I find myself returning to a piece I wrote about this same time last year. I was coming out of a long winter of riding inside and I was rediscovering the joys of riding on the small, soggy, lumpy field that I call my own up the hill from my barn. I find myself in the exact same position this year. After a winter of struggle I am finally back in my element of riding my horse in a field!
I grew up riding in much the same environment as my soggy little field. I had horses at home throughout my childhood and rode through the woods and fields on a daily basis for the first 18-20 years of my life. I grew up practicing dressage tests up and down hillsides, through neighbors woods, wherever I happened to be. I rarely rode in a ring outside of lessons or competitions. To this day, I feel less at home riding in a proper arena. All of my best rides seem to happen in a field or on a hillside somewhere.
This gets me thinking…There is something about how I manage my ride on a rough surface that is different than how I ride on a groomed arena. I have been thinking a lot about this lately because I have been working really hard this past winter on finding my balance on a horse who has trouble with his balance. In truth, we have trouble with each other’s balance if that makes sense?
On my own or on another horse, I consider myself a pretty balanced rider. My horse Oskar is very agile and very balanced on his own. He is a typical Thoroughbred who struggles a bit with anxiety, and anxiety about his ability to balance the two of us is one of our biggest struggles. We both tend to over think everything. As a team, Oskar and I tend to contort ourselves trying to prepare for the others missteps. I find this to be especially true when I have the luxury of consciously thinking about each step rather that feeling/reacting to each step…aha! I think I have discovered what has been happening in all my years of ring riding! In a field that is less than ideal footing and terrain-wise(!!) I do not have the luxury of over intellectualizing every step. I can’t plan every move. This means that I can’t stiffen up and micromanage every step. I am forced by the nature of the terrain to ride the horse that I find underneath me, each step of each circle in each gate. I need to ride the overall balance of the horse from back to front without fiddling and nagging and prodding and bracing. I just have to feel the horse underneath me and ride the overall picture from back to front. When I am not forced by the terrain to turn my thinking down a bit and just feel I stiffen up. I shut off my feel and just try too hard. It turns out that this does not help my riding!
I am excited to see whether this insight will bring with it an improvement in my riding overall. It is relatively easy in riding to have an intellectual understanding of something but it is exponentially harder to put it into practice! I am heading into the 2014 competition season with a new goal; I would like to put the feel back into my riding and shut my brain off a bit.
Check back in October for a full report!