Glamour shots: completely necessary.
As it is often with young horses, there is an ebb and flow to the learning curve. It’s definitely not a linear process, and sometimes you go backwards before you go forwards. I find that most horses have a pre-determined personal pace, and it’s usually wiser to let that be the guide for the rider. However, my favorite part is the lightbulb moment that leaps outside of the common progression, the “Aha!” that happens spontaneously and sometimes without prompting.
Although Leo is not really technically a young horse anymore (he’s coming on 8 this summer), he’s still green. Some horses, if they aren’t started properly, take a really long time to get going again later in life, and such is the case with him. After spending six years of his life meandering aimlessly and picking up bad, nervous habits, he’s only just now realizing what “job” means and getting into the different parts of his new career. Understanding that there are THREE distinct parts is a struggle, something we all could have told him from the get-go. Eventing is hard!
Just this past month, even with the snow and the cold-as-a-witch’s-rear-end weather, something funny happened to Leo in the way that he understood his own body. Maybe it was because for three weeks I was relegated to trot sets in the snow and the occasional canter up a slight hill, requiring more push and articulation from the horses. Maybe it was just the sudden accumulation of muscles and strength. Maybe it was just a little magic. Regardless, Leo just learned a really important thing: how to gallop!
This sounds silly, but he’s such a big dude and basically a thousand percent warmblood; he’s just been, you know, cantering a bit faster than usual on cross country. But suddenly, he knows how to gallop like a proper horse! He can increase his speed, change his stride length within a balance, keep himself uphill the whole time, and lets me rate him from a galloping position! It’s the small victories, you guys.
“When you have a bit in your mouth, your lips are automatically too short to cover your teeth.” — Leo
The day after the discovery, he started to act wild under saddle. At first I thought it was spring fever, but there was still snow on the ground. I figured maybe he was getting a little too much grain for his work load, so I cut it a little. No dice. This galloping thing opened up a whole new window for him, and he was just so psyched to be so fast now!
Leo is generally very low maintenance on the ground. You can leave him alone in a stall in the barn and he just munches hay and stays behind a stall guard. He stays out in a field by himself and sometimes will whinny or trot a little bit when you take the other horses away, but he never persists. I’ve done it hundreds of times, and he’s just not very dedicated to the cause of being neurotic, which is amazing.
One day, I pulled Nyls from the field while Leo was still out and was walking him back the the barn. I saw Leo canter around a little, pull some playful bucks and whinny a little. I figured he would give it up in approximately three minutes and continued on my way.
Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I see a red blur of flailing galloping legs coming towards me, definitely NOT in the field. Leo comes flying as fast as he can straight towards Nyls and me, who were both standing dumbstruck on the road back the the barn. He had successfully cleared his 5-foot gate and come pelting down the path at a full gallop. When he reached me, he stopped and allowed himself to be caught, because that was the extent of his escape plan, obviously.
I never really thought that Leo would have the kind of commitment that it takes to decide to straight up jump out over a gate. I was a little impressed. He did scrape some hair off of one leg, but other than that seems to have cleared it in good style. Most horses can jump out of the field if they want to badly enough, but Leo just never struck me as the type.
Fast forward two days, and I finally got to jump him when the snow melted. He’s usually a total goon unless he jumps regularly, and I was expecting some combination of disorganized buffoonery. This time, however, he was on point from the beginning, and in fact a lot more coordinated than I remembered him being in January.
#Derp
He had suddenly accepted that taking off from underneath the fences was maybe not a great idea and was lifting his shoulders and his front legs in a way that was all new. He was waiting and cantering politely and not throwing in 27 differently sized strides before each fence. He was even landing a reasonable distance away from the jumps, instead of turning each one stride into an almost bounce! This was magical. I jumped him the next day a little too, just to make sure that I hadn’t made it up in my brain, and it happened again!
My theory is this: Leo decided on a whim to jump his gate, and perhaps saw his life flash before his eyes while he did it, feeling the absolute solid unflinching metal as he scraped his right leg a little on his way over it. In that moment, he realized he’d better start taking this jumping stuff more seriously and get his damn front end out of the way, and maybe start listening to me a little more. This self-administered jumping lesson clearly was a lightbulb moment for him.
While I’m glad I didn’t have to do the jumping of the 5-foot unmovable gate on him, I know of a place across the ocean that believes in such jumping lessons. That place is Ireland. Why do you think we buy horses that learned to jump in the Irish hunt field? Those horses are clever, no nonsense and know how to get their legs out of the way because upright gates in ankle deep mud are just par for the course.
Leo enters his spring season eyeing a move up to Training level and feeling all sorts of newly cool and powerful. I can’t get too many of those amazing jumps out of him, because he still tires easily from the effort of doing it correctly, but I’m delighted to have this new technique on my side. He’s making me a better rider, and I’m hoping I’m making him a better horse. Let’s just hope all this galloping and jumping doesn’t go to his head!
