2pointober Wrap and a Spinal Tap Reference

I was very excited for 2Pointober at the beginning of the month, because it's an area in which I know I need work:

And in the first week of it, I realized that I needed to jack my stirrups up one more hole.  Sadly, this means I'm on hole 12 on my stirrup leathers now and can't make Spinal Tap jokes anymore.

Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?

Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don't know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

My trainer was skeptical at first, and said I was only allowed to keep them up a hole if I kept my leg underneath me.  Challenge accepted.  It either made it physically easier to keep my leg underneath me, or her challenge made me focus on it more, but one way or another, my lower leg has gotten more stable.

It also made us revisit my jumping position, and I'm now riding with a neck strap, following his neck down more with my release, and really working on sending my hips back first and staying tight through my core.

Unfortunately, it also means that my more-like-a-hunter-saddle jump saddle, which only works for me as an eventer because I have really short femurs, is now not quite right.  Workable, but not quite right.  So I'm going to have to start thinking about that.

Not a very forward flap, and not a style you'd typically see an eventer in, but it's worked for me up until now.

In the last two weeks of the month, the phone system replacement clobbered my participation in riding, going to the gym, 2pointober and pretty much anything that wasn't an alphabet soup of VoIP acronyms: SIP, PBX, MBG, SSC, and hundreds of numbers that translate into other numbers.  Worth it in the end, but a huge effort that took many late nights and early mornings for my team of 5, and not a lot of riding for me.

So I won't be getting a prize for 2pointober, but I definitely got a lot out of it that I am looking forward to working on over the winter!