Jazz the Jigsaw

I was just explaining to Mary Lou that Jazz is a jigsaw and we are learning where to put the pieces. And also that he appears to be a 2,000 piece jigsaw and we have so far only managed to get all the ones with a straight edge and make the frame :-) And of course it remains to be seen how complicated the picture is - with our luck every piece will be the same colour!!

So - the story got even more complicated today. His energy levels have remained high, so that's good news for the 3,000 calories of oil he's eating every day. Using the technique we found yesterday, he jumped the warm up cross pole and straight bar with no problems. He stopped once at the warm up spread and then did it nicely. I began to be able to feel really easily whether he was "on" the fence or not.

Let me see if I can explain this so that James could understand. Imagine a bowling ball in a rack made of two bars, so it can roll up and down in the rack, like they have in a bowling alley. Jazz has that rack running from his chest to his loins, with a bowling ball on it. If the ball is in front of me, he is going to jump the fence. If the ball is behind me, he doesn't want to and, if made to, will do it badly. Jazz can roll the ball wherever he wants it. Got that?

Right, so he has warmed up well and we have jumped a circuit of four fences really well. Super. At that point Jazz starts to wait for me to tell him that I want him to jump. So now I have a super-fine judgement to make. If I push him at the fence when he is not ready, he will jump badly or refuse. If he is waiting for me to tell him to jump and I don't, he will refuse. Oh blimey, it's so difficult in the split second that you have to decide what action is the right one.

So, OK, we have reached a point where I am making it clear he should jump without pushing him out of his comfort zone. And then he throws another bit into the mix!!! He gets bored. Yes, bored. He says "I've done these already, I see no point in doing any more". The bowling ball keeps on and on rolling back behind me. I put it forward, he pushes it back again.

So now I have to tell him that he has to jump even if he's bored, but without unbalancing him, letting him rush, or pushing him out of his comfort zone. Simple huh?

We managed it. We learnt an awful lot, both of us. We are, I think, now definitely on the verge of a breakthrough, because the quality of his jumping was mostly fantastic.

This is so good for me. For thirty years, just because they were cheap, I've been buying badly behaved and/or unskilled horses which other people couldn't manage. I didn't used to ride well, but by strength of mind I sorted out every horse that came my way and got them all jumping and behaving in a civilised fashion. After enough time of that you begin to think you pretty much know the answers. And then you go up a notch in the quality of horse you buy, and along comes Jazz. He is quite simply the most complex horse I've ever met. He's not bad, he's not even terribly naughty, but he has such a strong mind! The judgement needed to work out how to get him to perform is so finely balanced (even when you know what it should be, which we still don't half the time :-). Then the physical skill required to put it in to practice (to urge him forward, but not too forward, for example) requires a level of riding that is new to me. With Jazz, I'm learning all the time, and I love it.

Then there's Zip. What a sweet boy. We did our first loading lesson today. He loaded. Yup, that's it, he loaded. Oh OK, there was a few minutes of stepping onto the ramp with the front feet and back off again, but it's hardly worth reporting. After less than five minutes he was inside the lorry with all four feet and went back on again after getting off. Job done!

He's also now totally unconcerned at being left alone. And Jazz is loading and travelling like a seasoned campaigner. I've cancelled my Bradwall entry for the last weekend in April and we'll make a judgement before the end of next week whether to go for the one at the place where we go training towards the end of June.

C.