Jumper dressage. Jumper. Dressage. Jumper dressage? Is this a term I can actually use?

I mean, I DO use it, all the time, but I always feel as if someone (most probably a DQ) is going to pop up behind me and swat me upside the head. I imagine a Yoda-like voice intoning: “There is no jumper dressage, there is only dressage. Stupid.”

What am I talking about, you ask? I am talking about my bête noire, my nemesis, perhaps even my Waterloo.

No, not my trainer (well, maybe sometimes). I am talking about what has become my overarching goal in life: to be able to do fancy dressage stuff with my jumper. Can you discern my enthusiasm in that elegant phrasing?

When I first got Steve he had a nice flatwork foundation but he had only just turned 5 and his education was obviously very much in progress. We couldn’t really canter to the right in small spaces, for example. I mean, we COULD canter to the right, but it was more like careening around on a 16-foot stride, both of us anxiously trying not to smack into any of the walls that seemed to come up way too quickly.

Once I figured out how to put him together better and we got more in tune with each other things evened out. I realized that even though Steve thinks flatwork is for suckers and idiots, he’s built for it and even difficult movements are possible for him (if not probable given who is sitting on him: me).

Packy has helpfully informed me that as a jumper rider I am lucky in that my dressage doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be effective. That sounds nice except that even getting to effective is a struggle some days.

Steve looking fancy.

He also says that a good jumper should be able to do a few things: leg yield, half pass, canter pirouettes, passage, and piaffe. Hunh? Excuse me? Pi-what?

Other dressage terms are equally confusing to someone from my hunter background. A 20-meter circle is how big? Truck and trailer-sized? From here to that cat?

And when you say “connection” does that mean having my horse’s head pop up and down, on and off the bit is something “bad” that I need to “fix”? Um, how do I fix that again?

I do know what tempi changes are—they are what Steve does in the warm-up ring when we first get to the show and he’s nervous.

I grew up doing the hunters and while we know a thing or two about self-carriage, the deeper nuances (or even the shallow ones) of dressage are simply not something into which most hunter riders really need to delve. Hunters have to carry themselves but they certainly don’t need to do canter pirouettes. Hunter flying changes are sedate things usually done quietly as one goes into the corner, not elegant demonstrations of power done precisely at X. And so on.

To me, this is still somewhat of a foreign country, therefore, and poor Steve has to travel along the same rocky road with me toward “effectiveness.”

On the other hand, there is a lot of satisfaction to be gained from correct flatwork, especially with a horse who has what it takes, physically, to do even the more difficult movements. The other day we were practicing our lateral stuff and I finally understood how to achieve the correct bend in his body during haunches-in.

It came to me like a whap between the eyes—when I do a very sharp turn to a fence opening and holding my outside rein to get Steve straight gives me the same effect as I want with haunches-in.

Controlling those haunches in the turn.

Well, hmm, sort of—it’s complicated and I’m certainly not the person you want explaining any of this to you! Suffice it to say that part of my education has meant going back and forth between flatwork and jumping to understand how the one affects the other.

When I use my aids properly I have a straight, supple, powerful horse. When I don’t, Steve gets cranky and I find myself contorting my body into ridiculous shapes in a misguided effort to get to at least Step 2 of the training pyramid.

Yes, I know the training pyramid! I have a picture of it on my phone and I made up an (admittedly awkward) acronym to help me remember the steps when Packy gives me a pop quiz about it. I haz skills!

I think that is a perfect illustration of my relationship with dressage—it’s important enough to have information about it on my phone, and the few times I have gotten close to a true medium trot with actual swing (or schwung, if one wants to be German about it), were thrilling. I’m such a dope at the finer details that I don’t think the dressage community probably needs or wants me to join their ranks.

However, I am gratefully and humbly learning what I can because it truly is helping both Steve and I to become more effective over fences. He’s stronger, more balanced, more responsive, and more confident in his own power. In turn, that means I have more horse under me at any given moment.

I’m not sure the canter pirouette business is ever going to come easily (it hasn’t yet), and I still find myself winging it when I’m told to do this or that meter circle. Also, I honestly feel like the whole letter system is set up to make people like me feel stupid.

But if dressage gets us closer to being a good team in the jumper ring I’m going to keep plugging away. Maybe not precisely at X, but hopefully somewhere close to it!

Susan Glover is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at American University (D.C.), specializing in comparative politics. She shows her Argentinian Warmblood The Red Spy in the adult amateur jumper division in the Mid-Atlantic area. Read all her COTH blogs.