overly ambitious, but when else am I going to get the chance?)

I have yet to see an actual horse, although I did find a gray tail-hair in the closet when I was unpacking (which I am taking as a good omen.) We took a walk around the grounds this afternoon and located the gated entrance to the stud farm. At some point we get to take a guided tour of it, but there's no point in using up all of our entertainment options at once. The hotel cafe and the gym seem to be popular with the locals. It wasn't until I noticed the casino on one end of the hotel complex that the full parking lot made sense. 

Towels with horses on them! Why didn't I think of that?

Otherwise, nothing eventful so far. First riding lesson at 9am! (meep!) Too excited to sleep!

-Beth

Training Rainbow

In my last post I described being aware of the location of various parts of my legs. There's a word for that: proprioception. And it is something that can be trained and developed. File under: Something to research later.

A couple of weeks ago I was looking for a poster of the training scale to frame and put in my house. (On the off chance that someone who isn't interested in dressage stumbles onto my blog, I offer this brief (possibly not totally correct) explanation of the training scale: It's a progression of six concepts that a rider is supposed to work on while training a horse. It starts with foundation principles that are accessible to the majority of horses - Rhythm and Relaxation. Next come Connection and Impulsion, where the horse is taught to use himself in an athletically effective manner, and the mental qualities of focus and willing obedience are developed. The top two are Straightness and Collection. Those are the most demanding and rewarding areas, I suspect, but I have no real personal experience with them. It's not hard and fast, some concepts having overlapping requirements, but it is essentially a way to break down the areas of focus, so the rider is posing reasonable questions to the horse, and preparing the horse for advanced work in a systematic, appropriate way.)

The closest thing I could find is this large, vinyl banner available for sale at the USDF website:

It looks very functional for a barn environment, but probably not appropriate home decor (even by my standards.)

So, I had a little bit of time to fill, and not really being a TV person, I decided to make my own poster. This is my basic concept:

(For boring software reasons, I printed it off and scanned it. The colors are going to look way groovier when I get it printed from the PDF file, I promise.)

For a brief, insane moment I considered lopping off the right third of the diagram and repeating the pattern at 90 degree angles in a cloverleaf pattern, then getting custom fabric printed at www.spoonflower.com, (for making into throw pillows or something, I dunno.) Which would be a phenomenal waste of resources, but, y'know, it was a thought.

Today, on Valentines Day, my husband is making the ultimate romantic gesture and flying with me, to Slovenia, where he is going to hang out for two weeks at the Lipica Stud Farm while I ride horses. I'm getting very excited, but feeling somewhat under-prepared (except for my boots, which are exceedingly well polished.) Thankyouthankyouthankyou to Meredith and Willie and the Lipipotomus's Amazing New Trainer - I can't imagine what I'd be feeling like without all of your help getting my riding skills tuned up!

Love and hugs to y'all. I should probably go... clean out the fridge or something. I'll keep you posted!

-Beth

Fortune Favors the Prepared Mind

"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it."

-William Hazlitt

Prior to owning a horse, one of the charmingly naive ideas I had about horse ownership was that it would ensure that I always had something to ride. (Which is a bit like saying, "I'm so sick of the crappy plumbing in this apartment! If I owned my own place, I wouldn't have to deal with any of this!" Hah hah. Yeah.) Since I obviously now fall into the "older and more cynical" camp, I've had some time to reflect on the inevitability of periods in which I won't be able to ride. These fall into three categories:

1. The horse is injured, sick, or cranky.
2. I am injured, sick, or cranky.
3. I have no horse.

I spent a large part of last year dealing with category #1, I had instances of confronting the possibility of category #2, and I am currently in category #3. Once I get back from my travels and my Trainer Dude gets back from Florida we will be working to remedy this, but since I plan on being actively involved with horses for the duration of my life, I can see that I need to come up with ways to deal with the times when I am unable to ride. These seem to boil down to two problems, either I don't have a horse to ride, or I am physically incapable of riding.

Lack of Horse, Able to Ride

This has been my main issue so far, but even though it's been driving me bonkers and I've been venting my frustration far and wide, it is probably the easier scenario to deal with. 

• Find people with horses who are willing to share. When my last horse was on stall rest I was very lucky in having a trainer who owned a schoolmaster. She was very generous in giving me lessons and ride time on him. Even after the schoolmaster was semi-retired and my horse started slowly coming back into work, she found me another horse to ride occasionally. More recently, barn manager extraordinaire and all around hilarious person Meredith has very generously given me ride time on her guy Willie (who deserves his own post, I can't do justice to him here.) And the Lipipotamus's Amazing New Trainer lived up to her name by giving me a lesson Sunday on her own eight-year old competition horse (in a double bridle, no less. And yes, she had seen me ride before!) The two experiences I had share boarding with total strangers are what convinced me it was time to buy a horse in the first place, and I will never go down that road again. But I can see that, once you get involved with the horse community and get to know people, opportunities are there, and there is always something to learn. 

• Train for riding off of the horse. This also deserves its own post, but essentially, I call bullshit on anyone who says things like "Well, there's nothing you can do off the horse to engage the muscles you use in riding," and "Riding is about balance and coordination, not strength," and just generally makes excuses for why they don't exercise or even stretch. My first proper trainer was one of those types, and we actually got into a couple of civilized arguments about it. He preferred to ascribe the progress I made in my riding to some mystical "talent." I guess because I'm the only one who knows exactly what I'm doing outside of the stable, it's more obvious to me than it is to other people. But I know, through experience, that there are a lot of things that I can do physically to prepare my body so I get the most out of the time I have riding. And I can feel a very direct and fairly immediate difference when I do them as opposed to when I slack off. I am just like practically everyone else in the Western world in exercising less than I could or should, and I know that I have room for improvement. But I feel like this has been one of the key factors in making it possible for me to do the stop-start riding I've done all this past year. I still have lag time when I relearning everything that I used to know, but physically I'm not starting from anything like scratch.

•  Mental training away from the horse. I'm assuming that anyone who is really into dressage is already fairly obsessive about books, DVDs, clinics, etc. What I am referring to here is something I actually have not tried yet.
  
  
  It came about from the Amazing New Trainer's lesson on Sunday. Bless her heart, A.N.T. wanted to see if I could get a few steps of piaffe and/or passage out of her mare, just so I could have the experience of feeling them (and, I think, to give me something to look forward to so I'd be a little less grumpy about being back at the figuring out how to walk, trot, canter, steer and halt stage.) I totally failed on both movements, and she was a little disappointed on my behalf, but I genuinely didn't care. I've never even tried to ask for those movements before, and just the act of physically sitting up there and trying to do it gave me a mental concept of them that I've never gotten from reading about it or watching other riders perform them.
  
  
  I am aware of Jane Savoie's training material on visualisation. (But cheese and crackers! I am not sold enough on the concept to shell out the kind of money she's asking. And her infomercial-style website does not persuade me to give it a try.) Guided visualization exercises would probably help once you know the feeling of a movement.What I'm talking about here is a little different.
  
  
  What I realized on Sunday is simply this: when I read about riding, I still very often picture it from a third-person, "video camera" perspective. Which is partially just laziness - it's easier to consume something as it's presented than mentally (and often physically) do the work of picturing myself performing the movements, and actually standing up or sitting upright in a chair, shifting my seatbones, moving my legs, holding my arms, etc. (I have been thinking for a while about building a wooden saddle stand that is elevated off of the ground so that I could sit on it with the stirrups down. Which no, would not really be like being on a moving horse, and yes, is probably a crazy idea. But I dunno, it seems to me like sitting in a saddle when I'm, say, on my laptop, or reading (equally ridiculous contraption to function as minimal desk at appropriate height would also have to be created) would at least give me that many extra hours a day when my body is sort of doing what I want it to do when I ride, am I right? I will discuss this with the saddle fitter I know when I see her, she has a lovely saddle stand that she uses for trying out saddles.)
  
  
  Related to this, I rode Willie on Sunday shortly after my lesson, and had a PHENOMENAL ride on him. (Obvious evidence that I need two horses, not just one.) Part of it was due to me being warmed up mentally and physically to ride, but I think it was more a result of, for whatever reason, the lesson unlocking in my mind what the physical sensation of "right" feels like. 
  
  
  I'm pretty sure that the problems I was having were more to do with my upper body being stiff and protective and that most of the changes happened up there. I could definitely feel my torso open up (mental imagery that pops into my head is of the big sails on those old Spanish galleons unfurling in the wind. Apologies if I inadvertently ripped that off from someone else.) My seat connected deep into the saddle, my shoulders relaxed, my arms functioned like they were supposed to.
  
  
  
  I had a stronger conscious awareness of what was going on with my lower body. My knees were like, We wanna scooch forward a bit. They got scooched, and then my heels went Yay! We are right down here beneath your seat bones. Mmm, weight drop. And my legs were all, Willie's warm. Let's wrap around Willie. A little while later, I was trotting around, thinking everything was fine, but then my knees were all HEY UP THERE! WE'RE NOT HAPPY! I looked down, and they'd shifted back to the old spot, so I scooched 'em forward, and they were all Mmmm.
  
  
  As annoying as I'm sure that was to read, that's pretty much what it was like. Oh, and I got that whole 'hula-hoop belly, cocktail waitress upper body' for bits of it, at the walk, anyway. It crossed my mind to try cantering (there is an issue I've been working through, and I haven't cantered outside of lessons recently), but I always like to err on the side of ending on a good note rather than pressing my luck. But at the end of the ride I did do tons and tons of three-loop serpentines at the walk without stirrups on a loose rein, because, Oh yeah! Moving your outside leg back as a turning aid is really just a natural consequence of opening up your outside hip, which is really where the movement should originate. And, in addition to looking pretty and connecting leg parts, knees can actually serve a function of keeping the inside shoulder from falling in. And I can feel my seatbones and notice where my weight is and adjust accordingly! Magic!
  
  
  I have experienced something similar in other times I've returned to riding after a break, where I'm not getting it and I'm not getting it, and then, Oh yeah! And it all starts coming back. Part of this is related to what I call "The Futility of Working on Body Parts in Isolation", which is, again, probably a topic for another post. (Yes, I do have a lot to say for an adult amateur who's been doing this for about five minutes. Thank you for noticing!) The relevant bit to my current post (and I promise, it ties in somewhere) is that I'm realizing that I have not really used my mental resources to their full capacity, either in the saddle or out. There is an element of "remembering" how to ride that is physical, and some of it is concrete knowledge, but clearly there's something a little more subconscious that kicks in. My subconscious is aware of what I am doing in a way that my conscious is not. In a number of ways, over the last year or so, I've felt like my subconscious has gone to great lengths to tell my conscious brain things about my horse life and my riding. As a total coincidence, I had two conversations somewhat recently with different friends about their meditation practices, and one of them recommended books by Jon Kabat-Zinn. And a third friend recently told me how to check out books from our local library for my Kindle. So. Whether or not it does anything else for me, mindfulness meditation when I am not riding seems like it would be helpful for training my mind to be... mindful, I guess, when I am riding. I'll let you know how it goes.

This post is already way too long, so I'm going to do a separate post on the strategy I'm thinking of for dealing with the (probably inevitable) periods when I am unable to ride due to my own physical injury or illness. Stay tuned!

sleep when you're sleepy. ride when you're awake.

This post's title comes from a text a close friend sent me last night, after I apologized for yet another weekend of horse activities trumping social ones. She gets it. In part because she and I are close, so she's gotten a lot of blow-by-blow details from me as my horse life has progressed, and partly because her career is her vocation and not a punch-the-clock job. This kind of support has been overwhelmingly important to me as I've gone through various transitions and rough patches in the horse journey, and I'm extremely grateful for all of the people in my life who've accepted that this whole horse thing is now one of the biggest priorities and main driving forces in my life.

On the other hand, I'm starting to feel like I haven't quite conveyed what I'm doing and what this means to me to a number of people in my broader social circle. I get the sense (from some, not all) that this is viewed as a "pleasure" activity, like eating ice cream, or going to a movie. It's not that they're dismissive, they're just... puzzled, I guess, when I say that I'm turning down the opportunity to take a vacation and go sit on a beach because I have an even better opportunity to stay here in the miserable heart of winter and ride someone else's horse. Why am I staying home on a Saturday night so I can get up at 6 AM on a Sunday morning to commute an hour each way, so I can pay for a riding lesson and hang out in a cold barn?

Because the only thing worse than a bad day at the barn is a day when I'm not at the barn.

And not that I would even consider the above scenario a bad day at the barn - I'm really looking forward to it! I enjoy many of the "work" aspects of being around horses, and certainly there's a real sense of responsibility and obligation that comes from having one in your care which makes it easy to prioritize the horse's needs. But, for anyone who rides regularly, there are times when it's just not "fun." It's not video games, it's not an amusement park ride, it's not sitting on the couch flicking through the TV channels. It's pushing yourself and your boundaries, it's confronting things about yourself that you'd rather not see, it's learning acceptance and how to be centered in the moment and in yourself. I guess I've never been motivated enough by anything else to really experience this before, but the inherent value that riding and horses bring to my life is so great that it seems obvious to me that I'd put long term goals above short term pleasure. And, I dunno, it feels better to do something and participate than it does to sit around and consume the things that others produce.

In any case, enough of this nonsense. I gotta get myself together and head out to the barn.  Less talk, more rock!