I’m going to jump all the jumps
After I recovered from my fall yesterday, back on Tigger, back in charge, right back into cantering, it was time to jump. We did this thing I’ve never heard of* called gymnastic jumping. It’s lining up a bunch of jumps together, and it’s meant to help me focus on my jumping form. There are probably other reasons for it, too, but that’s the one Wendy told me about. So she set up the jumps in two long lines. The first time, there were only two jumps, one stride in between. Horse goes over the first jump, takes one stride, goes over the second, and then we come back around and do it again. Then she added a third, another stride away, then a fourth. The fifth jump was four or five strides past the fourth. That’s the top row in the sophisticated diagram below.
All of that went pretty smoothly, 1-foot jumps, way fun. We took turns running through it, Daisy and Dobby first, then me and Tigger. There was one incident…Wendy set me and Tigger up to go through that set of jumps after Daisy and Dobby, but Tigger could still see Dobby at the far end, and since we’ve already learned that Tigger wants to be near Dobby all the time, you can probably imagine the speed at which we barreled through that set. It was exhilarating and scary and fun and TOO FAST FOR ME, especially since it happened maybe 10 minutes after I fell off. We adjusted so that Dobby was well out of eyesight before Tigger lined up for the jumps for the rest of the lesson. That helped.
Oh, and then Daisy, wunderkind, jumped that set on Dobby with her arms held straight out from her sides. Like she was flying. It was AMAZING.
I did not try that.
Then we switched to the second line of jumps (the bottom line in that diagram), and in addition to setting up the jumps in a close row, Wendy raised two of them to 2’3″. TWO OF THEM (the ones with the double x). I’ve jumped that high twice only, in one lesson weeks ago, and it was a single jump. Like before Christmas, so months ago, really. It was SO COOL. Exhilarating again, but in a less scary way. I can’t wait to do more of that.
So, yeah. My lesson was exciting. I’m curious to find out how afraid I’ll be of getting back on Tigger next week. Right now I feel okay, but when I’m standing in front of him, knowing how he gets, knowing that I can fall off, will I be scared?
*It’s safe to say that nearly everything I’m learning is a thing I’ve never heard of. Even if I’ve heard of it (dressage, for example), I probably don’t really know what it means or what it is, and I certainly don’t know how to do it.