No Stirrups, No Problem (except for when you want to stop)

To everyone's surprise and delight (NOT), this week is Trainer K's most favorite week of all - the week in which she removed all stirrups from all saddles, and then has us carry on with our lessons as usual.

Pictured: a clean saddle sans stirrups

No-stirrup work is a regular part of each lesson with Trainer K, but typically it doesn't last for more than 5-10 minutes on the flat // one or two jumps.  It's definitely something that Leo and I struggle with; for one thing, stirrups against his sides freaks him out a little, and for another, I have a hard time balancing without them. I tend to balance with my hands, which turns him into a giraffe, which makes me hold on tighter, which makes him run... cycle, cycle, cycle. So, removing the stirrups completely definitely helped with the panic-about-them-touching-him part, but not at all with the holding on too much part. 

Still not sure how I got so far ahead without stirrups.

By the end of our flatwork, we were in a pretty good place - less giraffing was happening, and we had a relatively slow canter going on.  Unfortunately, jumping = excitement and joy = running fast = holding on because no stirrups = moar running. 

Zooooooom

How do you return to a maintainable speed? Circles. Which are hard to do without stirrups, because your legs have to move and then you maybe aren't balanced and your horse is galloping because he's excited and it's all happing very, very quickly. If you could hear Trainer K in the gifs, she's most likely telling me to "do things" and to "use my legs" and "half halt."

How many times can you swap a lead in a line?

Honestly, our jumps were pretty great. It was just the in-between bits that were a little rough. But we persisted. 

Attempting to rest my legs

Eventually, we graduated from straight lines to bending ones, and Trainer added in some solid fences - including the 'stone' boxes of death and a brand new, bright red rolltop / box thing that Leo had never seen before. I sat, waiting for my turn, trying to change my thoughts from "I absolutely cannot do this - it would suck even *with* my stirrups and that red jump is going to kill me" to "let's just get it over with and try not to die." 

"Gigantic" red jump

We did it! We cleared the boxes and the new jump on the first try! And at this point, I was able to bring him back to a trot in between components of the course, emphasizing to him (hopefully) that he doesn't *have* to run as fast as he can to the next jump. They'll still be there, even if he slows down. 

I left the stirrups off of my saddle, and I plan to leave them off until I can ride my horse without them, w/t/c (and possibly in our jumping lessons), and feel comfortable/not out of control/balanced. Despite the running and giraffing, I felt like this was a very productive lesson (so much confidence building for both otlf us!), and I had a huge smile on my face when we were done.