Posting The Trot, You’d Think I’d Know How To Do That By Now

Training Journal

If you’re riding a horse, you’ve already won.

 
My groundcrew pointed out that I lean forward when I post the trot. Up & forward. Up & forward. Like a metronome. So I have been working on this. A good shut-down exercise. Hard for the rider; low-key for the horse.
 

 
When the ideal rider posts, the hips move up and forward. The shoulder does the same.
 

 
When I post, the point of my shoulder describes a longer arc than the point of my hip does. I don’t collapse down, so much as lean forward as I rise. While I have been know to slump my shoulders on occasion [Dueling Disciplines], that is not the problem here.

We can argue about the exact arc the pelvis should make. The point is 1) the motion of the hip and the shoulder should match. 2) Mine don’t. The result is that I end up pitched forward at the top of the post.

I do this for two reasons.

One. It is part of my execrable habit of leaning forward, pitching the reins, and thinking ‘Go, horsie, go.’ I do this riding [Being Muddled] and driving [Spontaneous Showing].

Two. Lurking in my hindbrain is the theory that hovering over the shoulder is somehow “kinder” to the horse. The habit is even worse at the canter. Getting rid of this idea is harder than uprooting kudzu.

To fix this, people yell at me to get my shoulders back. They are not wrong. Unfortunately, I react to this instruction by forcing my shoulder blades together. This doesn’t work. It is an untenable position that does not address the underlying problem. The rot sets in at the hip joint.

Rodney is hyper-sensitive to everything that happens on his back. His knobs are on 11. Always. When I start flinging my shoulders about, he either picks up a canter or – if he’s in a mood – gets pissy.

So, I’m learning how to post the trot.

Process notes. Apologies if I have posted this before. I remember having this discussion with Coach Courtney. (Clearly, I have not fixed the problem.) I remember thinking it would make a good theory post. Before I started this post, I searched on the words arc, shoulder, and posting. Nothing came up. So, I assumed I had not posted this before. Or I did, can’t find, and forgot. Again [Blogging: Not Remembering].

Can I point out how confusing it is to write about posting, as in the blog, at the same time as writing about posting, as in the trot? I need more words.

Roberto preparing to zoom around the ring. [Being Muddled]

Update, Tuesday evening: Tooth getting an onlay. Protection procedures outstanding. More on Friday.

Stay safe. Stay sane.
Katherine Walcott

Mood On Monday, Venturing Out

Thoughts

 
I hold to my policy of not editorilaizing on current events. I have nothing to add, except my outrage, which solves nothing and helps no one. When you bite into a cupcake, you don’t want Hollandaise sauce. “So, this is me, writing about horses, being a cupcake.” [Speaking Out]
~~~
Or not writing about horses, as the day would have it.

Dentist appointment tomorrow. Me, not horses. Medical providers are opening on a limited basis. My fractured tooth qualifies [Inconveniences]. This will be my first extended interaction with strangers since the pandemic got to my state.

I have not talked to a stranger for more than the length of a check-out transaction in over two months. Even those occasions are rare. When we have essential tasks, husband goes in the store. Either they are his errands or – sadly – people will respect his space more than mine.

I’m not nervous. Covid 19 is serious; it’s not anthrax. To the best of my understanding, passing contact with a tiny amount of virus particles will not doom me. I’m going into a medical environment. They will be better at this than I am. Of all medical types, a dental office will be the most up-to-date on respiratory disease transmission. They spend their lives getting up in a person’s grill and not getting sick.

I’m not nervous. I am concerned. Low-risk is not no risk. Young, perfectly healthy people can get Covid19 and die from it. I may be healthy but I’m teetering on the edge of when they say you should consider locking yourself in a tower.

I’m not nervous. I do have questions. I plan on wearing a mask and staying away from people. Will people stay away from me? Will I forget myself and commit stupid, contamination-prone actions? These are not habits I am used to. What will the world be like between the safety of my truck and the dental office? How do I manage the elevator? What if I go in first and people crowd in? Should I look for the stairs?

I live in a … um … mask-optional area. Some stores are all about protecting employees and customers: masks, acrylic barriers, regulated lines. Other stores act as if the virus is over, or never happened in the first place. No protests. No eye-rolling if you do wear a mask. Spotty compliance.

Mind you, data from my direct experience is limited, as I said. Most of this is based on reports from the household’s ambassador to the outside world and my surveys of parking lots while I wait.

Want to give props to folks doing it right. Little Professor, a local bookstore, has made a huge effort. I was picking up an order I made weeks earlier, back when everyone was yipping about placing orders to support local businesses. They had their double doors wide open, which eliminated the need to touch the door handles. This was before research was telling us about the advantages of fresh air and ventilation, so that was a happy bonus. They completely rearranged their interior by heaving bookshelves around and removing their center island. Traffic flow was wide open and I could see every person in the store in order to avoid them, had I wished to browse. The small check-out table was easy for both customer and employee to step back from. They clearly put thought into their new arrangement. Of course, masks on all employees. Good job. Here’s a cookie.

I say I’m not nervous now. We’ll see how exhausted I am tomorrow evening when I get home from my big adventure.

Update, Tuesday evening: Tooth getting an onlay. Protection procedures outstanding. More on Friday.

Stay safe. Stay sane.
Katherine Walcott

In Closing, Color Contrast

Lettering & Graphic Design

 

 
A logo exercise on Sunday is my graphic design equivalent of the monthly state of the blog on Saturday.

Process Notes.The 16 letters stacked up reminded me of the HTMl 16 colors contrast chart, only not the HTML colors again. Tweaked the secondary colors to my idea of the opposites of yellow, blue, red. Checkerboard colors and 16 different fonts sounded good in my head. Too much confusion. The eye needs something to follow. Program fonts Arial bold & Century Schoolbook L bold. Drawing acquired fuzziness in exporting from Inkscape to GIMP. Fixed what I could figure out, declared the remainder to be a computer communication issue beyond my capacity, and moved on. Final question, If any color is possible, why can’t I get a decent green?

Stay safe. Stay sane.
Katherine Walcott

Blogging In A Time Of Crisis

Blogging About Blogging

 
Monthly State of the Blog [Archives].
~~~
We can wonder about the worth of the endeavor, given the state of the world. I have come down on the side of continuing, for good or ill.

Obsessing About The Blog
I have been obsessed with the blog since lock-down began. Well, I’ve always been a bit obsessed. You can’t have a daily blog for eight years without a touch of obsession. Lately, it has increased.

I have a pleasant fantasy that the blog takes me an hour a day, Monday through Friday. That was not true before. It’s not even close now.

I often get out ahead of skis, working on posts for the following week. Does this mean I use the free time for gainful activity? Not in the slightest. Let’s say Monday arrives with posts written and scheduled through Thursday. Do I go off to attack the endless to-do list that is house and barn ownership? Nope. I spend twice as long on posts for the weekend.

Is this a good use of a large part of my day? No idea. I’m not sure how to weigh merit. I am sure that I don’t have the energy for philosophical debate. I’m simply doing what holds my attention at the moment.

After the firestorm of motivation that is the blog, I do nothing. Limited housework. No work marketing, no organizing of my life, no hobbies that loom patiently in the corner of the living room. I often can’t muster the concentration to read. I’ll pick up a book, look at a few pages, wander off.

So that’s my schedule: blog, bike for exercise, horses, stare into space. Even the horse activity is low key. If we had the right horses and access, I’ll be strolling down the trail as often as possible. As is, there’s a lot of practicing our statue maneuver or meandering about the ring.

Why this devotion to the blog? A call to entertain? A diversion? A time sink? A chance to figure out where my own head is at? All of the above? No idea. If you’ll excuse me, I need to get busy finishing the rest of this post.

Obsessing, But Not Remembering
One the things I have been obsessing about is what a friend calls “evergreens.” Posts not connected to a particular time or place that can held in reserve and used as needed [Green Horses].

I have finished my current list of evergreens. Now, I have 8 in reserve: 2 text, 6 image, 2 Sunday. Some, I definitely want to use at some point, mostly those which people have been kind enough to send me. Other posts may never see the light of day, unless I get truly desperate. This much emergency rations makes me a little nervous. As if having back-up will call into existence a reason for needing it. I am trying to see it as a gift to my future self, and/or to remember that being called away could be a good thing, as when I had to drop everything to get Milton in Kentucky [Delay Of Game, Shipping].

The last one on my evergreen to-do list was a life hack about a safety can opener, on the theory that horse people have cats and dogs. This one took a while. I already had the text, from an email recommending one to a friend. I needed better photos. I wanted to get the unit after it had been cleaned in the dishwasher but before it was used for dinner. It took a while for conditions to line up. Finally, I achieved lovely pictures of the sparkling clean can opener in golden-hour light. Magnifco.

Then, my phone died. Before I had downloaded the photos.

A few days later, I wondered if perhaps I had emailed them to my desktop and forgot.

I searched.

I found the a notification for a post from 2014, [Life Hacks: Can Opener].

I have no memory of this.

All this time. All this effort. Not the faintest clue that I had done this before.

Would I have remembered had the world not been off kilter? Or have I written more blog posts than my recall buffer can handle?

Obsessing, But Not About Horses
Weekends have been off topic for a while [Fiction]. Lately, I have added posts about my exercise choices [Will Walk For Bling], about my thoughts on life [Minor Inconveniences], even my mailing habits [If We Can’t Travel, At Least Our Postcards Can]. Some weeks are more off-topic than on.

I can’t bring myself to care.

I’m typing what I want to type. Maybe because of the pandemic, maybe because I am slowly – or not so slowly – turning into a curmudgeon.

Partly, a dearth of gripping content. I talked about this before [Meanwhile]. Slow, steady progress is not the stuff of legend. We walked. Rodney was relaxed. Yay. Lack of progress is even less riveting. Milton and I continue to circle each other warily. Boo.

Partly, I have gone completely off the rails on driving traffic to the blog. I’ve stopped posting to blog Instagram and Facebook accounts. Not splitting my focus [Contests]. Triaging efforts that were not wildly, or even mildly, successful. Stop trying to entice people to read the blog. I have lost all grip on targeted audience engagement. I didn’t do much before [Attitude Check]. Even less so now.

You found it. Maybe other folks will. Awesome. Meanwhile, I need to come up with an idea for next Friday.

Stay safe. Stay sane.
Katherine Walcott

If We Can’t Travel, At Least Our Postcards Can

Random Images

The world is vast & weird.

 

 
Have restarted Postcrossing, wherein I send/receive postcards from randomly-assigned strangers around the world [Latest Batch of Postcrossing, October 2016]. Have indicated a mild preference (they frown on direct requests) for horse-related cards to use as blog posts. Solved my postcard supply problem [PostUNcrossing] via the Yellowhammer Creative online shop.
#stayhome
#shoplocal
#supportsmallbusiness

YHC: Postcard Set, Magic City Landmarks
4″x6″postcards, French cover stock
Sloss Furnaces [An HTML Color Factory]
Lyric Theater
Birmingham Zoo [Life Is A Zoo]
Railroad Park
Alabama Theater (in LEGO bricks, not mine, a fellow LUG member [The Upside of Negativity])
Rotary Trail

Stay safe. Stay sane.
Katherine Walcott

Ride Away With Me, Virtually

Fit To Ride

 
Join us!

In a burst of optimism, I signed up for the The Conqueror Virtual Challenges: Route 66. A virtual challenge allows you to post your distance and track your progress on the map. This one goes along Route 66, of song and story, from Chicago to Los Angeles, a distance of 2280 miles. [Biking Virtually, Route 66]

Let me repeat that, 2280 miles.

I ride 10 miles a day, at best.

What was I thinking?

If I ride at my maximum every day without a break, that’s over seven months. As I type this, it’s raining, so no mileage for me today.

To speed the process and have some fun, I have teamed up with friends. (Waves hi!) We finally hauled ourselves out of Illinois. We still have seven states to go, five of them over 300 miles. Even collectively, this is going to take a while.

Join us!

On one hand, so it’s slow. What else I’m gonna do with my time? I bike along. I clock up the miles. I/we will get there eventually.

OTOH, life is more fun as a party. We need several fighters, a cleric, at least two magic users … no, wait, wrong kind of party.

Come join us. Seriously. Would love to have more folks. I dunno about you, but I could stand to have more people in my life right now, even if they are digital.

Requirements. Sign up with My Virtual Mission. You will have to pay to play. Approx $35 for a medal. More for medal & shirt. In return, the program logs our mileage, tracks our progress, and sends us medals when the team finishes. International shipping from US available. Doesn’t seem to cost extra, but I would not swear to that.

Mileage can be anything from Aerobic dancing class to Yoga. MVM has a mileage converter for 105 activities, including housework.

If you are interested, go ahead and start the challenge as an individual. Then, leave a comment below. We’ll figure a way to get in touch to give you the team code. At the moment, my dead phone is messing with access to my email accounts. We’ll figure out contact somehow. Update. New phone = access to email, virtual brushbox@gmail.com.

Open to friends & friends I haven’t met yet. Come walk, ride, or whatever with us.

Medal waiting for you at the end.

Virtual Exercise Posts
[Virtual Bling] Intro
[Come Away With Me, Virtually] Widget Announcement
[Biking Virtually, Inca Trail] Completed, post pending
[Biking Virtually, New Zealand] Completed, post pending
[Biking Virtually, Route 66] Where we are now

Stay safe. Stay sane.
Katherine Walcott

Turn ‘Em On

Adventures in Standardbreds

Enjoy the ride drive.

 
Continuing my tour of the breed barn [Western Counterfactual].

I have no experience with Standardbreds. Be fun to try. We’ve thought it would be interesting to remake an ex-trotter as a driving horse. Can it be done? I don’t see why not. Could we do it? Who knows. International Museum of the Horse: Standardbred

I do know that it’s not a popular breed in the sport driving world. Dunno why. You’d think a breed that was trained to trot would be all over Combined Driving. Nope. The discipline is dominated by warmbloods, particularly Dutch Harness Horses, much the same way riding is dominated by warmbloods to the detriment of the Thoroughbred [Get Off My Lawn, And Take Your Warmblood With You].

One question people have about Standardbreds is if they can be taught to canter. Well, one does not canter in CDE dressage until the upper levels. One can canter on marathon in Prelim, but it is not mandatory. So, that’s two levels to mess with before cantering is required. Imagine the endurance.

Standardbreds are big at Saddlebred shows. They are the breed used in Road Horse classes. The horses show three speeds at the trot: jog, road gait, & full speed. Road Horses also show under saddle. I almost had a chance to ride one. Unfortunately, the window of opportunity was before my class. No one wanted to watch me equitate after blasting around the ring as fast as possible. They seemed to feel I would lack poise. Moi?

Anyway.

Standardbreds. Any experience with, in general or in CDE driving?

Stay safe. Stay sane.
Katherine Walcott