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What a Week
I’m not even going to tell you how many moments of sheer stupidity I had, but they started with having absolutely no idea what day of the week it was until mid-day today, when I learned it was Friday, not Thursday as I thought. Darn those three-day weekends; they’ll get you every time.
But riding wise—the last few weeks, we’ve been working on establishing contact with the horse, which means having to deal with the fact that I want to throw the reins away as soon as I feel the horse on the other end of them.
My frustration with all of this is self-directed: I know what I need to do, I can even feel when I lose the contact, but I can’t make my body do what it needs to do. Or, if I can, I’m not quick enough. I keep waiting for that magic switch to kick in, so that the exercise becomes as instinctive as posting.
In all this struggle for me to “get” it, my instructor has been really good at switching things around—giving me new techniques to try, or having me focus on different things, or changing the pattern I’m riding in the arena. Which is exactly what you have to do with me. I’m not one of those riders who can go around in a circle for the entire lesson and focus on the same thing the entire time. It drives me nuts. I’m sure you’ve known horses like this—they get bored and frustrated with the constant repetition and it starts to work against the exercise. That’s me, too.
If I ever step back into the show ring, you can bet I’ll ride the most complicated test I reasonably can. I would ride Intro 4 over Intro 1, for example. Not because I think I’m too good for Intro 1, but because I would be a nervous wreck and the least helpful thing I could do would be to ride an easier test. Much better to ride something complicated, where I really have to think about what I’m doing and where I’m going so there’s less time to psych myself out. I’ve noticed when I look over my old test scores that there are a lot more Test 3’s and Test 4’s in the mix than there are Test 1’s and Test 2’s.
So drilling an exercise until I’m perfect at it doesn’t work for me. I don’t learn that way. I learn better if I drill it until I sort of have it, but maybe not entirely. Then I need to move on to another exercise that incorporates the troublesome exercise without focusing on it.
I’m not saying I should be trying 1-tempi changes if I can’t get 3-tempis or anything like that (oh, to be at a place where that was my concern!)—but back when I learned to do a shoulder in, for example, we focused on it for a lesson or two and then moved the shoulder ins to the warm up or cool down, or else did exercises that started with a shoulder in and went into something else. When shoulder ins became part of a broader context, they finally made sense and I was able to break through the problems I was having.
Gosh, I love it when I have my whole learning process so perfectly mapped out like this. Life looks so easy. Here’s the solution! Go forth and ride!
Yeah, right. It’s one thing to know how I learn best, it’s another thing to really believe, when I’m in the middle of not getting an exercise, that I really do need to move on and try something different before I drive the instructor, the horse, and myself entirely insane. I want to be perfect now, darn it, not in a couple weeks when things have synthesized.
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Comments
Go for a trail ride http://halt-near-x.com/images/smileys/wink.gif
Kidding—I am kidding… http://halt-near-x.com/images/smileys/smile.gif
But do not beat yourself up over things, either. The switch will click, and you will feel “right” and not throwing the reins away before you know it. I bet it happens when you least expect it, and we will see a post on here saying “You will never believe what I finally realized!”
I get bored easily going around in a circle as well. I guess that’s why I work so much with cones and poles and dressage moves.
On Jun 2, 2008, greyhorsematters said:
It is so hard to be content to use little steps until you perfect one thing. I understand how it can be frustrating as I’ve been there myself, my instructor says I’m always getting ahead of myself and looking for more complicated things to do. When what I should be doing is practicing what I am instructed to do until I get it right. There is no help for us, we will always be looking for more complicated movements.