jumping

The outside ring was still setup for the IEA show. We’d finally had rain so the ground wasn’t too hard to jump Tonka out there. (No use pounding on his legs. My goal is longevity with this horse!) So last week’s lesson was given outside. Tonka was delighted to be […]

Our First Oxer

by
Tonka and I have a lot of fun jumping, but it’s not simply pointing him at a jump and flying over it – although he would do that! There’s a lot of technique to learn and implement. As I wrote about previously, jumping happens at the canter, and when we […]

Progress on Changes Over Fences

by
Thinking that I’d put my white breeches away for good, I bought Tonka to be my trail horse. But it turned out that I missed the training and fine-tuned connection that I got through dressage. I knew that Tonka would benefit from the communication that we’d find through the training. […]

Training Hurdles From Dressage to Jumping

by
Tonka certainly doesn’t lack in enthusiasm about jumping. This is his expression as he approaches a fence. Eyes locked on, ears pricked forward, face determined but not stressed, tail flying behind, hooves light on the ground as he powers from his quarters.   What we do lack is consistency. This […]

Enthusiasm, Consistency

by
I’ve very recently switched from focusing on dressage to going over fences in the hunter/jumper (H/J) style. I’ll write another post about why (short answer, it’s fun!) This blog, though, is about all of the things that I didn’t know that it was assumed that I did. I’ve been around […]

Learning What I Don’t Know

by
Last Saturday, Tonka and I competed in our first show over fences. The Hunter/Jumper world is new to me and I left it to my trainer, Stephanie Plaisted, to decide what classes to enter us in. The class list reads to me like a foreign language. “beginner”, “pre-modified”, “open”, “hunter”, […]

Last and First

by
Yesterday Tonka and I entered our very first jumper show! The day dawned hot and was only going to get steamier. We needed to warmup, but not do it so literally that we got heat exhaustion. Tonka is a calm guy at horse shows, so he didn’t need to be […]

Horse Show Warmup

by
Yesterday in my lesson I learned a new term: hony. Tonka is a hony. Horse + pony = hony. I’ve never measured Tonka with an accurate stick, but the best guess is that he’s 14.3 hands (a hand is four inches, and you measure from the ground to the top […]

Pony or Horse?

by
There is only so much training that you can do for the show ring at home. Some things that happen at the horse show only happen at the horse show. So last Sunday I trailered Tonka to a small, relaxed schooling show. The plan was to expose him to jumps […]

Show Ring Training

by