Centered in the Saddle

You are required to read the title of this post with this type of inflection: The a-MAAAAYYYY-zing MAY-sie. It’s just how it’s done.

Who is The Amazing Masie? She is my trainer’s horse. She’s a grey Dutch Thoroughbred mare and she’s so adorable and fancy.

A few weeks ago, I got a text from Trainer B: “Dressage tonight. You’re on Maisie.”

Cue celebration! I firmly believe it takes a lot of trust for someone to put a new person on their horse. So I was thrilled and felt like I had “passed” the judgement phase of riding with someone new.

The lesson was great. I’m still figuring out how to Dressage…mostly my heels want to go way down and when I try to relax them, all the rest of my joints are like, whoa lady whatchya doin’? And I just feel very out of sorts and like my limbs aren’t totally connected to my body. This also makes my hands go to crazy town, especially because Maisie has a very active, bouncy trot. This is just at the posting trot, sitting trot is much easier for me at this point.

But by the end we had some very nice moments and I felt like I was starting to reconnect all my body parts. Progress.

The next week, I got another text from Trainer B: “Jumping tonight. You’re on Maisie again!”

Sweet! I got some tips from Maisie’s leaser, M: Sit up to the fence and keep your leg on. The two things I struggle with, of course. They’ve been getting better, but my muscle memory still tells me to lean to the fence, and I’ve honestly never been great about keeping my leg on over the fence.

But I did it! I sat up, kept that leg on and felt like I rode well. It was not smooth or pretty all the time, but we jumped some pretty decent size fences and only had one stop that I could feel coming for about four strides.

Maisie does this thing where she gets herself to the distance she likes very well, which is great but also sometimes means she throws a trot step or two in before the fence. It never felt like she was questioning or stopping, she just wanted to fix the distance. It looks real ugly and scramble-y in some of the fences in the video but whatever. It was my first time jumping her and it was so fun!