Continuing Ed

Yesterday Dixie and I went down to San Jose and took a Centered Riding lesson with Becky Hart.

Becky Hart is a name I've known for a long time.  She's one of the top ten US endurance riders, and one of the top international riders - I don't even pretend to follow FEI so I have no idea how well she's ranked overseas.  But she was the Chef d'Equipe for the US endurance team at the last WEG - she is the real deal.  (And don't even get me started on her horses - Rio was possibly the best endurance horse ever, with 10k miles and a ton of first-place finishes.)

And I'm a redneck from Mississippi with four months of dressage lessons four years ago, on a horse I've made, for better or worse, entirely on my own.  I was a little nervous, really.  But it's gotten to the point where I have to recognize that Dixie is a serious athlete, and she deserves a better partner, and I needed to go find out what I can do to improve myself and make her job easier.

SJ is only 60 miles away, but anything involving vehicles in the Bay Area takes far longer than you can comprehend, you lucky flyover state readers*, so I left the house at 10 to get to Becky's farm at 1, and I left there at 3 to get home at 6:30.  Dixie was a hot mess when I pulled her out of her pen, screaming and pawing like a completely unhandled filly, but I paid her no mind.  I rinsed her off (must scrub her with soap, that Foresthill red dirt is NOT coming out) and loaded her up and she snapped into grownup endurance horse mode.  She rode well and ate hay perfectly calmly while I tacked her up.  I started to think my lesson might not be a debacle.

Becky didn't laugh in my face at my goals:  Sunriver 100, 20 Mule Team 100 in February, Tevis '14, Decade Team.  (And the Nevada Triple Crown some year, but that's even harder than Tevis.  It's the Derby 50, NASTR 75, and Virginia City 100 all in the same year - but the trails aren't unfamiliar and at least it's not humid, so it's not out of the question...)  There's still so much that can go wrong, but it's not unattainable.

I could try to tell you all the stuff we talked about, but you know how lessons are - you learn a lot, but it's not something you can explain to someone later.  But somehow Dixie and I rode around that arena like a centaur, not like a monkey clinging to a horse's back.  We didn't do a single thing with my hands - all I had to do was sit back and shift my weight and she curved nicely around cones and stopped and started when I thought about it.

I finally learned how it feels when the horse lifts her back under me, and how to ask for it.  I learned how I'm crooked - I collapse my left ribs and wrap my left leg nicely around the horse, while my right ribs are braced up and my right leg is twisted funny.  It'll take some work to retrain my muscle memory to sit properly and cue properly, but that's the benefit of endurance:  I'll get those hours of practice hella fast.  I'm planning on going back for another lesson a week or two after Sunriver to see how we're coming along.

My mouth is often disconnected from my brain, and at one point Becky said she used to show TWH in the 70s, and I just up and blurted out "I'm sorry!"  Because I'm a huge asshole.  :headdesk:  She gave me this look like "did you just say that?!" and I explained that Dixie was a padded, sored show horse, and showing in Tennessee is barbaric, and I just hate the whole sport.  She agreed that she showed clean and had a hard time beating people who tuned up their horses, and we just left it at that and thankfully she didn't seem too offended.  D:

Dixie did me proud.  I just can't say this too often:  she has a great mind.  She really does.  She's hard to condition because she's so laid back, but she's so easy to ride when she's in shape.  I can't even believe I just typed those words - she was such a bundle of nerves for years.  Who knew that there was a relaxed, confident horse under all that panicked energy?  And I did this; I kept at it with her and brought out her good traits.  :)

And I got Dixie a massage on Tuesday.  There's a massage therapist at the barn who's an "endurance ally" - she does trails and dressage on her lovely Friesian, but she's crewed Tevis for her friends and she understands the sport.  She said she didn't do a lot of work yet, because she wants to keep the experience positive for her, but that Dixie seemed to enjoy what she did.  She'll work on her again after Sunriver.


*you know I'm not dissing the flyover states; I'm from them and I love them. But I assume that eastern seaboarders like Dom also understand how a hundred-mile round trip can take longer in a car than on a fast horse.  ;)