Cob Jockey

"It's almost like we have to make him anticipatory right now."

I didn't fully get to process those words from my trainer in the moment as I sat on Disco panting from the effort of getting him to canter, but I sure did later.

Disco has finally earned the "nice" bridle. Also, the Fairfax drop is the most attractive drop noseband of all time and you can't convince me otherwise.

Once again, she had asked me how much I'd ridden since my last lesson 5-6 weeks ago, and once again, I told her "Not much." 

To be fair, he was at Lisa's for 3 of those weeks and waiting on the saddle fitter for almost one, but still. How am I going to "almost make him anticipatory" if it's quite frankly been years since I rode anything on a consistent schedule?

My partner asked if he could keep bush hogging for me during that lesson, and it helped SO much. There's only so much weekend daylight for bush hogging and it all has to be done every 3-ish weeks in the growing season.

It was during a heat wave that I figured out the answer. It was going to be way too hot and humid to ride after work, and although I'd never done this before, I had the thought that I might be able to cram a ride in before work now that the barn is a quarter mile stumble from my bed. 

Turns out? I LOVE riding before work. And it might be the key to everything given the stage of life I'm in right now.

Connor holding court for the main herd outside his dutch door during my morning ride, because he can be trusted to mostly ignore them.

...mostly.

Disco doesn't need duration, he needs frequency and consistency right now, so the 25 minute rides are perfect. We warm up and practice "old" skills for about 10 minutes, I pick one new skill to work on for the next 10, and we cool down for about 5. 

"Send help, call PETA"

The change in him was almost immediate once I started giving him consistency. Everything that was previously dull and slow started to become sharper, and I could feel him paying closer attention to my aids.

Proof that I am, in fact, sitting on a horse before 7am.

It's a whole separate post, my thoughts about where I'm at with starting a young horse for the first time, but giving him a schedule and patterns that he can recognize and think through has been a game-changer for his training. Who knew.

A slightly slow mo canter GIF. Canter is a normal part of our lives now, finally.

Finally, it has been a major personal win for me too. I'm enjoying these quiet mornings and the guilt-free kid/partner time I get after work now, plus the sense of "going somewhere" with Disco is so gratifying after treading water with him since he came home. If I can keep being diligent about my bedtime, this feels very sustainable, even as I look ahead to when these mornings will be cold and dark.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Disco ended up spending three weeks at his breeder's in May and June, and covered four mares. He got a glowing report card - he was good to handle, good to the mares, and "stopped when I said stop" which is "the most important thing".

Disco and his breeder, Lisa

He also stayed at a good weight thanks to some very careful nutrition management on my part before he left, and on Lisa's while he was there. Maintaining a good weight isn't easy for an active breeding stallion anyway, and doubly so when I realized he went through a growth spurt while he was there.

My eye was immediately drawn to his withers when I picked him up - where did THOSE come from? In three weeks he grew a centimeter, and his topline is now a completely foreign shape to me. Or wait, is it familiar...

I brought him home a few days before we had a Wow fitter coming to visit, and opted to not even try to ride until she had a chance to evaluate his saddle fit.

She is a wonderful fitter and is a Wow specialist, but works on all kinds of saddles. She's coming back this fall if anyone local wants to get on the schedule.

She said his flat tree still suits him (phew, that's the most expensive part), but she did think he needed a slightly different headplate (3U instead of 3UU) and that he no longer needed tabbed panels. Tabs lower the contact surface at the front of the panel for a wide horse, and to my utter shock, Disco isn't a wide horse anymore.

I wasn't done being shocked. When she evaluated Connor (the first time he's been evaluated by a Wow professional), she said he could really do with a flat tree too. And that he and Disco are currently the exact same size in every part.

I joked when I bought a baby out of Connor's full sister that I was hoping genetics was on my side in terms of Disco fitting into the same saddles as Connor, but Lisa's herd tends to have two back shapes: native pony flat-and-wide or easily-shares-saddles-with-warmbloods. Connor has always been in the latter camp, and up to this point I thought Disco might be in the first. Can you blame me? Look at these photos from when he came home 7 months ago:

No withers here, ma'am, just a potato. (November 2024)

I tried Connor's saddles on him back in November, and the fit was terrible:

In Disco's own saddle, he's gone down from being a 4U headplate/borderline 5 headplate, to a 3U in the last 7 months.

November 2024, 4U headplate

And finally, the whole thing is a love letter to Wow. Renske said I needed a different panel shape for him now, and instead of getting a whole new saddle or new panels, I just took my spare pair of no-tab DXWG Size 1 panels out of the office, we swapped those onto the saddle and spent a half hour getting the flocking (air) just right. Boom, done. No matter which dimension he grows in and which direction he grows in, the saddle will keep changing with him.

25 minutes of w/t/c is EXHAUSTING guys, but look at that saddle fit.

This month is the four-year anniversary of creating the co-op, and gosh, I don't think I've ever been prouder of anything I've created. 

Canadian wildfire smoke making for an ethereal sunset

We have proven that it works. Not only that, we have proven that it works under so many different configurations: anywhere from 2-5 boarders and from 24/7 turnout to stalls/turnout hybrid. Not one forgotten shift in all that time.

We've had two people leave in four years, both for good reasons unrelated to the co-op, and we've added three, including the first person that I didn't personally know before they started boarding here. We've also expanded upward in age, and currently have people from their mid-30s to mid-70s participating.

Even with the added workload of the chores only I can do, it still feels sustainable

The crazy part is, almost nothing has changed since I first imagined the way it would work when I had to scramble to find a way to keep the barn open after my trainer announced she was closing her program with very little notice. 

It has worked exactly like I thought it would, with a system of checks and balances so that multiple eyes are on anything that's important, a group of grateful boarders that treat the facility like it's their own, and a workload that is sustainable over the long haul and doesn't leave anyone, including myself, feeling tied down to the horses.

Cold hosing a fellow co-op member's horse who of course had a fat leg while she was out of the country

The only thing that's changed is that I've instituted a probation period for any new boarders after we took it very slowly with our newest boarder and that worked out really well. Any new boarder will have the opportunity to shadow as many shifts as they want before they move their horse in (at least over a couple of weeks), and then once they move their horse in and start taking shifts, they'll have a mandatory 30 day probation period during which either of us can terminate the arrangement for any reason. 

Newest boarder (12.2hh Icelandic) continues to be the cutest ever

That said - for the first time now, we are actually full, not "fake full so I can properly screen potential new boarders." So I don't expect or hope to be adding any new boarders for a long time now. 

Here's to four years down and many more to come! 

I have no media from my second National Drive lesson since Mary couldn't be there, but fortunately for you all I had a near duplicate of that lesson this week at home, so we're going to combine the two.

Home instructor looking over my work. All photos courtesy of Leah.

There's a driver's meeting every morning at 8:30am, so when I saw an 8am slot open on Joanna's schedule, I grabbed it. I guessed that there'd be no other horses out to distract Disco during the meeting, and, having already had a "working through getting his focus" lesson, I really wanted a different kind of productivity for the second.

I was right, and Disco was SO good. We had his focus from the very beginning, and Joanna was able to cover so much ground with me.

We spent more than half the lesson at the trot on the driving equivalent of a 20m circle, which was the first time I had really trotted him for a continuous amount of time in the cart. 

She was also able to drop some wisdom about how my cart fits me (as good as anything off the rack will, but I need some seat adjustments), how to use the whip (never for going forward if you can help it, only for bending, and never on the horse's back) and inside rein vs outside rein in turning (juuuuuuust like in Dressage).

It just worked out that my home trainer was also able to give me a lesson a couple weeks after The Drive. Last time she saw me before Christmas, I was in the wooden cart, my lessons were mostly at the walk, and I still felt overwhelmed by driving.

This time? 

We leveled up the work significantly and ended up doing trot serpentines! 

For whatever reason these videos' frame rates aren't playing nice with the GIF editor, but just imagine it at normal speed.

Things feel like they come up very fast in the cart and the indoor, so the trot serpentines felt like they were a lot to manage at first. Just like in riding, you can't just yank them from one turn to the next, you have to have clear aids and at least a couple of straight strides in the middle before you change the bend.

We also worked on pace and obedience. He's getting a LOT less sticky about up transitions than when this instructor last saw us, but of course now she wants more. 

We did a lot of transitions - a LOT of transitions - including starting to ask for transitions within the gaits. For the first time, I pushed him for a very big trot, and started to feel a glimmer of that big swing I've started to feel under saddle. With him, his default is this low-energy mincing pony trot, but you know there's more in there when you see it.

She pointed out, as did Joanna, that he's educated enough in the contact to start learning that the reins are for more than turning and stopping. I would ask for a half halt, for example, or for him to soften to the bit, and he would stop. 

This is something I need to start working on under saddle too, but I've been erring on the side of caution given my complicated relationship with contact over the years.

For the first time ever, I felt totally comfortable driving, even at speed. I enjoyed the heck out of that lesson, and was smiling most of the time. It's such a hard challenge to be a complete beginner at something that feels so foreign, but I feel like I'm getting there with it. 

This lesson was a great roadmap for the next few months and gave me lots of things to work on, although I hope to have her back out sooner than that!

I was - in a word - nervous about driving Disco at The National Drive.

I mean, I'm nervous about driving in general still, and I had never driven him outside of our indoor arena. Nevermind that Maude trail drove him all over the place and also showed him in driving off the property. 

I decided I was only going to drive with an instructor present, and I also decided that I would make my mandatory safety check part of my first lesson.

The pro photographer didn't get any pictures of my drives, but did get this one of us. Fun fact, he had not been groomed in days here, that glow is just his coat. Photo by Mark Jump Photography

No matter if you've been to the Drive zero times or fifty times, the first time you take your horse and cart out, you have to drive over to the mandatory safety check and be inspected. Driving people take safety verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry seriously. 

At the safety check, they make sure you can control your horse in public and that there's nothing unsafe about your setup - they look for straps that look like they might be about to break, cart in need of repair, harness put on incorrectly, that kind of thing. Once you pass, they put a green band on your cart to show that you've passed the safety check, and it stays on your cart the rest of the weekend.

Driving over to safety check with my emotional support instructor. Thanks to Mary for all the rest of the photos and video!

After I passed my safety check, my instructor gave me the choice: indoor arena, or outdoor arena? We drive in the indoor all the time at home, so outdoor sounded scarier, which is why I chose it.

Disco didn't let me down. There was a lot to see and do and feel as we walked across the complex to the outdoor, and my #slugmode pony was distracted, up and forward. By the time we got to the arena, I was struggling to keep him at a walk, which had my nerves maxed out: I was braced hard against the floorboard and pulling hard against him, trying to keep him under control. I'd honestly never gotten a chance to work with him in a mindset like that before, since he's always so chill at home.

This is pretty much what we looked like for 30 straight minutes

For the next half hour, Joanna did a masterful job of talking me through it, alternating between giving me tips and telling funny stories through the headset, I knew, just to distract me from my nerves. All the while Disco was screaming, counterbending and trying to trot.

"This is just baby stallion stuff," she said. "This is a big atmosphere for him, lots to see. He's trying to call to the other horses, there's no sense in disciplining him for any of it, we just need to be patient and give him reasons to focus on us." I mean, to be entirely fair and 100% accurate, he was still not even four years old during this adventure!

Disco got introduced to Mary's show grooming intensity

After what felt like an eternity, I finally felt him come down enough that we could move on in the lesson. We worked on basic steering, with four sets of cones set out on a circle, which I am not at all ashamed to say I ran over multiple times. 

"So right now, he's kind of doing whatever he wants generally in the direction you want him to go, but you're not really steering him. We're going to work on that."

It was here that I got my biggest lesson of Day 1. She told me to turn my shoulders in the direction I wanted to go.

No joke, the tightest turn I have ever made driving so far.

It was revolutionary. He started going exactly where I wanted him to, and we stopped mauling cones. I realized a couple of things: one, that there are a lot of things that my brain goes "If you're not on his back he can't feel this so it doesn't matter," that I'm probably going to keep discovering like this, and two, uhhhhhhhhhhh pretty sure my turning aids in the saddle are also dysfunctional (more on that later).

Brain cell, reinstalled

That was supposed to be my one and only lesson of the drive, but as we walked back to the barn, I knew I couldn't end on that one, not when we had only just started to make real progress in both my nerves and actually learning something right at the end. So I quickly did some mental math on how to cram one more lesson in before I had to leave for my Rolex Land Rover Cosequin Kentucky 5* tailgate prep, and got up bright and early the next day...