It’s been a busy time here in Austin with horse shows galore (and more coming up!) so I was happy to have a free morning where Jen of Wyvern Oaks and I could head to the barn together. Even though she’s been around Simon and heard quite a lot about Simon, she’s never actually ridden him.  It was time for that to change!  Plus, since she’s been rocking the dressage lately we took this as an opportunity to dress Simon up and see what he could do.

Even though I do prefer a nice brown fancy stitch bridle above all else, I had to admit he looked pretty good all dressed up in Jen’s snazzy tack.  Side note – can you believe him and Paddy wear virtually the same bridle size?  Does this mean Simon is really a Haflinger in disguise?

After adjusting every thing and some pre-ride bribing, it was time to head to the ring.  I didn’t take a ton of video, but compiled some clips so y’all could see the fanciness!  It starts with a loose rein warmup trot, so if you want to skip right to “dressage Simon” skip to about 20 seconds in.

Jen was very complimentary of my nerd horse creature, which I loved hearing as his usually adoring Mommy.  Plus it’s always fun to see a good rider get on your horse, especially when she’s able to make him look so fancy!

After she rode and gave me her opinion on some of our issues (which was super helpful), I hopped on!  I have to admit I’ve only sat in a dressage saddle a handful of times, and even though my stirrups felt sooooooooooo long at first… I got used to it fairly quickly.  Although I will say that when I felt like I was sitting up, I was actually still way forward and way hunchy with my shoulders.  Will have to work on that!

With the new saddle and all the fine tuning, Simon didn’t feel as much like Simon but some fancy super trained horse all of a sudden!  It was really neat to feel, and gave me a lot of inspiration to step up the game with my flatwork.

Even though we won’t be switching disciplines anytime soon, I do believe that all riding can benefit from dressage and I hope to try and take my boy to a dressage schooling show this year.  As I joked on Saturday, we could learn to love this discipline if for some reason he had to be retired from jumping one day!

Gotta love some cross discipline training with a friend.  There are definitely worse ways to spend a Saturday 🙂

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