Fran Clinic!

Fran is the woman who taught me how to really ride. I met her when I was 15 and started working off lessons, riding her nice show ponies and my horse of questionable sanity, and almost no ridability. She and Tom trade off teaching at each other’s farms doing clinics. It was nice to meet all the other Tom-Students and hang out with them, we had 14 people at dinner! 

Nice!

The clinic here was more of a practice horse show than lessons. The morning was dressage, having groups practice components of their dressage test that they would do Sunday morning. A dressage test gives the rider the opportunity to show how well trained their horse is; at the lower levels focusing primarily on quality of the gaits, transitions between gaits, and accuracy of the ring figures. If you don’t ride you would be surprised at how hard it is to get a horse to do a round, 20 meter circle and be told it was "fairly good". The afternoon was jumping. Each group warmed up in the arena over some simple stuff, and the more advanced riders then went out to the field, XC vests zipped up, to jump some natural obstacles. Sunday was judged dressage rides (Fran is a judge, after all) and then in the afternoon each rider picked a jump course to ride, talked about how it went with Fran, and then worked on what they didn't like.

Practicing Novice level dressage 

On Saturday Fran was pleased to see where Ami was in her way of going, which meant a lot to me. For where we are at we need to pay attention to having quality gaits (not to fast, not to slow), quality transitions between gaits (think shifting a manual transmission), and accurate figures (truly round circles, straight lines, even corners). The afternoon jumping got interesting, there was a pony-mare moment involving a five-foot wide ditch and some name calling, but other than that she galloped up to things with a “I’ll jump that sucker like it’s never been jumped before!”

(This is what a normal, attitude and hormone free, effort over a ditch looks like) 

We did dressage tests on Sunday morning. Our overall scores were 35 for Novice A, and 36 for Novice B, which both fall between “satisfactory” and “fairly good,” and are good scores for the sport. She had some tense moments, but I had my own goals which were accomplished (good downward transitions, and my position), so I was happy.  Jumping in the afternoon went well; people commented on how cute Ami was and said it was fun to watch her go around. She jumped some 3ft jumps and gave them much more respect than she does to the stuff that is 2’6”. One of the other participants, Chris, was taking lots of pictures, so I'm spending some time looking at them and seeing what needs to get better.