slow and steady

Remember how I said that I was going to talk about the early years of my riding career? Yeah, that’s what we’re doing right now.

As I’ve mentioned in a couple of places, I started riding when I was eight, with a trainer based out of a local eventing barn. The trainer in question had done a little bit of everything, but she had settled on dressage as her discipline of choice well before the time I started riding with her, and that meant that all of my lessons were firmly rooted in her dressage background.

At my first lesson, I showed up, she showed me how to catch my lesson horse and saddle him (with my dad peering over my shoulder the whole time – my family aren’t horsey people, but he definitely became that barn dad over the years I spent at my first barn), then I got on, and then I walked. At my next lesson I walked. At the lesson after that, I walked some more. I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many months I spent just walking. All I know is that it was a very. long. time.

After I spent all of that time walking, I got to spend a long time learning how to trot. My trainer put me on the lunge line, and I stayed on the lunge line for lesson after lesson, except for when I was walking. I was on the lunge line when she took my reins away and made me put my hands on my hips while I tried to post. I was on the lunge line when she gave me back my reins and then took away my stirrups and made me post. I was on the lunge line when she kept me without my stirrups, took my reins away again, and made me post until I could do it with no reins, no stirrups, and my eyes shut. I had to do the same thing with the sitting trot. I was not let loose to trot around the arena until I was balanced and had the beginnings of an independent seat. If I had to guess, I’d say it probably took about a year from my first lesson for that to happen, if not more.

It took another year for me to start learning how to canter (after she spent a good bit of time teaching me how to do a two-point in the trot), and again, I was on the lunge line for lesson after lesson as she took away my reins and my stirrups. She left the barn before we had fully completed that process – for good reason, she found a job actually relating to her degree that also let her work with horses – and I started riding with my next (and current) trainer, but the point remains the same: I spent a lot of time on the lunge line during my first two and a half(ish) years of taking riding lessons.

Now, based on a lot of things that I’ve seen on the internet, there are a whole bunch of people in the world who would have a really big problem with this trajectory in their lessons -I said would like I haven’t read any number of threads on whichever forum about how a person is two years into lessons and only jumping crossrails and how that seems oh so incredibly slow. Is it all anecdotal evidence that I can’t put a hard number on? Sure, but there seems to be a lot of people out there who couldn’t possibly fathom taking close to two years to even start learning how to canter (and I know it was two years because I have videos from one of those lunge lessons, and they were taken almost two years to the day of when I started riding).

We didn’t think anything of it. Like I said, my family aren’t horsey people. My aunt and uncle had owned horses since before I was born, but that doesn’t mean my parents knew anything about them. My lessons were private, it was rare that anyone was riding when I was, and for those first couple of years, I had no one to whom I could compare myself. There was no concept of too slow when it came to my lessons, because all that mattered was that I was riding. I didn’t care when I learned how to do things. It was just having lessons and being in the saddle that mattered to me.

Things picked up the pace after that first trainer left – I was cantering and jumping full courses within a year – but those first couple of years gave me some very important gifts. One of them – one that I’ve mentioned before – is that I have a really good seat. All that time on the lunge line with no reins and no stirrups means that I’m pretty secure in the saddle, whether I lose a stirrup or not. I don’t tend to go anywhere when a horse does something stupid. Spooks don’t really move me. Bucks rarely unseat me. I know how to ride a rear. The only times I’ve been dumped in the last few years have involved a combination of a dead stop and a spin to take off at top speed in another direction directly in front of a jump. Regular antics, though? I’m not really going anywhere, and I have those early years to thank for that.

The second important gift that I was given? Patience.

It didn’t seem like much of anything when it was happening – like I said, we had no concept of pace of riding development back then – but I wasn’t just learning how to ride when I first started taking lessons. I was learning how to take my time. I was learning that there are no shortcuts to good training and that, fifteen years down the road, it wouldn’t be about whether or not kids were jumping higher than me, it would be about who could get on that green horse and stay on it while it learned to be ridden. I was learning that you can’t rush anything, and that the rewards to having patience might not be flashy, but they will run deep.

Cooper was a little younger than I was really looking for when I was horse shopping – I thought four would be the younger end of what I’d end up with, so imagine my surprise when I brought home a two-year-old – but his age has really let me re-embrace those lessons of patience. As my barn owner and I discussed repeatedly before he came home, the virtue of him being so young and only ever being with his breeder and his trainer before he came to me is that I will know everything about his training as a riding horse. I’ll get to control every single step of his journey under saddle, and that means that I get to take my time.

I got to wait a month to get on him after he got home and spend that month doing nothing but ground work and getting to know him. I got to take a month (and the summer, really) to focus on walk work and strengthening his stifle so that it wouldn’t stick anymore. I got to introduce him to poles, and walk him over a tarp, and slowly but surely teach him how to steer from my seat and give to my hand. I got to take as long as he needed to teach him to leg yield (we’re just solidifying it at the walk and really understanding that lateral and forward are not the same cue, so we’ll start with it in the trot soon enough). I got to spend a lot of time really focusing on what he needed and what he was ready for, and that means that we’re now almost a year to the day when his listing was posted on CANTER, and we are just beginning to work on our canter under saddle.

Now, there are probably some people out there who would argue that I rode him too much back in the fall, when he was just barely three and a half and getting three to five rides a week for forty-five minutes to an hour, but my counter to that is this: I spent (and spend) most of my rides walking. We will spend anywhere from twenty to forty minutes at the walk (if not more) during any given ride, depending on how he’s acting when I get into the saddle. Some days, like today, he jigs a little bit to start out with because he’s fresh, but it only takes five or ten minutes for him to settle and reach for the contact, and then we do ten to fifteen more minutes of walk warm-up before we trot. Some days he needs forty-five minutes of walking to relax and then we do a few laps of trot and then we’re done.

A lot of what we’ve done has really been psychological training as much as anything else. He’s been learning that poles are no big deal by going over a few during most rides. He’s been learning that he can be as fresh as he pleases, but that doesn’t mean that he gets to ignore me under saddle. He’s been learning that, when I put my leg on and say go when something is scary, he can trust that I’m telling him the truth and he’ll be okay. He’s been learning that I want to be able to pull him out of the field and get on him once a week and have him behave himself, since he’s largely had the last two months off courtesy of my work schedule (save for one or two rides over the weekend, which I look at as stifle maintenance more than attempts to actively try to teach him anything) and will have another month or so before I’ll be able to start going to the barn during the week again.

He’s taken that time to grow, really (and I mean mentally as much as physically). We measured him today and he’s officially almost 17hh (another quarter of an inch or so and he’ll be there), which means he’s grown over two and a half inches since this time last year, and he still has two months to go before he turns four, so I am anticipating that I am going to have a big horse in a couple of years, especially once he fills out all the way. He’s also become a lot more willing to use himself, and it’s beginning to be something that I don’t have to fight him for. He’s developing a topline and starting to show some muscling in his neck, so he’s now strong enough to reach down and seek out the contract for more than a step or two, and he’s also figuring out that the more he does that, the less I fuss with him (because I really do prefer leaving him alone if he’s carrying himself and regulating his own pace).

As I’ve said more than once on here already, he’s three. I mean, he’s almost four, but he’s still only three and he’s already learning how to lift his back and stretch, and it’s something that he settles into quite happily more often than not these days. I don’t drill him on it – if he’s being good and stretchy from our first walk-trot transition, we’ll do five or ten minutes of trot work and that’s it for the day – but it’s turning into something that he’s looking for. As long as I’m there, as long as my hand and leg are following and supporting, he’ll stretch down and out without too much fuss (unless he’s feeling extra fresh that day), and I am so proud of that. It hasn’t been a quick process. It’s not even close to being over. We still have a very long road ahead of us, but he’s developing the right building blocks, and I know that’s going to make everything he learns in the future a lot easier.

I could’ve brought him home and gotten on him that first day. I could’ve thrown him into the canter, even though he was still growing and too unbalanced to really be able to handle it. I could’ve already started taking him over jumps. I could’ve ignored everything that I learned in those first few years of riding lessons, or I could do what I did and take my time with him and listen to what he was telling me.

I had that conversation with my trainer back in November – he and I have had one lesson with her, so while there are many more in our future because I am certainly not ready to be completely on my own, I’ve essentially done all of this myself so far – when she was just taking her first look at him. I told her I was letting him dictate our trajectory, that I didn’t see the point in drilling him while he was so young, that I’d rather let him tell me when he was ready for the next thing than overface him and fry his brain, and she agreed with me that it was the right strategy to take with him. She felt that it wasn’t a bad thing for him to essentially have the winter off to grow up a bit, and that the more we could ingrain the fundamentals in him now, the less fighting and working backwards we’d have to do later.

I don’t know what this summer is going to look like. I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to develop a canter we can actually work with (because right now, having even vaguely controllable speed and being balanced enough to have no lead changes in the corners for maybe one lap around the indoor is what we consider a victory). I don’t know if he’ll be introduced to crossrails later in the spring or if that’s something that we’ll be waiting on until the fall (or later). I don’t know how long it’s going to take him to be able to fully work outside without having a tantrum about not being allowed to play in any gait faster than the walk. I don’t know if our first time hacking out on a cross-country course (not to jump, just to go out and take a look) will be a disaster or if he’ll take it like a champ. I don’t know if he’ll dump me at our first show (over walk-trot ground poles) or if he’ll once again disprove the fiery OTTB stereotype.

All I know is that I’m not putting a deadline on anything. I’m not asking him to do anything that he isn’t ready for. I’m not going to jeopardize the process of instilling him with the basics that will make every single thing we try in a few years a whole lot simpler just because I really miss jumping. I’m in no hurry. I don’t get frustrated when it takes him longer than some people would probably like to really start to understand something. It took me a year and a bit to be allowed to trot off the lunge line. It took me over two to be able to canter properly. He’s more than welcome to take as much time as he needs, and we’ll both be better off for it in the end.

I owe my first trainer for teaching me that. I owe her for teaching me how to laugh at the things that other people might see as setbacks, for putting me in a position where I don’t feel the need to fight through every one of his baby moments or the days when he’s feeling particularly stubborn – I just change what I’m asking so that he can do something that I want and we can end on a good note. Do I have goals? Absolutely, but I owe her for teaching me that the goalposts can be moved, that the timing can be changed, that victory doesn’t always mean what you originally think it will, that nothing can make you ready to do something before you’re truly ready for it. I owe her for teaching me patience.

It’s a lesson that I feel lucky to have learned, and I really do wish that it was more common in the horse world, because I’ve lost count of how many horses I’ve seen be thrust into things that they weren’t ready for, just because their rider or trainer was impatient, and end up psychologically fried (possibly for life) as a result. It’s just cantering. It’s just a pole. It’s just a show. We have all the time in the world. Why waste all the time you would have in the future just because you feel like you have to do something right now?