Tacoma polo

Tacoma Polo club had a day of indoor polo, so I thought I'd go down and see what indoor was all about - of course I did take my jeans, boots and helmet just in case. Ran in to Tom Skaggs right off and since his wife recently had a baby he was more than happy to have me help get his ponies back into playing mode (he and his wife have six horses). So, I got to ride "Miss Piggy" in the 3rd and 6th chuckers (chuckers are the periods in polo, usually four are played in a regular match). The club set up the two 'slow' chuckers for a few of us beginners. The more seasoned players, Annie, Randy, Tom, Chris, etc. were great and gave us a lot of advice along the way. I did well enough...I stayed on "Pig" as Tom called here and managed to hit the ball at least a couple of times. Almost scored once, but missed the shot completely - that would have been too much for my first try anyway. Once again, polo made it clear that I still have some balance and overall confidence issue to address. Overall, I had a great time, its a wonderful group of people and I look forward to playing some more.

Chucker!

Its been a while since I've made a journal entry, but don't fret, I have been working out on occasion; riding and a little swimming mostly. Still no fencing for now though. With things a all a stir at work I'm just too frazled to do much more than the riding and swimming.

And now for something completely different...I played my first indoor polo today. Tacoma Polo club had a day of indoor polo, so I thought I'd go down and see what indoor was all about - of course I did take my jeans, boots and helmet just in case. Ran in to Tom Skaggs right off and since his wife recently had a baby he was more than happy to have me help get his ponies back into playing mode (he and his wife have six horses). So, I got to ride "Miss Piggy" in the 3rd and 6th chuckers (chuckers are the periods in polo, usually four are played in a regular match). The club set up the two 'slow' chuckers for a few of us beginners. The more seasoned players, Annie, Randy, Tom, Chris, etc. were great and gave us a lot of advice along the way. I did well enough...I stayed on "Pig" as Tom called here and managed to hit the ball at least a couple of times. Almost scored once, but missed the shot completely - that would have been too much for my first try anyway. Once again, polo made it clear that I still have some balance and overall confidence issue to address. Overall, I had a great time, its a wonderful group of people and I look forward to playing some more.

Riding in circles

Started my day with a swim. Its still pretty obvious my cardio/endurance is not up to par, but that will come back in time. I was surprised that my mucles tired out pretty quickly, I guess it shows that its been way too long since I swam last. I did an 8 lap warm up, 4 lap with hand paddle and knee board, 4 just arms and knee board and then 4 laps kicking. Not much, but I wsa still pretty tired. I've got a long way to go here.

I rode Pet again at riding tonight, he actually seemed pleased to see me. I had ridden Eli the previous week and I guess it had been a while since anyone had ridden Pet. I didn't have my helmet with me, so didn't do any mini-jumping or obstacles. Spend a lot of time working on leg yields, especially ina drill where I basically asked for leg yields into a smaller and smaller circle, then the opposite coming back out of the circles...basically spiralling in and out. A great excercise and it allowed me to really work on keeping my heels down during the leg yield. Laura's pretty pleased with my heels, I guess the polo really worked for me. I did a little canter with Pet towards the end to work on keeping my heels down during the canter. These canters didn't feel as good as previous attempts, but I did make some improvement on keeping him at canter and keeping my heels down.

See Sean run

Finally made it to the podiatrist Wendy suggested to start the process to get orthotics for my feet. Dr. McInnes was great. It looks like I do have a few issues to deal with, but with the right orthotic I should be on a regular running schedule in no time. He did give me a temporary orthotic until the final ones are finished, so I thought I might try running in them. So I went and joined the Wednesday runners over on Greenlake. They were doing some specific drills, so I decided to try a light run around Greenlake. Overall it felt good, bug I could definitely tell that I hadn't been running in two months. My cardio is nowhere near where it used to be, and my overall endurance has dropped as well. My feet felt fine during the run, but as usual they started giving me problems a half our after my run. looks like I'll be waiting for the full orthotics before I do any more running.

Polo anyone?

I had a pretty successful training night. I rode Eli, the talkative horse in the barn that wants to be a chef or an astronomer. Eli is much more sensitive to commands than Pet, so I was able to really focus on my aid signals being correct. Laura had 4 poles on the ground as obstacles and we did quite a bit of going over these at the trot. Eli was doing a pretty good job of avoiding these, but with a little practice and assertion, we cleared this up. We again went canter each tme coming out of the obstacles. I seemed to get started well on these but wasn't closing my legs enough to keep him at the canter. Got this corrected too by the end of the night.

The fun tonight really started after the lesson. Virginia showed up to have Laura work on her near shot in polo. Virginia has 'opportunities' as far as getting more out of the tack to get these shots. This is harder than it seems since you really are leaning way over the side of the horse to do this. I watched for a while as she and Joan, another rider in the barn, did some drills to work on this. They were using foot mallets rather than full length ones to really force them to get out of their tack. Then...Laura suggested I try it out. The challenge in polo is that you have the reigns in one hand and a big mallet in the other. Thus, balance is really important and all the security I have during lessons as far as being well balanced were no longer there. So, I noticed that since I had some new things to focus on I wasn't able to over focus on the things that seem to keep troubling me in lessons: my feet being correct in the stirrup, looking ahead where I'm going rather than looking down and just paying too much attention to my balance (which usually manefested itself in that I am too tight and dependant in my tack). With polo, especially when I'm at the canter you have to do all these things, correctly, or you'll end up on the ground pretty quickly. So I think polo will be a great cross training for my jumping. I'll definitely become more confident in the saddle and in doing so be able to be more aggressive, which will be important in the pentathlon. Plus, polo is so much fun. I noticed my horse had much more energy and enthusiasm when playing polo. My guess is that it is because the horse now is as engaged in the sport as the rider. In lessons, the horse is simply doing what it is told to do, in polo it is as involved in the sport as you are...it knows that its after the ball too and is as competitive with other horses as you are with other players. I could learn to like this polo thing.

Hey Mikie

I came down with another cold so I've been out of it for a while. But started back in tonight by going to Greenlake to observe their runners. I've switched around my riding so that I'll be able to train with the Greenlake gang as soon as I have orthotics for running. This will be great as Mike Jones runs there on Wednesdays and as he's the only person around thats done the full pentathlon event, he'll be a great resource. I did talk to him for a while after his run and we made plans to have a longer talk in the future. The two messages that I took away from our talk were to not overtrain and to really spend time working on my endurance. For this reason, I may pick up rowing a little here and there again to cross train for endurance.

Peeping 'post'er

Apparently, watching Angela's post last week really helped me because Laura was pleased with my post this week. I spent most of the lesson at post, really trying to confirm what I had seen and learned. Pet was tempermental as usual, but we were doing pretty well 15 minutes or so into the lesson. Did some canter, but not much as I had to leave early. What little I did also please Laura, so it was good to leave on a good note.

Swim plus trategy, Greg style

I had my first coached swim training session this morning with Wendy. I was pleased that she was pretty happy with my overall swim technique. I need to do some work with my hand entry and a lot of work really stretching out my stroke. Right now I'm at about 16 strokes for the length of the pool and I'll need to get that down to 12. My kick needs some work too, so some time doing the kick for my backstroke may correct this. And then there's the whole endurance thing. I am a long way off from the 80 swims I used to do last summer. I am recovering from a cold, but that doesn't excuse my lack of endurance. I love swimming, so as soon as I'm feeling better I look forward to working a lot more on the swim.

I missed the basketball this time, but did make it for most of the footwork. Afterwards, spend most of my time fencing Sam. She had a lot of energy tonight, so it was hard to keep up with her, she was much more aggressive than usual...which is a good thing. I did take a lesson from Greg, which turned out to be more of a strategy session than anything else. I brought up several of my weaknesses, both defensively and offensively so that I could start working them out. I learned a few new strategies and Greg once again provided some very good metaphors for me to keep in mind. The last part of the evening, I spent watching Sam and Russel fence foil. Its so great to watch people who really know what they are doing. And Sam, although a young fencer was doing a great job as well and really made some amazing touches. Donna, Russel's wife, was judging the bout and gave Russel several handicaps, such as you can't make a direct hit - you have to engage her blade first or touches in her lower left quadrant (position 4) don't count, in order to give him some drills to work on.