We jump the jumps

I was lucky enough to snag the arena Friday night for some riding time solo, and doubly lucky that the Fiancé was willing to come with and be a jump crew/videographer!  Since I'm still slowly introducing Koda back to the wonderful world of jumping, I set up a simple grid of crossrail-stride-vertical-stride-oxer.  In our arena, it's a bit tight, but it worked for us.

Cross rail only

I started off slowly, just building it up as we go like my old instructor showed us back in Nova Scotia.  My placement was ok for the poles, but as the jumps went up, Fiancé had to move my oxer out a foot, making our corner even tighter.

Cross rail and vertical

Koda was SUPER up about jumping, it was kind of funny because he'll usually just truck around and get down to business, but when the jumps are out and he's lined up for them, the ears are pricked forward and he takes me through :)

Cross rail, vertical, and oxer

I found it really cool that he was offering to carry himself properly before we came to the grid line, shaping himself up and just having fun with it.  After the line, I tried to either put in a halt (not fully built grid) or a circle or something without tailing off at the end as if we were just doing a triple combination and continuing our course.

I love my horse

The way he was jumping made me extermely comfortable in the tack.  As some of you guys know, I've had issues with oxers/wide jumps from last year.  Darn box type things on cross country!  The goal this year is to get over that by jumping larger boxy oxers in the arena so that on xc, they'll seem puny.  Which they will be.  Now, I've only really schooled around 2'3" to 2'6" by myself, and up to 2'9"ish in lessons before.  Last night, Fiancé set the heights, and I didn't realize it but once I got off and looked at the oxer, the back rail was set at 2'9"!

And it felt like NOTHING!

Case and point - the height doesn't bother Koda, I just need to get out of my head and do it

A few days ago I read a post by Denny Emerson (Tamarack Hill Farms) that is going to be a bit of focus for me this year with Koda.  The essence of it was if you stick around a certain limit, you'll start feeling like that's your max and you can't go further, and if you don't push the envelope a bit, you're going to get stuck:

Whatever you are doing, see if you can push it a little. 

If you aren`t subsequently dead, push a little more. 

Don`t be totally stupid, but be a little stupid.  

A little stupid`s not a bad thing