Bending

 Rain, snow,

Go away,

Come again never.

I am so sick of the cold and the wet and the icky. I am sick of wearing long underwear under my breeches, sick of dealing with blankets and coolers and quarter sheets, sick of waiting for the barn water to get hot to run over the bit before bridling, sick of riding in endless circles inside in the dark. I am very jealous of the happy people going to Aiken. I have a very bad attitude about life right now.

However, the two months of cold and dark has forced three things upon me that have greatly improved our training. First, jumping inside has allowed us to practice precision. Because the jumps are close to the wall, I have to be vigilant about establishing a line and making sure Surya doesn’t turn too soon. Also, without access to the larger jumps and courses outside, we have worked on a lot of technical questions. This past week we did a gymnastics exercise for the second time and Surya rocked it! Double bounce to one stride to two stride. At the end, my trainer put the two-stride up to 2’10”! Second, the cold necessitated a longer warmup, which resulted in lots of work on walk-halt and walk-trot transitions, which improved Surya’s response to my leg, reinforced forward-thinking mentality, and encouraged me to be very precise with where Surya’s haunches were so that she kept the correct bend through each transition. Third, riding inside meant drilling inside leg to outside rein and drilling speed control with no distraction. So our rides go bend, bend, bend, canter(!), canter forward, canter slow, canter forward, canter slow, trot forward, trot slow, trot forward, trot slow, change direction through the centerline, repeat. This past week I started adding in serpentines again. While we initially had technical difficulties traveling to the right, once I got control of her left shoulder, Surya found the right much easier than the left. We are finally just establishing correct bend to the left.

But as I mentioned two posts ago, to focus on bending correctly, one needs to know how a horse bends. So how, exactly, does a horse bend? What are its rib cage, spine, and feet doing when we ask it to bend to the inside?

As the Official USDF Guide to Dressage notes, a horse’s spine has very little ability to bend laterally. Its neck, sure, that can obviously bend around and touch its own rib cage when motivated by a piece of sugar. But withers to haunches, a horse’s spine cannot bend into the half-moon shape that “bend around the circle” would seem to imply. But then what is happening when a horse does a haunches-in, or shoulder-in, or half-pass? The horse definitely appears to be bending its rib cage!

Let’s say the horse is traveling left at the trot and “bending” to the left. What is happening, according to the USDF and Philippe Karl, is that the horse is contracting the muscles on the left side of its body and lengthening the muscles on the right side. Since the horse is in motion, this is still a dynamic process, and the bend flexes as the horse moves, but the general idea remains.

If you think about a horse on a circle, and draw a straight line from its haunches to its withers, it becomes evident that, on a circle, its haunches are always traveling out, and its shoulders are always traveling in. So when contracting to the left, a horse’s left hind will reach under to the center of its body and the right fore will reach out and slightly to the left. The more contracted the left side, and the stronger the muscles, the more the shoulders will already be angled in the direction of motion, so the less the right fore will dislocate from forward, and the more the haunches will simply follow the shoulders instead of swinging out, so the straighter the left hind will travel. The neck follows the bend. However, I am still unclear on the benefits of greater or lesser bend through the neck, so I will leave that topic for another day.

Astride, we want the muscles to contract, and so to move away from our inside leg. If the horse is hollowing the right and seems to be pushing or ignoring our leg on the left, it is contracting the muscles on the right. So if they are bending left correctly, the left side doesn’t feel hollow…it is lifted and there is definitely something “there”, but neither does it feel bulging. In my mind, it is still a subtle difference but I’m sure once you ride dressage long enough it feels obvious.

Things get more complicated with counter-bends. Don’t even ask me about canter yet.

Another important thing to note is that bending is not collection. Collection is the lifting of the base of the neck, lifting of the withers via contraction of the abdominal muscles and dropping of the pelvis in order to animate and lift. BUT my trainer tells me bending is an important step toward collection since it defines how the horse must move. Then, as we ask for further animation in the stride, but no faster, the only response the horse can have is to collect. Whereas, without first being “through” the bridle and bending, or contracting, in the direction we ask, asking for animation of the stride would only result in high-headed or side-stepping evasions. Right? If I’ve got this all wrong somebody tell me please!

So where are Surya and I in this process? To the left, she alternates between ignoring my inside leg and ignoring my outside leg, so the angle of her shoulders is very rarely right. We are working on it. To the right, we are doing very well and working on moving more through the bridle. It’s all very exciting and I’m becoming very obsessive-compulsive about things since we are stuck inside and my hands are cracking from the cold and I WANT IT TO BE SPRING. Anyway, bye.

Since I am having technical difficulties with the video, here is a picture of me and Surya jumping the double bounce. She always jumps with her ears forward :).

Year One

A year ago today, I met Surya and my life changed.

She is the sweetest, hardest working, smartest, bravest, itchiest, most beautiful, and perfect horse I have ever met. I am so lucky we are partners.

A year ago, Surya wouldn’t go into the indoor arena… or her stall. A year ago, she was not confirmed at the canter under saddle. She hated fly spray and wouldn’t think of standing for clippers. A year ago, I didn’t own a pair of breeches. I didn’t own a curry comb. I had not yet inexplicably bought unnecessary duplicates of halters and blankets. I posted the trot like a child told she was going to Disney World. Surya was green; I was (am) green. A year ago, a successful partnership was not a foregone conclusion.

Thanks in large part to my brilliant trainer, we have made it work, and last month Surya started galloping up to me when I come to fetch her from the field. Granted, this may be because it’s winter and freezing and she wants to come inside, but I am choosing to interpret this as enthusiasm for my company.

I trust her; she trusts me. This is in evidence in our jumping. If I am unsure or confused, Surya decides she is too. But if I ask her to go, she goes. I have almost fallen off of her a couple of times – lost my stirrups, landed on her neck, hung off the right side of her with my left hand clenched in her mane while she somehow ran out of a bounce. She doesn’t hold it against me, and on the plus side, she’s obviously very agile. The next time we face the bounce I keep my upper body back and we go through perfectly, her ears relaxed and happy. And she is so smart. She gets us through the jumps if I don’t see a distance and over new stuff like she’s seen it all before. She is unafraid and I am unafraid. I’ve got her back (hah) and she’s got mine.

This is true in dressage too, though it’s less about trust and more about accurate communication. Surya will let me know if she is upset: pinned ears and swished tail. But she capitulates so easily. As if she considers the energy required to put up a good fight, then mentally shrugs and says ok Alex, you know best…bend to the right it is! This is wonderful, because I have been able to work on developing finesse without her punishing me for accidental heavy-handedness. If riding is a language, I feel like I’ve finally gained enough understanding to start reading novels. Easy ones for now, maybe on the level of Harry Potter, but hopefully more nuanced with time.

In some ways, Surya is the least marish mare that has ever existed. But she loooovvves scratches, pretty much everywhere. She pricks her ears and then pouts if I greet other horses in her line of sight. She will do anything for grain or apple bites, but places a lesser value on carrots. We have had little fights, but I’ve won, and she lets the precedent stand. She can tell if she’s pushing the boundary of acceptable behavior, and I can tell if she just wants to run in the snow.

Having a horse is like living a pop song, or a symphony. Surya, as Taylor Swift says in declarative chords, “I loved you from the very first day!”