The Evolutioin of my "Eye" Part 1

I went through many years of jumping, just cantering at the fences. I didn't know what or how to see a distance, or that it was something I could even do. Some people believe you should see your distance and help get the horse to the correct distance so the horse has the best ability to jump the fence. Others believe you should get a good canter and let the horse figure out the distance. Then there are those that tell you to just canter down without worrying about the canter or the distance.

Now that I can (usually haha) see my distance, I wouldn't want to jump any other way. I find it gives me great confidence to know when I am three or four strides out that the distance is going to work, or if it doesn't that I have time to change the canter to make it work. This year I am becoming very confident at seeing my distance four strides out, it has taken me a very long time to reach this point. There were many learning curves along the way for me, my eye has definitely evolved over the last several years. I'm going to break this up into a few different blogs, they will be about the different turning points while developing my eye.

This first part is about starting to recognize what three strides looks like.

Denny was very adamant about learning to see your distance. He had told me that in the past people told him it wasn't something you could teach, you either had an eye or you didn't. He learned to see a distance and now teaches all of his students how to. So I began learning about seeing a distance by cantering a pole on the ground. When I thought I was three strides out Denny would have me say 3, 2, 1. Sometimes I started too soon, sometimes I started too late but it started to give me some sense of what three strides looked like. Denny is also a great believer in what he calls "the hoof-print game." You pick a hoof-print, a leaf, a stick, anything and you try and see three strides to that. Now when I started this I got it right every time yet when I jumped a fence I would mess up! I then realized I was picking a hoof-print three strides in front of me, I wasn't looking far enough ahead and then riding the canter. Once I figured that out the "game" became very useful. I still think you need to test yourself over poles because you can cheat a little with the hoof-prints and just "sort of" get it right without something there to "jump" over.

So I started to recognize what three strides looked like over poles and hoof-prints and took this to actual jumps. It was slightly different for me because there was a certain amount of nerves when actually jumping, if I messed up the consequences were greater. Also, when you canter poles on the ground you don't have to have as much impulsive as you do when jumping bigger fences. So I needed a slightly different canter when jumping, this was when I started to realize how important the canter was to seeing my distance.

The next blog on seeing my distance will be, about the canter and realizing I had the wrong distance but how do I fix it?