On Wednesday, 11/9/11, we loaded up the horses in time for an 8 am departure from Sebastopol to our Colleen Kelly lesson in Gilroy which is, according to Mapquest, 2 hours and 22 minutes away. Mapquest has apparently never made the trip anywhere near the vicinity of commute hour. We made good time until we hit Oakland at a little before 9 a.m.. Supposedly this is after the morning commute, but somebody forgot to notify the rest of the automotive community, and we did a slow crawl all the way south to San Jose and the merge with 101. Three hours later we arrived at Rancho Ruiz just north of Gilroy, still well in advance of our appointed hour of 1 pm. for our lesson. The weather in the North Bay has been brisk and cool, so we wore our winter clothes, but in Gilroy it seems that Indian Summer is lingering and the temp hit the 80s. The horses have their full winter coats and we were in long sleeves so it was a very warm day indeed! But the facility is really beautiful, designed by an architectural team from Oregon specializing in stable/landscape design. I think I may have found my dream job! Check out Equinearchitecture.com.
The horses had taken the trip very well--we love our ponies! I have gotten Cowboy a slow-feed hay bag as he can go through a haybag in record time, and he definitely does not appreciate the gesture. The small openings in the bag cause him to slow down his consumption and it caused him some consternation. We caught him pulling his tie rope through his Blocker tie ring and sneaking around the trailer to steal Dexter's hay. But they were nice and relaxed and happy in their surroundings, which certainly made the lesson a better experience.
Laura got her lesson on Dexter first. Her concern was Dexter's odd "skipping" gait and his reluctance to move forward. Colleen's focus is on "rider biodynamics" so she assessed Laura's riding posture first, and then moved on to Dexter's movement. What I mostly got from the lesson is that we are way over-analyzing the horse issues and sometimes you just have to get after them a bit. Colleen did emphasize tapping the horse's shoulder, not the rump, to get the horse to move out, and soon Dexter was moving nicely forward in response to the tapping. Colleen is from Australia and is very extroverted--she pointed out that at one point Dexter discovered that he has a butt, and that now he must use it! I'll say one thing--this is really a one-hour workout and you get your money's worth.
After Laura and Dexter were done, it was time for Cowboy and me to take our turn. My concerns were that Cowboy is my tenth horse, and that makes 10 horses I've owned that work off the forehand rather than the hind end, and maybe it is not the horse that is the cause of my never achieving a flying lead change. I was also concerned about his saddle fit issues and what I may be doing to contribute to it. Colleen focused on the flying lead changes and assured me that we would achieve it that day. Wow! After 40 years of trying....She also went into some detail about the bit I was using (a thick French link mouthpiece recommended and sold by Parelli)--apparently this is a popular bit with larger horses with wide mouths, but not appropriate for smaller mouths (she referrred to Cowboy's mouth as a "teacup" mouth), and recommends a very inexpensive loose-ring sweet iron snaffle sold by Stateline Tack. Cowboy does tend to fuss a lot with the French link bit, and I do have another bit very similar to the Stateline bit that I intend to try when I have 5 free minutes. Then she recommended abandoning the rope reins in favor of leather (much easier to make subtle adjustments), and then we shortened my stirrups A LOT. She had me trot and canter along the rail, and disengage the hindquarters so that we were moving diagonally across the arena toward the opposite rail. I would have sworn we had this move down, but it was way harder than I would have thought and we kept getting crooked. To correct this, she had us go off the diagonal into a circle--not an intuitive move, but designed to get the correct bend and flexibility. The idea was that when we reached the opposite side, we would do a fairly fast change of direction, so that if we were moving from right to left diagonally across the arena, when we reached the left fence, we would start circling to the right--forcing a lead change from left to right. Sounds good in practice but really hard to do! I kept getting my hands too high so what with correcting my hand height, the newly shortened stirrups, and continued crookedness, we never did achieve a flying lead change, but boy did I learn a lot. I have a western saddle, and I kept getting the reins snagged on the horn. I was not adjusted to the short stirrups, so when Cowboy would slow down abruptly I felt I was going to catapult over his head. But, the fact that she was asking to accomplish so much actually made me feel much better about my riding ability since she would not have been asking for these fairly complex moves if she didn't think we were capable of achieving them. After an hour of this, Cowboy and I were both dripping sweat (did I mention the temp was in the 80's?). We were allowed to set up a video camera so there is a clip from the video here. (I had to compress the file to upload so it looks like the quality is seriously compromised). One useful bit of info that Colleen imparted is that the preferred libation for riding is gin and tonic rather than beer as the gin and tonic tastes good even when warm and the beer does not! Who knows what you will learn at these events.....I also got caught red-handed (red-footed?) in my relentless and mindless kicking of my horse. Feedback--DO NOT kick your horse with your heel! One nudge with the mid-calf or with the knee, and if you don't get a response, go to the crop/whip. The horse should respond to leg pressure, and if you keep after them with the leg, it is just annoying nagging.
We were pretty tired as we headed out just before 4 pm and put out good thoughts for a speedy trip home. Alas, not to be. We got onto Hwy 880 at San Jose and immediately traffic slowed to a crawl. This continued, with speeds mostly at 5 mph with occasional bursts of dizzying 35 mph, all the way up the East Bay until just before the Richmond-San Rafael bridge almost 3 hours later, when we finally got clear roadways. We had left the trailer windows open so the horses could get maximum air flow and were praying that we would not have 2 horses suffering from exhaust fume poisoning by the time we got home. They took the whole trip in stride (did I mention that we love our tolerant ponies?) and we finally pulled into the driveway at just after 8 pm.
Since we got back it has been nonstop work, but it is now Friday night and although I still have work to do, I don't have any appointments and it isn't supposed to rain tomorrow, so I am crossing my fingers that over the weekend I can try to put to use what I learned on Wednesday.
