Sweat the small technical details - or the foreign language issue

Gotta love Michigan – just as I was warming up Saumur yesterday the heavens opened with snow and sleet pelting down very hard. Sandy and Megan rushed out to get the horses in from the pastures, so I pulled off Saumur’s tack and stuck him back in his stall to help. When everybody was safely inside I got Saumur ready again, all the while wondering if all that flurry of activity and the still pelting sleet on the indoor roof shook him up enough to ‘be on the lookout’, aka ready to spook. He was absolutely fine, another big step for us!

We worked on controlling the shoulders, 10m circles, haunches in, keeping slowing him down on the outside shoulder. That lead to half-pass. Especially going to the left Saumur has a tendency of ‘falling’ to the wall, so I really had to focus on keeping the bend to the left and slowing him down on the right. We actually were able to the Grand Prix half-pass tour on the short diagonal both ways.

The we moved to turns on the haunches, in preparation for the pirouettes. Again, shoulder control is key. If I can control his shoulders, the rest comes easily (or so Sandy says). Saumur is such a smart boy, when we moved into canter I had my outside leg a bit too far back and he immediately brought his haunches is in preparation for canter pirouettes. Sandy has been schooling them with him and it really teaches me that I need to fine tune my aids to different level.

It reminded me of a conversation we had not too long ago, on how I am switching constantly between at least three languages, and sometimes it gets a bit tiring. So for Saumur it is a similar issue – while maybe Sandy and I are not speaking completely different languages to him (in the form of our aids), my aids equate more to a “lower class accent”. I compare it with Sandy speaking Oxford English compared to my Cockney slang. While the goal of getting to Sandy’s standard is pretty lofty, at least I can strive to make it easier for Saumur by speaking regular English (albeit with an ever-present German-French accent).