Spring’s come so early this year! Two weeks ago I took Poe out on the road for the first time. He was fantastic: relaxed but engaged, happy to be out, just marching along. Last week we hit the back field. It’s gorgeous out there, all green grass and birdsong. I think that’s a month and a half, maybe two months earlier than we were out there last year. It’s totally dry, even all the low spots that were boggy forever a year ago. He was really lovely, even a little lazy, and went into the water jump straight away. GOOD PONY.

This past Sunday was the start of lock-in for the pasture horses, which sadly means he’s confined to the front two paddocks for at least two weeks while the pasture grass gets a chance to develop. The good news is we’ve had very little rain (knock on wood) so it’s not the mud pit it was last year. The bad news is there’s really not enough room to run and everyone’s been squabbling at the round bale, so every day I’m discovering some new gash. Play nice, boys!

I rode him inside on Monday to try a new dressage saddle(!!). I’ve been talking FOREVER about taking the plunge and getting one. Flatwork in my jumping saddle is honestly a bit torturous. The twist is so narrow that it tends to chafe. NOT GOOD. It also sticks me in a bit of a chair seat, and I just do a lot more fighting with it than I should. I have a very hard time not bracing against it in my downwards transitions, etc. The more I have been really paying attention with a thought toward a new dressage saddle, the more I’ve started wondering if I should be looking for a new jumping saddle as well…

It’s my habit before any major purchase to research, research, research. I’ve done a lot of reading about saddles and fitting and the woes, OH THE WOES, of saddle shopping — but the underlying theme seems to be that you just have to try a lot of saddles. Sit in every different brand and type that you can. The problem is it’s not just effortless to sit in a billion different saddles. I’ve put out some feelers, mentioned to lots of people at my barn that I’m looking for a dressage saddle — and a few people have said in passing that I can try theirs, but the offers never materialize into actual saddles that I can put on my horse and put my butt in. There are lots of online tack shops that will send out demos — to the tune of $40-50 in shipping each direction. The hassle of all of this is compounded by the fact that I haven’t really ridden in a dressage saddle before, so not only do I have no clue what will fit my horse, I have no clue what will fit me. I could easily spend half my saddle budget shipping trial saddles back and forth.

So, a couple weeks ago I coughed up the dough to have the County rep out to fit His Poeness. County keeps its prices a bit of a mystery (and the range of prices I found on used Countys was crazy wide), so I knew that they were expensive but not HOW expensive. The rep has a good reputation in my area, though, and I was up front with her about my budget when I contacted her. I basically said that I didn’t know how much her saddles cost, but I was pretty sure they were out of my budget, and she said she’d leave me more than enough information to help me find something that would work, whether it was a County or something else.

The good news: Poe is very easy to fit. There is nothing funky about his back or shoulders or withers and he is not a princess. Right now he is a perfect M in a County, standard flap. He fits well in their flat panels. Because he’s just 6 (well, nearly), a MW and using some additional padding for now seems like a very smart choice — something he could grow into. The bad news? The model I felt most comfortable in: $5,000. HA. Hahaha. Ha. That is, for some perspective, about what I paid for the horse, and five times the cost of my other saddle. It does not, if you were wondering, also do laundry or give massages.

So I was a step ahead of where I began. I know to look for MW, and a 17.5″ (maybe 18″) seat. Lo! Behold! Right at my barn, someone selling a MW 17.5″ County Competitor, excellent condition. So I tried it on Monday. We both stood staring at it on him, a bit bewildered. I made the motions I’d seen the saddle fitter make. The tree seems to fit his shoulder well. Concerningly, the back of the panel sweeps up off his back in the last few inches. I don’t know what that means, exactly. Is it something that can be fixed with flocking? Padding? Is it just designed that way? So I stuck it in the back of my mind and girthed up to ride in it. And it felt great! I loved it, especially at the canter. Oh the canter! I felt so with him, so stable. The new Competitors I’d tried when the rep was out seemed to hit my seatbones funny, like they were having a fight with the saddle’s tree. I couldn’t tell if that was just because I hadn’t quite found the sweet spot (your seat in a dressage saddle is WAY different from your seat in a jumping saddle — as my inner thighs reminded me the entire day after the test rides), or because it was the wrong shape for me, or — ? (Should saddles be such a mystery?) This Competitor felt fantastic. No tree prodding at me. So I went home and emailed the rep for her opinion on the fit of new vs old, and I did some more reading.

More sad news: the older models were made with more banana shaped panels (vs the flat panels they now use), which can work well for horses with sway or j-shaped backs, but can otherwise cause rocking. So comfy for me though! I was already lined up to try it in my lesson tonight, so I’m going to ride in it again, and check for rocking, and see what my instructor thinks. I asked the rep if the banana shape was something that could be fixed/altered/mitigated through reflocking, but haven’t heard back. Obviously I am not going to spend all this money on something that doesn’t fit both of us, but it would be really nice if the perfect thing could just land in my lap. I want my comfy dressage miracle!

This post is monstrously long already (must update more often), but quickly — I took him in the back field again on Tuesday. I hemmed and hawed a little about it before going because of the lock-in thing (after my VERY forward dressage ride on Monday I turned him loose in the arena and he ran around like a mad man — even threw in a buck, which he never does), but it was SO NICE out that I went. Probably a mistake since we got nothing done. He was VERY excited. About a minute after we got out there, the horses in the farm behind ours (separated by a line of trees) went galloping in for dinner, and it was all over. I couldn’t get his brain back for more than a moment at a time, and he felt like a powder keg. We walked and walked, changing direction over and over, asking for this bend, that bend, this bend, that bend. It was boring and stressful and not what I wanted to be doing — but you have to ride the horse you have. I always get so in my head in these moments, paralyzed by the thought that I should be doing something else to address this mess. Maybe I should be pushing him on? Let him run it out? I’m afraid if I let him go in those moments we will lose all steering and brakes, and may become a bolting bucking mess. Even though he’s never bucked, and never actually bolted. He has taken off out there a few times, just lost his fool mind and tried to charge off in his own direction. I feel like I should stop that behavior before it starts by not letting him trot when he’s being an idiot. But if I don’t give him a chance to misbehave I can’t correct the misbehavior? But I’m a chicken and I just want him to not misbehave in the first place. BAH. Anyway — we ended up trotting a bit out of view of that field, and through the water (good pony), and I was able to get two short canters out of him. He was difficult to bring back after the canter, though, and kept offering to canter all on his own, so we called it a day after only 30 minutes. I’d really wanted to bring him back there for a long, long trot and some nice cantering to help him get out all that excess energy, and I feel like I failed miserably in that goal. Que sera…

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