As a follow up to my 2025 reservations post I had typed a rough draft of this post prior to Emma's post regarding goals. After reading that I realized that this post pretty closely aligned with the "process goals". The actual foundation that leads up to showing up to those competitions. Emma's post and the blog posts linked to in it did prompt me to think about what did I want to have as my focus while proceeding through each week. That distinction keeps this post from being more along the lines of a horse version of my annual "Getting it Right off the Horse" post.
- Jump lesson with JT, usually a 3:1 or 4:1 ratio of stadium to XC lessons over a 4 or 5 week period
- 1 hour bareback walk hack with serpentines through ditches and other terrain questions. This day also involves some footing questions with a mix of pavement, soft sand, hard sand, rocks, etc
- Fitness day- currently we're at 20 minutes trotting then 3 x 3 min canter, but we will be upping that to 3 x 4 min canter soon
- Dressage lesson OR at home cavaletti work with a 30 minute walk hack to warm up
- Dressage school at home with a 30 minute walk hack to start
- Lunge in Equiband for 23-25 minutes (10 at walk/halt, 10 at walk/trot, couple minutes each way with trot/canter), some weeks incorporate another bareback walk hack to start
The weekly plan helps us get to those competitions in two ways. First I have always believed that a good amount of walking is the best way to keep a horse sound. And I'm not alone in that belief. So the weekly plan incorporates a lot of that, done over as much varied terrain as possible. Which involves the ditches on the side of the roads and occasionally trailering out to actual (Florida style) hills. Hacking out also helps with desensitizing Butterball to things that might come up at shows - we encountered two flags on a fence noisily flapping in the breeze the other day and had the opportunity to very slowly acclimate to them. He's also learned about open trash cans and now wants to shove his face deep into each one, I think because they smell like food. Culvert openings were another thing that were initially deep dark holes of doom and now are a-okay to him. Second, each week includes instruction and a jump school to keep us heading in the right direction under close guidance.
As far as my internal focus for each week or month, I liked L. Williams approach from way back when of having a specific position goal each month. It is impossible for me to focus on everything at the same time all the time, an idea JT verified at one point early on in our relationship when I asked "but what about X position fault" and she essentially told me slow down young grasshopper you can only take instruction on one or maybe two things at a time. In that vein, I was amazed at how well Butterball started going when I just focused on keeping my body still and centered and keeping him soft through the down transitions. While I'm not sure I can concretely put each weeks or months focus on the blog because it's going to change based on what is most relevant at the time, I am concretely going to resolve that if he starts doing weird things or not going well on the flat, rather than micromanaging him and picking, I'll examine my own position and aids first. Then I'll take it back to the basics of good, soft transitions and a steady tempo.
*Grand competition goals = showing up at those specific competitions and finishing on a number, but even the showing up part is sometimes out of my hands because horses are horses
