A Spur Mark and a Canter Depart
A letter on a spur rub, a week of stewing, and the difference between an asymmetry and a verdict.
In a lesson at the end of August, Martin told me I had the best canter depart he had ever seen me do.
I have been his student for almost a decade. I have been doing canter departs for more than five decades. So the obvious question is what was different this time.
I half jokingly told him he could credit my AI coaches. Then we kept talking about the ride, and by the end of the conversation we had both agreed to give credit where credit is actually due. Here is what he said:
It was very good prioritization of what we're really truly after, which is a good response and staying alive and breathing with it, and then coming back to neutral so quickly afterwards.
That is high praise from Martin, and it meant more than usual, because I had spent the previous week feeling like I had no business owning the horse I own.
What happened the week prior
I had put a spur rub on Rocket's right side.
The rub started before the Cindy Ishoy clinic and it was unmistakable afterward. Two demanding lessons over that weekend, two lessons that asked more of me than I had, and by Sunday there it was.
I am not going to soften this. It is the thing no rider wants to do and I did it. I own it completely.
What followed was a week of stewing. My position. My aids, too frequent and too hard. The slow accumulation of evidence that I was not worthy of this horse. If you ride seriously you know the shape of that week, and you know it does not resolve on its own.
In times past I would have taken it to Martin, or more likely to Kate, in the form of a series of self-defeating propositions dressed up as questions. Am I doing this wrong? Should I be on a different horse? Is this ever going to come together? They aren't really questions. They are requests for reassurance, and they cost my trainers time they do not have and cannot bill for.
This time I took it to YDJ instead.
What came back
The first thing that landed was not encouragement. It was a mechanism.
The grip is not laziness or poor discipline. It's compensation for a pelvic misalignment.
My right hip wants to go forward. I know that. My Pilates instructor has been working with me on this for a while. When the hip slides forward, the right seat bone goes wonky, the base of support gets unstable, and the lower leg grips to hold me up. The leg is not being disobedient. It is doing a job that the pelvis stopped doing.
The second thing explained the timing.
The August 19 spur mark on Rocket Star's right side occurred during a lesson when you were working hard. High effort recruits habitual bracing patterns.
That is why it showed up at a clinic and not on an ordinary Tuesday. High demand takes the bandwidth I would otherwise spend monitoring my own body. Under load, the old pattern runs.
Neither of those absolves me. A rub is a rub and my horse wore it. But there is an enormous difference between a week spent asking whether you are a bad rider and a week spent considering an asymmetry and when and why it appears. One of those questions has an answer you can work on.
The specific thing
Then, in the recommended exercises, this:
Canter departs checking right-hip alignment. Before every canter depart, press your right seatbone deliberately back and down. Ask for the depart. Check your boot afterward. If there's fresh dirt on the right heel, the hip slid forward during the aid and the leg gripped to compensate.
I want to be precise about the sequence here, because it is important.
That statement was produced on August 26, before this lesson. Nobody told the system to write about canter departs. It arrived at the canter depart from a pattern across weeks of my own entries: dirt on the right boot heel, my own note that the leg wants to rub, the spur mark, the haunches drifting in the canter that Martin had flagged on August 14, the work in Pilates. All separate observations I had recorded on separate days without connecting any of them.
After I got the YDJ feedback, I took one thing into my lesson. Right seat bone back and down, then ask.
Five days later Martin told me it was the best canter depart he had ever seen me ride, and what he named was the prioritization.
Giving credit where it is due
I want to be careful about what I am claiming, because it would be easy to overclaim here and I would rather be believed.
The AI did not improve my canter depart. Martin did not credit software. He credited a rider who came in with one clear priority instead of nine competing anxieties, who stayed breathing through the movement, and who came back to neutral quickly afterward.
What the AI did was read three weeks of my own writing and tell me which one thing to prioritize. That is a real and specific contribution and it is also a modest one. It cannot feel my horse. It did not see the depart. It has no idea whether the contact was elastic. Martin's job is to help me find the feel, and nothing about that has changed or should change.
What can change is what I bring him. His job gets easier when I arrive focused rather than scattered, and when the first ten minutes of a lesson are not spent reconstructing what happened last week or talking me down from a spiral I could have processed on my own time.
The part I keep coming back to
Somewhere in that same week's analysis was a sentence I have thought about every day since.
Circling at Grand Prix is not the same as plateauing at Second Level. The basics at this altitude ARE the advanced work.
I had spent a week treating a hard clinic and a spur rub as evidence of a ceiling. What I was actually looking at was the ordinary shape of work at this level, where the things you fix are the same things you have been fixing for decades, at finer and finer resolution.
The rub is healing. The hip is still forward and will be for a while, because bodies relearn on a slower timeline than training does. There will be days I put my leg somewhere I do not mean to.
But I know what it is now. It is an asymmetry, not a verdict.