First, some very good news, Mia did not cough at all when I rode her on Tuesday!  Mia is looking chirpier and she is ignoring every previous trigger for coughing fits.  I am still just walking her to build her up gradually from her 6 weeks of sick leave, but Mia no longer acts as if she is waiting for death.  And what caused this big change?  The remedies just helped her get the phlegm out of her lungs, what REALLY helped her was that Debbie could not find any round bales to put in the paddocks.  The horses now have to content themselves with flakes of hay from square bales and whatever little grass, herbage and browse that are left.  The horses are well fleshed and sassy still, round bales in paddocks are good for boredom but not necessary for good condition, and Mia’s cough has gone away.

I was using my Crosby Wide Front saddle on Mia, with the Corrector of course.  It still does not fit, but Mia has shrunk somewhat from her younger frame, so it does not fit as badly as it used to.  Thank goodness for the Corrector!  Debbie was riding Tercel in my Stubben Siegfried (with its Corrector) just so she could get some riding time in.  She was just walking too.  Tercel was not being a perfect gentleman for her ride, he behaved but he was obviously looking for something to spook at.  Antsy, doing his marching walk, and finally he did one of his big startles.  Debbie got him back moving and I was glad it was just a startle rather than a startle-run fast.  Since we put the blinkers on all visual fear triggers are to the front and sides and he stops more than runs. 

During our rides on Tuesday, I told Debbie I wanted to work on the canter on Tilly when it got cooler.  Tilly is an experienced lesson horse for shaky riders and I figured it would be a good idea to take advantage of this opportunity.  Well, I got out to the stable on Wednesday all ready for another exciting ride on Tercel, but Debbie decided that it would be good for me to go ahead and ride Tilly and try to canter.  My Stubben (and the Corrector) worked perfectly fine on Tilly when I rode her before so that was no problem.  Debbie insisted that I use the Light Rider bitless bridle (like the one on Mia in my avatar photo); she told me that Tilly had been diving her head down when the beginners were trying to learn contact.  Debbie had gone into her tack room looking for a solution, found the Light Rider bitless bridle, put it on Tilly, and Tilly stopped plunging her head down.  Since Tilly is thirty years old, her mouth and teeth are changing and I guess the bit just stopped feeling comfortable in her mouth.  Tilly keeps good contact with the Light Rider bitless and my hands got the proper “feel” when we walked on contact.  

Debbie decided I should try a canter before it got too hot and I got too tired.  Tilly knows how to pick up a canter from a walk, which is good for me because I can stay sitting in the saddle while she picks up the canter.  I was trying to do three things at once, keeping Tilly from just speeding up her walk, using my inside leg for impulsion, and my outside leg as the canter signal.  Well, I messed up.  We were aiming for the right lead since that is Tilly’s favorite lead, but as I was trying to coordinate my legs my right leg stayed clamped against Tilly’s side, and when I used my left leg to signal the canter Tilly took my confusion of aids and gave me what she thought I wanted, a counter canter on the left lead.  My fault entirely.

One of my problems was that I had put my right side double offset Prussian sided stirrup on wrong, so I had no feeling of stability with my right leg--I think that was what lead to me clenching it against her side.  My other problem is that my body has forgotten how to “kick” a leg aid without losing my lower leg security.  As I told Debbie I was NOT using this as an excuse as to why I cannot canter, this is just a problem of mine that I have to work through.  I want to canter again, but it has been so long since I cantered regularly that I lost my ability to coordinate my aids properly, and I am going to have to re-grow the proper nerves so I can do a proper canter signal again.  I will have to have many lessons on Tilly until I can get my act together and get my lower legs to give the proper aids for the canter.  On the plus side I had no problems sitting Tilly’s canter, something I had not been able to do for years on the Arabs.  I need to canter regularly until I can do it properly, like I did decades ago before my MS got really bad.  It is sort of discouraging, I cantered for decades without any problems, but now I am just like a beginner.

Today I got to ride Cider.  Yesterday I had asked Shannon if I could use my dressage saddle on Cider (with the Corrector, of course.)  My dressage saddle is the most hoop-treed saddle I have; I rode Cider with it before I got my EZ-Fit treeless saddle.  I have gotten so tired of Cider managing to get the saddle off to the right since it was hard for me to re-center the saddle since the lining of the EZ-fit saddle is a non-slip material on a non-slip pad (and yet the saddle managed to slip to the right without much problem.)  I wanted to get out of the frustrating discussions Cider and I have been having when I rode her.  I put a pair of the double offset Prussian sided stirrups on my dressage saddle since I need every bit of security I can get.  My stirrup leathers were WAY too short when I mounted, so I ended up lengthening one three holes and the other one three and a half holes (I have punched extra half holes in my stirrup leathers) before I felt balanced in the saddle.

Cider did not mind me changing my saddle at all.  She was trained as an English horse, and while she will accept a more Western type saddle, she still thinks of herself as a proper English horse.  She brightened up, moved more vigorously at the walk (I did not have to use my leg to keep her going) and she gladly sprang into a good, impulsive trot.  I still had some problems keeping the saddle centered, but it was not as much of a problem as with the treeless saddle and I was able to re-center the saddle easily.  Shannon told me that Cider perked up and looked “prouder” and happier being ridden in my dressage saddle.  I still had some problems with straightness but Cider did not go as far as turning herself into a pretzel.  I felt really good, my legs were not floating on air, the saddle has a “pocket” for my knee, and I felt a lot more secure.

My present set up, with the dressage saddle, will have to continue until I save up enough money for a proper hunt seat saddle for her, with a tree that conforms to the conformation of her back.  I had planned on saving my money these past two years to get her one, but real life interfered big time, with thousands of dollars of extra expenses we had to cover.  Maybe next year I will be able to start saving money again.  Until then I am SO GLAD I bought my Corrector pads, these pads do seem to make imperfectly fitting saddles more acceptable to the horses.  Since I only ride these horses once a week for 30 minutes at a time at slower gaits, we manage to muddle through without my saddles hurting their backs.

It has been challenging for me to find my double offset Prussian sided stirrups.  First I found a pair of Never Rust double offset Prussian sided stirrups on E-bay and that made me happy for a while.  But I have three English saddles (two jumping and one dressage) so I went back on E-bay to see if I could find more pairs.  What I found first was a set of THREE double offset Never Rust Prussian sided stirrups for sale, so I got them and out of them I got a pair of stirrups that matched, leaving me with a left side stirrup all by itself.  Then I found, on E-bay, ONE right sided double offset stirrup and I got it, and while it did not match my lonely left stirrup perfectly it was good enough to make up a third pair.  So last night I put this last pair on my dressage saddle for my ride on Cider today.  Now I have to re-learn how to relax my leg muscles so I can let my weight sink down into the stirrups, and I have to relax my inside leg muscles more to get the full effect of the double offset stirrups. 

Now I am waiting for a pair of Eldonian stainless steel stirrups, from the E-Bay pictures they LOOK like they are double offset, but I will not know for sure until they get here next week.  I really wish that a stirrup manufacturer would make these stirrups again in stainless steel so I could just order them out of a catalog instead of haunting E-Bay looking at countless pictures of stirrups hoping to find what I want.  I had no idea of how hard it can be to get an accurate, undistorted photo of double offset stirrups!

It took me several tries to get my double offset stirrups on the saddles correctly.  As I related above I had messed up putting them on one saddle, the day I was putting them on was HOT (I don’t have air-conditioning in my house right now) and I just could not do the spatial visualization needed to get them on right.  I do have them on properly now, when the stirrups are on the saddle the short branch of the stirrup goes to the front and the lowest part of the foot bed goes to the outside.  That way, when my feet are in the stirrups, my big toe is lower than my little toe and my heels go down properly.  Now I just have to relax my ankle muscles and get used to them again.  

Have a great ride!

Jackie Cochran