Patience

I am very impatient.  I don't like to wait, and although I understand that learning to do anything, not just riding, is about building the skills to accomplish your goals, it's hard for me to see that end goal.  I want to jump, and unfortunately I can tell by my (lack of) progress that I will not be jumping any time soon.

When I first started riding again about a year ago, I made the goal for myself that I would learn to jump at least tiny crossrails by this summer.  After a couple months of getting back into the swing of things, I bought an English saddle (the first real time I even rode English) and started leasing a horse. The horse I was leasing was a perfect horse at the time to learn to ride English because he was actually trained Western Pleasure and so he didn't have the kind of speed that I feared would be my undoing.  That being said, Hollywood (the horse's name) wasn't exactly the right horse for me at the time - or for anyone else - and my barn owner ended up retiring him.  He was getting old and cranky, and he was starting to become a problem with many of the riders, including me.

Hollywood and I

It wasn't too long after that that I decided to buy a horse.  When Walker arrived, it took me so long to get used to him (since he was so different from anything I had ever ridden), that I pretty much switched to riding him Western full time.  Walker is a Western horse through and through, and since I'm most comfortable in a Western saddle, I feel like I truly am able to work with him (read: fight with him) when I'm riding in my Western saddle.

Walker - my Western pony :)

Even though I've begun adding an English saddle back into my routine, I simply do not have the balance or the control of my horse to even consider jumping.    Although I don't want to rush things and risk making things worse, I simply just want to trot a tiny crossrail - not lope a course of jumps at 2'9 (something equally outside both of our abilities).

Because Winter is so harsh here and soon we will be forced to return to our tiny indoor arena (tiny being the most important word there), my chances to get control of Walker in time to even do a miniscule jump are pretty slim.  Next summer, I will be moving to a new barn, and so I imagine that the time it takes us to get settled in with a new trainer/instructor will take up the time we could be learning to jump.

I love Walker and I love the journey that we are going on together, but sometimes my life just gets in the way.  I have a pretty hectic schedule, and I wish I had the money and the time to devote entirely to our training so that we could make these dreams come true.