(“She is that ‘Lumps in the Gravy lady.’”)
One luxury bestowed by advancing age is that of hindsight. Through trial and error and error and error, you settle into a comfortable expectation of having fewer things to worry about while training your horses. A behavior, that when you were 30 spawned angst and fretfulness, now just evokes an “oh, that again.” “A developmental stage,” you say to yourself. “It will just work itself out and disappear in its own good time.”
Aside from nuts and bolts advice, an instructor’s job description includes providing perspective and reassurances to overly conscientious students who second guess their every move.
Case in point: teaching flying changes. Elsewhere I’ve written about the particulars of preparation: hot enough to the leg, a movable center of gravity, the stride by stride “count down”. The whole range of do’s and don’ts.
But here, picture the woman on her Second Level horse—a mare who is not yet confirmed in easy, reliable changes but who has a pretty good likelihood of changing for me when I ask.
Her owner works on her own most days. She’s never ridden a schoolmaster to ingrain the timing she needs. Often her change aids are too tentative, too mild, or she leaves out some important element.
But during a recent schooling session—after a handful of unsuccessful attempts—she was at once bold and assertive. The mare’s change was on time and clean! But she made a little bounce and required an unsubtle correction after a dozen strong strides to restore order.
The rider’s reaction: “Oh, I was too strong. I feel bad for her!”
My reaction: “No! The change was clean. Now you can begin to refine your aids.”
To give you a further clue, she is that “Lumps in the Gravy lady” from an earlier blog—the one who had to be persuaded that every schooling attempt shouldn’t have to look like a perfected, finished product.
Years ago I mentioned something to George Morris about keeping horses straight on the way to a fence. His eyes bore into me [you Idiot] as he declared, “Well fine, but your main job is to get to the fence at the right spot. Then you can care about straight.”
In eventing, the primary advice to cross country riders is “Don’t let them stop and go between the flags!” When you’re teaching changes, it’s make them happen, make them clean, and then smooth out the details.”
I found an old video clip of Reiner Klimke, everyone’s paragon of thoughtful and appropriate riding. On this video he’s teaching a horse changes, and I observed (almost gleefully) that to get them to happen, he’s all over that horse. Not unkindly, to be sure, but the name of the game was Get the Job Done!
I have another clip of Kyra Kyrklund at the 1995 National Symposium in Burbank on a Second Level horse. When she asks for the change, he jumps through but also levitates exuberantly above the ground. She pats him. Doesn’t punish, doesn’t worry. Just acknowledges his reaction as part of the everyday process of teaching a horse new things.