William Fox-Pitt Clinic - Report

BunnyDog

BunnyDog

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Ok it's late here so I'm copping out a tiny bit and sharing what I said on Facebook.

There are pics with the link here

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Videos will be coming once I get them. I will post the more extensive photos and videos once we get them all.

Post:

WFP Clinic..... First few pics. This is just to give me and you all something to see and know that 1) Cudo and I are in fine fettle and 2) I am very tired. LOL

Suffice it to say that it was a fabulous clinic and we did get a ton out of it. I will say I had tears in my eyes this morning as I was sharing with Jeanne that it was a little tough to walk into the indoor yesterday for a clinic in March and not have it be with Jimmy. But I get it and William was probably the perfect trainer to be the one to be the instructor for the place where Cudo and I are right now.

He prioritizes the going stride that's forward and positive. He lightly favors that over the 'set/prescribed' strides. Cue Cudo in "Beast" mode when we asked him to do a 12 fence course for the first time since August of 2022. Soooo yea. I didn't get "yelled at" and William thinks pretty darn highly of Cudo. ;)

Yesterday was a lot of great exercises and we did a lot of turns and great things. It was more main stream and Cudo showed up in a big way. Last night we had a cocktail party with dinner for meet and great time with William. The mutterings of the party was the setup of the ring for today.... The entire ring was filled with skinnies and narrows and only 2 fences were still a normal jump face with a longer than 6' face.

I was nervous. I remembered that in my first clinic with Jimmy and Cudo in spring of '18 he made me jump the chevron and when I had tried to explain I wasn't sure that Cudo knew what that was....in typical Jimmy fashion he basically told me to go ride the fence. So I did. Cudo jumped it perfectly and Jimmy said on camera "Who said he didn't know how to jump a chevron?" Jimmy 1 Emily 0.

In my continued quest to be transparent, I will admit here that the courses today made me feel less confident and more nervous than ANY of the 1.30m+ courses I have ever done. These were lower heights but bigger challenges. I dug deep into my eventing past and pulled up the chevron/corner/stile jump rider who is still buried back in my brain somewhere. I tried to remind myself that in jump offs, we're aiming for and needing to be on fine lines to cut the times and make the turns and distances. So what if half the fence is missing....the goal remains the same. Accuracy, straightness, balance and skills. So let's do this.

He did so well. I am so pleased with Cudo, and myself a little. :D

Enjoy the pics. Videos and a larger photo album will come. Just not right away.

As always huge and grateful thanks to:
Tiffany Wandy and Melissa Stubenberg for getting this pulled together and giving us a fabulous venue.

To William for coming and teaching us all.

To Jeanne Wood for coming down from Albany to be my trusty groom for 2 days of fun and more bucket list adventures.

To Niamh O'Connell for helping grab pics and videos for us.

To Celia Davenport Goodall, Patrick Kocher, Bonnie Kibbie, Jordan Meadley and Nikki Dalesandro Scherrer for helping get Cudo's body and health back in time for this fun.

To Phillip Dutton for being in Florida so Cudo could steal a stall at True Prospect Farm and get fit for this. 😉

And finally to John Salvaggio for dealing with 6+ weeks of fallout of "I have to get ready for the clinic/ride/be at the 2 barns" and basically helping with so many things I just am so thankful for EVERYTHING, including these awesome pics.

One thing the loss of Jimmy has taught me, I got pics with William, me and Cudo. I have none of Jim and me and I regret this fully. So now I will be that person and ask for the pic and I won't feel bad. Life is too short. And hopefully my coach appreciated the last round when I harnessed the wild boy and did the distances and finished with a smile. It all works if you ask the right questions.

Oh and welcome to Cudo's fan club William!! We'll get T-Shirts one day. 🤣 Best WFP quote:

I asked him to guess how old Cudo was.... he thinks about it and says "12."

I laugh and say he'll be 17 in April.

"17! How does he still jump THAT well?"

That was fun. Enjoy

Emily

Em
 
H

Hobo2

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Glad you had a great clinic. WFP is local to me and if you happen to see him in local shops or event's he is very pleasant always a nod or smile.
 
BunnyDog

BunnyDog

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More in depth report of the clinic.

Ok so here's what I have....

For Day 1 I have 3 videos.

Let me try to explain. William works a lot on straightness and going with a horse that wants to go over the jump and be forward, in the sense that it's doing what's asked and happy about it.

He set up a long side triple (vertical, 1 stride to oxer to 2 strides to vertical...if done going away from the in gate) there were a few single fences that we blended into and out of the courses. In particular was a white gate roughly 5-6 strides from a yellow and white oxer. In one exercise we did the bending line first as a normal pair of fences. Then the next time we subtracted one stride, then the 3rd time we added one stride. He said that in an indoor like we were in, it should be 5 strides but out on a xc course it would more likely be 4, but we didn't have the space to get going before the first to get that stride.

When I did it, Cudo and I chipped in a 5 on the second, take away one stride, go through. William looked at me after we pulled up, came and pet Cudo and was like "I think he would have done the 4 in here!" I agreed and bemoaned the unfortunate takeoff at the first that caused me not to be able to think asking for a 4 was the best idea. Sadly this sequence is not on a video that I have.

We also had a single right up against the "Onlooker alley." This was a space they had blocked off with rails and blox against the short end of the ring to better fit in auditors on their own chairs. Cudo was suitably not thrilled with this arrangement. He hates blox. LOL

That vertical led us into either the triple or a diagonal line that was a vertical with stone walls under it and 4 strides from that to an oxer with butterfly fillers.

A course we did early on is here:


William worked on keeping things going and did a bit of position discussion (Sit up and don't fold as much) and then after seeing Cudo's power and propensity tried to fix this by adding ground poles in the triple. Including after the landing of the final vertical (Coming towards in gate, so vertical, 2 strides, oxer, 1 stride to vertical)

This went the way of the Spooner debacle and Cudo cleared it a bunch of times until he finally put some hooves inside the rail. William was watching and laughing at Cudo's insistence at just jumping big and OUT.


Course before ground rail added after vertical (you can see the bit of rushing)

And after when he finally gives in and lands inside the pole with 3 hooves.



So at the end of one day we were feeling really good and so proud of Cudo for coming back into form in a mere 7 week, only 5 of which were we based at an indoor. The rest had been a LOT of road hacks.

I'm going to hold here for the Day 2 retelling with the hope that I can connect with what videos exist of Day 2 and see if I can get those and give a more unified report with videos once I receive them.

But Cudo remained a star and William couldn't believe he was coming 17 years old. "How does he still jump THAT well???"

And he might have alluded to thinking he would enjoy the ride on him. LOL.

Em

Stay Tuned.
 
BunnyDog

BunnyDog

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** WARNING: LONG. You can skip down ;) **

William Fox Pitt - Day 2 – 3/6/24



So as a reminder at the end of Day 1, I was feeling particularly good about the work with Cudo and that our efforts to be prepared in time were definitely paying off. As a ‘Rest of the story’ moment I am going to step back for a moment and explain why the show jumper that I am, signed up for this clinic with a preeminent Olympic Eventer. To do this we have to wave the magic wand and travel back in time a bit.

For 29 years I took lessons with Jimmy Wofford. When you do the math on the phone calculator and look at a number that big it’s daunting but allow me to correct this description a bit. I didn’t take lessons every week nor every month. I took lessons in his winter indoor clinics at Melissa’s indoor, where we were for the clinic, and this was a continuation of finding where he would be coming to my area and resuming the lifetime journey of improving as a rider with his knowledge and tricks to help guide me. When I started working with him in 1994, he had just retired from competing and still went fox hunting. At our last clinic together, he was sitting on a DeWalt rolling stool in the indoor and in remission from Pancreatic cancer. A lot can happen in 29 years, but I digress. The “why” of this clinic is here, Jimmy said to us many times over that you can learn something from every lesson if you have the appropriate respect/esteem for the person doing the teaching. If you don’t like their way of riding, you’re already one strike down. So maybe think hard about that. But overall, there’s a lesson in everything.

When I was at Jimmy’s funeral last February, I was surrounded by so many icons of Horse Sport and indeed the world, as even Royalty had flown over for this event. Sitting in my pew looking around the room I knew that so many of us valued the lessons of learning but moreover when the time came, we journeyed not to celebrate how he taught us to clear a left handed corner, but rather to celebrate the true scope of awesomeness that was the man himself. Labradors, fishing, AMAZING USET stories and an appreciation of ‘old brown’, the love I have for the sheer luck that led me to him cannot be understated.

So, when my own father was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer last January and Jimmy died in February, it was a truly rough start to ’23. I chose to not ride. Why??? Because as much as I love the things that all my horses bring to me and my life as a rider, nothing would replace my dad. Dad was going through a lot, and I wanted to be able to drop everything and run the hour south to Baltimore if I needed to. Could I have ridden and not competed, sure. But this is how I did it. Come August when things were much better for my dad I did start riding again. But then I hurt myself falling over my couch on September 4th. So that took out the rest of the year.

As 2024 approached and with it the ability to return to riding again, I felt like I needed something to motivate me off the couch, away from the depression of losing Jimmy and a metaphorical light to follow to get me, and Cudo back. I truly wasn’t sure if I had lost his last useful year of bigger jumps by letting him stand in a field at 16 years old and only knew the way to find the answer was to pick him up and get him fit and see.

When the call came out about William coming to the USA for clinics down south I was one of many people asking “Would he come North and do an indoor clinic for us schlubs who have jobs?”
William is a fantastic rider, has always been great in interviews and his books and other friends who have ridden with him made me think if we could get him anywhere close to Pa, I think I can do this.

So that’s how we got where we are. Now…for the second day of the clinic. I should point out that the second day was definitely colored by the cocktail party at the end of the first day. See, William had set his course for day two after the last group was done. And what he set caused there to be a strong undercurrent of “OMG-ness” at the cocktail party. We arrived a bit after the start and within 5 mins of walking in the door, I knew from 3 people that the ring was set with all “Skinny” (Narrow) fences. People who I know that are well able to ride this stuff, were looking more shell shocked than I, the show jumper who doesn’t have to ever jump something with under a 5’ face, would have liked to have seen. These were not comforting thoughts. And each new person who mentioned it to me thereafter just helped to stoke the fires of uneasiness. As I was in the early group, I didn’t have the luxury to go and watch to see how it rode first. But somewhere I was kind of smirking and thinking that at least I had an excuse. Eventers do have to ride Chevrons, Corners, Wood carved animals etc, ALL the time. Not so true with us show jumpers. LOL. As has always been the way with Cudo and I, when I closed my eyes to sleep I thought, “What will be, will be.”

As we set off to the arena, I made sure to have more warmup time, not to scope out the ring but to give my 17 yr old lug a bit more muscle warm up than he had had the day prior. Sure, I got to spend more time looking and thinking things through, all that did though was make me glad I had forgone having breakfast. I was nervous. These fences didn’t look friendly to me and honest to God, as big as we jump at shows, THIS stuff was way more nerve wracking than any of that. Cudo, for his part was also a little aware of the changes, as he kept snorting and giving a wide berth to the jumps as we did our flatwork.

William set up lines on roughly the same places and distances as the day one jumps so that the course would lend familiarity in efforts to the horses. And we already knew the striding. The change was just WHAT you were jumping, not how or with what stride length. That was cool. Also give credit…a friend of mine said she now understood why the Brits win a lot, they just find all sorts of things from around a farm and chuck it onto a pile and jump it. Done…World Champs. LOL. She wasn’t far wrong.

So, to recap, we had a fence in front of onlooker alley, now built on Blox and with other blox as filler. Then we had a 1 stride with a wall filler and a pair of rolltops that made a half sphere instead of just a one-sided rolltop. We had the diagonal line of a single wall filler (mate to the one in the one stride) and 3 little wall fillers, that William ended up stacking 2 on top of each other. No rail on top…just jump the leaning tower of wall fillers, oh and they were aqueducts with an arch. FUN. Then he built another fence made up of a flower box on top of the 3rd aqueduct wall. This was on a diagonal line mostly by itself but connecting the other lines of the course.

We had a Chevron between two plastic barrels and a tiny (as in REALLY narrow) corner jump. Then we had the same first 2 jumps as the day before in their normal sized glory. The white gate vertical and the yellow and white Oxer. Oddly, having them felt more complicated as you were working on skinnies, but the “safety” of their size was gone the moment you had cleared them. Oh, and we had a small brown log rolltop, maybe 12” on the ground. That would be the ONLY fence that Cudo stopped at, on his second approach. HA HA HA. He does make me pay sometimes.

In addition, we did a bit of work on 3 walls/flower boxes in a row. 1 stride between each, and Cudo took his sweet time with this one. He just didn’t really latch on and get the ask. He saw them as 3 individual things and didn’t really get it as a combination. But he eventually finished it well.

Every line and ask was about (DUH) straightness. Accuracy mattered but going over mattered above having the exact right stride and takeoff. I get that in eventing and it parlays over to jumpers well also. Though rails tend to fall when you make too big of a mistake.

The video I have here shows the first course we did. Then the second longer course. And then the 3rd where the fences have def been raised and standards have been moved away so you jump the jumps with less help from the guide poles and funnels.


We came out of this clinic with a ton of appreciation for different methods and ideals. Our accuracy took a huge bump up and Cudo’s fitness held throughout. I’m glad for the chance to ride with a champion and have a glimpse into what he does, thinks etc. He was very supportive of me when I was nervous, and he comes away as a new member of Cudo’s fan club. 😉 (I mean….how could you not!)

For our part Cudo got a pulsing treatment Thursday and I will likely take him for a road hack today. We have had 2 days of rain, and my ring is a swamp. So, flatwork will wait. We moved him back home and will continue to prep for our spring shows but now he needs some more hills and gallops to keep inching back to show ready.

I would highly recommend folks to ride with William on a horse of any experience. He was brilliant with the babies with all the narrows, and they all came away looking like future stars. Many thanks for reading all this. I hope it helps in some small way with your own riding.
 
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