To Everything, Turn, Turn Turn

This past weekend was my local Pony Club's February Mounted Meeting and I got to jump things!!!!!! It was a brisk 30 degrees when we started but we were dressed well enough and had a great time knocking the dust off.

I have zero media so lets look at Chimi back in April jumping around FENCE XC!

I think I've mentioned it before, but just in case I haven't, I'm a Horsemaster in my local Pony Club. Basically it means I can participate in all things Pony Club but have aged out of Pony Club. I mainly joined so I could enjoy the monthly lessons with the various professionals in the area that my club brings in to teach. I feel like it's a monthly clinic with people I don't ride with on a normal basis. Plus our club is has a lot of great moms in it so I enjoy hanging out with them! Lol, when you live in the middle of nowhere you take any socialization you can get!

Chimi at The Fork, b/c these are the only jumping pictures I have on my phone...

Anyways, back to the lesson! We didn't jump any giant fences or anything spooky, but we did do a really fun course of turns. The jumps were set up as 3 lines so you could either do the straight forward line or you could turn to each of the various jumps on the different lines. I don't really know  how to explain it with words but good thing I can "draw"

The exercise... you can ride everything in a straight line or you can turn to the various jumps, heck you can even make up your own course as you go along!

Warming up was just trotting in and cantering out over the red line of jumps. Then we incorporated halting between the the jumps to get out horses listening to us. After that we moved onto the more exciting turns.

We started out with the red jump and then had a really tricky left hand rollback to the  blue. This was probably the most difficult turn for Chimi and myself b/c we're not that great on sharp left turns. He's kinda dead to my right leg so when I try to balance him around the turn and use my outside aides to keep him going he sort of blasts through me and I end up having to pull him with my left rein to make it to the jump which then gets us all out of balance and the jump usually sucks. Stuff to work on, but it did get better through the course, especially when Chimi's brain woke up and he realized we were jumping!!! Damn horse loves to jump over sticks, which I'm very happy about!

If I remembered the 1st course correctly this was it, starting with the red vertical and ending with the blue the 2nd time you jump it.

Other than the tricky turn from the red to the blue Chimi nailed all the other turns and I just made sure I was looking where we were going. The best part about the entire lesson was at the end when my legs started to turn to jello and I was struggling to keep my leg on him Chimi still jumped all the jumps! I literally just had to look and somewhat steer towards the jump and hang on over the jump and Chimi did all the rest. WHAT MAGICAL HORSE IS THIS???? Guys I can't help but be giddy about this b/c there was a time that Chimi would stop at EVERY fence until he had a chance to analyze it and even then I had to package him up and say YES I really do mean jump that jump! This lesson just made me realize how much of the hard work I've put into this guy has paid off. Granted the jumps were plain verticals and not very big (2'9" and below) but when I started to fatigue Chimi was able to take over and keep doing the task at hand. He's gotten to the point that he knows his job and will do it even if there's a monkey riding on his back and I love it!!!! Now I'm not saying that I'm going to stop riding and become a passenger on him but it does mean if I screw up Chimi's got my back and that is the best thing to have when you're a bumbling adult ammie who just wants to have fun with her horse. Basically I love my horse and am so appreciative of all the hard work I've put into him and the results are there. Squeeeee!!!!!!!

How cute is this face??!?!?!!?

I have a lot of work to do this spring to get us ready for our next adventure (more about this to come, hopefully this week) but damn it's nice to have Chimi as my partner, quirks and all.