...and Sam and I come to an agreement about how short the reins really need to be. First, I need to preface this with a description of our jumping school with Holly on Friday, since I have never ridden back-to-back lessons with Sam before, and we did a jump school followed by a dressage school on Saturday, so he was pretty pooped on Sunday, which is why I gave him the day off.
Holly wanted to just work on jumping with us, so we worked on some pretty tight turns in her arena. She wanted me to tighten up my lower leg, which I thought was fairly tight but was moving just a tad back and forth while galloping. I'm not sure how to fix that without jamming my lower leg forward, but I'll figure something out. Also, I have a tendency to sit down too much in the turns, which takes away from Sam's forward motion and tends to hollow him - I've gotten much better about not sitting on the way to the jump, but I still want to sit and compress through the turns. Holly wanted me to keep my seat light and following, and keep a little more closed hip angle all the way to the jump, and rock Sam back on his hocks a little more. When I don't sit down in the turns and let him come forward to the jump, he flows through the fence a lot better. We did a canter-in bounce over some verticals, and I got a nasty surprise as I thought I was bringing him in deep and Holly said we were taking off from too far away, which led to a very ugly and uncomfortable "out". Yikes. So, I had to really concentrate on compressing him more for the bounce and really let him get under the first one, so he could bounce out over the second. I think I need to bounce more often, as I was still uncomfortable over the "out".
I rode him for that lesson with a heart-rate monitor that day, and noticed something odd: his heartrate would get up to the 160s and 170s, but then drop very quickly down to the 80s, but his respiration was still quite fast and heavy. I asked Doc about this later, and she said that he was most likely still obstructed a bit in his lungs and we were going to try and give him the full dose of Cough-Free in the morning, instead of separating them out for the am and pm feeds. I also talked to Joe about it, and he said that it sounded like he was fit, but without any endurance, which makes more sense to me. I guess the next step in Sam's training is to up his cardio, since the strength is there because his recovery is so good. He's like me, I guess - my heartrate drops quite rapidly but there is no endurance there. The plan is to gallop him and get his heartrate up about 3 times a week, and then bring him back down, and then jack it up again, so that he can sustain longer intervals of galloping. I know this is rather late for the party as Lumber River is coming up soon, but it's better than nothing.
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