While I believe it is unwise to blog about one’s experiences in the workplace, my creative impulse must be obeyed, so you get to read about the training of a young horse. There are four three year olds that we’ve started under saddle this year. Using safe and effective training methods (the details of which I will not bore you with at this time), Kathrin and I have reached the point where we can ride the horses around the arena in the trot…theoretically. I have never started a young horse under saddle before, so it baffled me when one of the horses became ‘my project’. Kathrin has not been on him. I have been on him. And I will continue to be the only person who has ridden him, so that I may establish a ‘sense of accomplishment’ from starting a young horse myself.
This is all well and good, until one arrives at the conclusion that sitting on a horse that has not been ridden is a frightening and unbalanced experience. I predicted that my sense of accomplishment would be more of a sense of discomfort when I fell to the ground, and besides, “unbalanced” is a euphemism. Sitting on an untrained horse is the equivalent of riding a giant, drunken flamingo. There is no rhythm to follow, the poor bewildered creature bobs and weaves and staggers and stops and bounds and bounces and, horror of horrors, takes off cantering in a wildly uncoordinated spasm of movement.
Enter Rumaki. Rumaki is a tiny jackrabbit of a horse (about 15.2hh) that I am expected to sit on and stay on and murmur encouragement to during the afore mentioned mayhem. This is not at easy feat. I prefer riding crazy big horses as opposed to crazy small horses. It may be farther to fall from a big horse, but big horses take longer to gather their feet under themselves to spring in any direction, so there’s at least a warning before anything happens. Small crazies jump like cats faster than the human eye can follow, and there’s nothing to wrap my legs around, so I usually fall off. The center of balance on a small horse is about the size of a pin, so shift a hair’s breadth to the front, back, left, or right and you’ll be picking dirt out of your ear for the rest of the day.
My first trot with Rumaki was not quite disastrous. Kathrin stood on the ground with the lunge whip to wiggle in his direction to keep him moving forward, and I sat in the saddle with no idea how I was going to stay on if he did anything weird. He took off trotting, and I am ashamed to say I grabbed the front of the saddle and hung on. Kathrin said something along the lines of, “What are you doing? You need to let go!” She had told me earlier that whatever happened I was not to let him lower his head, because I “would be off faster than you can say ‘Bob is your uncle’” (horses can buck easily when they drop their heads). So I had both the reins in one hand as he cantered, ducked his head between his knees, and started hopping.
Well, I was holding on, so I didn’t fall off. Rumaki stopped eventually, and we trotted some more with me not holding on. Miraculously, nothing happened, and I got off and we all breathed a sigh of relief.
My second trot with Rumaki went swimmingly. I had my head wrapped around the situation from the beginning. A brain surgeon couldn’t have been more focused. He even cantered around the arena a little, and that was fine. According to Kathrin, in a few weeks the critters will begin to get obstinate and then things will get really interesting. If they do, I’ll write about it for ya. Until then, Happy Trails!
No horses were harmed in the making of the events that resulted in the inspiration for the content of this blog.
Drunken flamingo! Love it.
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