Something truly fascinating about horses is how often an experience with them reflects so much on our day to day lives. Sometimes it’s as obvious as realizing that our moods affect theirs. Sometimes it’s deeper, for example, learning that they way I’ve handled tension in all my horses up to this point in my life is not necessarily the best way to handle it with Drummer.
Most of my horses throughout the years have been relatively hot and extremely sensitive. Off the track thoroughbreds and standardbreds have been my breeds of choice, with the odd BLM Mustang thrown in for good measure. However, Drum is neither of those things, and even though he is half thoroughbred, the warmblood side is the dominant set of characteristics with the occasional thoroughbred day thrown in to keep me on my toes.
I don’t consider myself a novice in the horse world by any means. I started riding when I was five, and continue on twenty eight years later. I’ve competed at schooling shows, registered shows, fairs, and the like. I’ve run a stable, helped found a therapeutic riding program from the ground up. I’ve raised horses, sold them, been there in their final moments. But that’s not to say that there is always something more to learn. And I think that can be one of the most difficult things to accept for anyone who has spent so much of their life in one avenue. There are always opportunities to improve, to broaden our horizons, and, most importantly, to admit that we’re wrong.
This came to my attention after my last self taught lesson. With my thoroughbreds, if they started the day a little bit tight, I’d walk, trot, canter, and by the time we’d done this in both directions, they’d be ready to go. This has worked at times with Drum, but at times it hasn’t, and I was finally willing to step back from what had always worked and reevaluate what he needed.
As this is the first warmblood I’ve worked with consistently in all of my 28 years of riding, I might tend to attribute his uniqueness to his breed. I might be wrong. I might be right. I honestly don’t know, but what I do know is that he requires something different than any other horse I’ve worked with – a slower, more fluid approach. When transitions don’t work, it is time to find where we’re going wrong, and to make the changes necessary to make it right.
For Drum, this comes through an almost completely loose reined use of the entire arena to do just about every form of lateral work. A little shoulder in (with just enough left rein to encourage his shoulder to fold in instead of bulging out), some haunches in and out up the center line, leg yield into half pass across the diagonal.
Just as every person has a specialty, so does every horse. For my first horse – Rabbit – it was moving cows. Tani had flawless shoulder in. Wish an extended trot that consistently got us 8’s and 9’s even when the rest of our dressage test was a 5 or a 6. Myth loved her piaffe and acting like a ballerina. Samson defied all odds by being perfectly able to perform all 3 major airs above ground. Merlin has a canter that could fix any back problem. Drummer excels at his lateral work.
After a few minutes of just walking around mixing it up at every opportunity, he finally relaxed. And then we could go back to the other stuff. It was the epiphany of the day: that just because something has worked before does not mean it will work today. It’s simple enough to say that this change was necessary because of Drum being a warmblood instead of the fast twitch muscles of the thoroughbreds, but even then…there’s something more to be learned here, and something more to be taught.
This blog is about me teaching myself to become a better rider. But in that process I will also be coming to address the darkness that nearly broke my love of horses. And each epiphany I have with Drum reminds me that the love of horses is not something that can disappear once it’s taken hold. We are born with it in our very bones, and no matter how the world and certain people in it might try and break us, it stays there. If we ignore the whispers, we fall deeper in to the abyss, and each day we don’t listen to the horses who would talk to us, the harder it becomes to claw our way back out into the light. At least so it has been for me. I allowed the struggles I faced to break me, but having been able to identify it, and knowing that horses are as much a part of the cure as they were the problem, I can start to regain my footing. I am not the rider I was ten years ago, but I can finally admit that this might be a good thing.
Until the next lesson,
L.E.
Haute Ecole* 