Ride every step!

Today's jump lesson at John's started like we'd been shot out of a cannon. Instead of my usual style of poking around for 30 minutes "warming up", we did our flat warm up, a cross rail at a trot, a vertical at a canter, and then moved right into an oxer with a hard left turn to a panel (I missed it the first time). From there, we did several courses, the only common element being oxers and a bendy line (oxer to vertical to vertical). What this showed was my weaknesses, and doing so many variations gave me several chances to fix them. What would usually happen would be I'd fix one, but drop another one, so while I had good fences, I don't think I ever rode an entire course without errors (error = sloppy jump on my end). For example, I'd kind of angle the oxer to vertical to vertical to make it a straight line, because I had trouble making the two bends (sitting up, half halting was key #1). When I tried to ride it bend to bend, I'd miss the strides and we'd have to chip or launch. What I needed to do was ride straight to the middle of each fence, which required me to ride very precisely and not just shoot around. But usually I'd have to not screw up on the oxer - if I did, my reactions weren't fast enough to correct in between the two. A couple of times I got it right, which felt amazing. The big lesson was to ride precisely. Second, adjust my canter - lengthen it and then half halt before the corner to the fence - then sit up tall, ride to it, and keep my hands planted so I don't mess with stuff at the last second. Like always, look ahead to the next fence, and use that outside rein (and outside leg!) to make those tight corners. I was panting the entire way through the lesson, and bright red, but afterwards, we walked the fences and they were just regular old beginner novice height, so making the course more technical really worked a number on me. Although the one line I did that Holly got to skip (thank god Shannon trained Charlie to be such a champ), had an oxer in to a 2 stride (?) to a vertical. I am pretty sure I have never in my life ridden an oxer to a vertical (it's always vertical to oxer) and it was amazing the difference it made in how I looked at the line. It was a GREAT lesson that made me wish I had more time during the week to practice so I could hopefully speed up the retraining of some of these sticky bad habits. Actually, it makes me wish I could only ride - be a working student half time for a dressage trainer and half time for a jumper. That would be pretty much the coolest life ever.