Mission: Impossible - Training

So, what did work? To begin with, we went back to basics to fill in all those blanks left in his training. Everyone thought that just because they put him in draw reins and got his head down that he was “on the bit.” They thought that just because he was moving forward he had impulsion. They thought that just because they could shorten his stride he was collected. Like so many people in the H/J world (and an alarming number of people in dressage) they had completely missed the point.

Of course, at the time I also knew nothing about the technicalities of dressage. I only knew when it felt right and when it felt wrong. And I had the benefit of riding my own horse who was super-sensitive in every respect and wouldn’t tolerate anything but the lightest contact. I didn’t know how to hold a mouth or to pull, or to drive a horse into my hand with seat and leg; that was all foreign to me and doing so always felt wrong.

Everyone talks about contact, contact, contact. And yes, contact is important, but I’ve learned that it’s not something a rider can just create by grabbing hold of the mouth, and it’s not something to be measured in pounds of pressure. Contact is a two-way street, where it is the horse who must accept the presence of the rider’s hand. People talk about putting the horse “on the bit,” but it is the horse who puts himself “on the bit” when the circumstances are right and all of the pieces fall into place, beginning with the relaxed horse accepting contact. Mellon was obviously not ready yet for contact, and certainly not ready yet to go “on the bit.” What they had done with him in the past - putting him in a severe bit, draw reins and riding with a big set of spurs – hadn’t worked. You might be able to bend a horse’s body into a shape resembling “on the bit,” but it’s never the same thing. And it’s certainly no way to encourage him to accept you; it’s a way to force him to do your bidding against his will. And Mellon had decided no one was going to force him; if put in that position, he was going to go down fighting. If I wanted to ride him, I was going to need his willing compliance.

In that situation, what do you do? What helps those pieces to fall into place? Everyone has their own theories, and I was about to discover mine.

Instinctively, I knew I couldn’t take a hold of him without a violent reaction, so I decided just to hack him on a loose rein for a while so he knew I wasn’t going to hurt him or get in his face. I am not a proponent of loose-rein riding on a regular basis (for example, the way hunters today go on floppy reins with their noses poked out, inverted and disconnected,) but if I could get him to trust me, I thought, then I could gradually take up some contact and hopefully he’d accept it.

At this stage, he could handle one rein at a time, but two at once made him feel claustrophobic. So, in the beginning, I only asked him to bend with one wide, leading rein, and rode forward into that bend (obviously not at much speed or he would have lost his balance). I never pulled a rein backward, but always out to the side where the bit would lift into the corner of his mouth and encourage him forward and around the bend. We worked almost exclusively in walk and trot. The tension in his back began to dissipate as he would lower his head and neck and his normally quick, choppy stride began to open up as he covered more ground and tracked well up under himself with his hind legs. He was beginning to relax under me.

And then something amazing and unexpected happened: he began to reach out for my hand. Slowly, tentatively at first, he would stretch out until he had taken the slack out of my reins and established a light contact with my hands. He would stay there for a few strides as if he was testing it out, and then bounce back up. But I never took back; I just kept my hand light and let him find it on his own. Over and over, he’d stretch down into my hand and I’d hold the reins almost in my fingertips to keep the feel light and the contact flexible, just barely feeling his mouth. The more I rode him gently forward, the more he sought my hand.

I kept him on the loose reins, kept bending him gently with occasional small rein corrections, using the short ends of the arena to make half-circles and the long sides to release the bend and let him travel straight. Soon he was consistently stretching forward, down and round, tracking up under himself, seeking the contact and traveling in a beautiful “long and low” frame. Now, not only was he accepting a light contact, but he was volunteering to put himself on the bit. (If anyone is interested, I could post more on how to achieve and use long and low, and I recommend a good post on the subject from Dressage in Jeans here.)

Calm, forward, straight = Relaxed, attentive, balanced

The horseman’s mantra is “calm, forward and straight.” To be effective, each of those elements must be tackled in that order. Relaxation, I have found, is the starting point – without it, a rider has nothing. We focused on getting and maintaining relaxation above all else, and that is what worked for Mellon.

I used that frame not only to develop his trust, his willingness to accept contact, and his relaxation, but also to develop his body. Long and low develops a full range of motion in the horse in a way collected work cannot. Long and low, at least in my experience, is the foundation upon which everything else is built, including collection.

If you cannot get long and low, correct collection will be extremely difficult, if not impossible – it will always be stiff, out of sync, or artificial. And, if you work a horse continually in a short or collected frame, you’ll never develop a full range of motion needed for correct extension, jumping, etc..

I see this all the time with dressage horses, who look positively muscle-bound; they seem incapable of true relaxation and stretching, and often their gaits have lost their natural rhythm and sequence as a result. It is the fashion in the hunters these days to never touch the reins and have the horse flop around on a loose rein with his nose poked out, which also prevents the back from rounding up under the weight of the rider; and Jumpers, like dressage horses ridden improperly or trained with rollkur, frequently have a musculature that indicates they spend all their time in draw reins; their backs are hollow and/or braced, their crests are overdeveloped and a there is a hollow in front of the wither where the trapezius and splenius muscles in particular have never been allowed to function properly, limiting the movement of the shoulders; this posture makes it impossible for the horse to track up. What’s worse, you increase the risk for pain and injury any time the horse is asked to use himself outside of this range of motion (or any time he goes out in the paddock and moves out on his own.) This was where Mellon was when we started.

A horse that is worked long and low, however, will have swing in his back, long ground covering strides, and a loose flowing shoulder, among other things. Working back from there, collection is relatively easy. Reverse engineering all of that lengthening and depth of stride from a muscle-bound, super-collected horse, however, is another story.

Slowly, with our long and low work, we were on our way. Not only was it a great way to warm up and cool down, but it became a kind of "reset button" for his brain and body whenever there was an issue or tension, and it was also Mellon's reward between brief intensive exercises – especially after jumping. He loved to stretch, and would pop his crest back and forth as he did; Mellon was becoming more relaxed, forward and balanced by the day; from there on the bit became second nature and, I could begin to play with adjusting the length of his frame without creating tension or resistance. In only a few months, we were able to walk, trot, canter, jump small courses and do some basic lateral and collected work respectably. He surprised all of us and, for the first time since he had come to the farm, Mellon was getting noticed for the right reasons.

But this, it turns out, was a double edged sword...

To be continued....

Mission: Impossible - First Steps

First Steps:

Something you should know about Mellon is that his solution to anything a rider does that he doesn’t like or understand - from losing your balance, inadvertently goosing him with your heel, using the reins too restrictively to just about any other unforeseen offense - could result in a bout of bucking and flailing that often ends up with the rider doing a faceplant. I remember there was slightly older gentleman who came for lessons (and actually treated Mellon with some kindness and respect;) unfortunately, he was not an especially secure rider, and Mellon had his number. Each time he had a lesson, Mellon would dump him in exactly the same place in the arena, sometimes more than once in the same lesson. Week after week he tried unsuccessfully to ride him, dubbing him “Mission: Impossible,” a name which stuck and eventually became his show name.

To this day, Mellon is a kung fu master. He can twist and buck at the same time, sunfish, rear, do handstands, stop on a dime, drop a shoulder and spin, or throw himself to the ground if he’s really desperate to dislodge a rider. Even in his 20’s, he’s quite the equine athlete… or, should I say, acrobat. As if that wasn’t enough, it turns out Mellon is an equine genius. I know everyone thinks their horse is smart, but Mellon was and is still the smartest horse I’ve ever met. In the past he used his intelligence defensively, to think up new and cunning ways to get himself out of unpleasant situations. On more than one occasion over the last 15+ years I have accidentally pushed his “eject button” and paid the consequences....

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So, in retrospect, a smart person would have started working with him on the longe first, especially since he hadn’t been ridden in weeks - or even months. In my experience, most people in the Hunter/Jumper world only longe horses to get the bucks out or to get them tired, and it isn’t considered a tool of training in the classical sense. At the very most they haphazardly slap a pair of tight side reins on to “teach the horse to go on the bit,” clearly not knowing any better. Of course now I know about the benefits of correct longeing in the training and conditioning of horses, but I've never needed to longe horses to wear them out. If they have extra energy or bucks to get out, I ride through it. So I jumped straight to riding him.

My trainer handed me his bridle. It instantly gave me a bad feeling. I had a strong aversion to pulling and to harsh bits, and this bridle had a mean-looking elevator bit with a twisted mouth. Mellon, apparently, was very strong in the bridle and difficult to control or stop. I was told, “When you pull, he pulls back harder... or he just runs away with you.” I didn’t know much about bits at the time, but it looked painful to me, and much too severe for the horse I was beginning to learn was extremely sensitive and easily panicked. I asked if I could use my horse’s bridle instead. “It’s your funeral,” I believe were my trainer’s exact words (he was not the most tactful person in the world, but he did have a knack for producing tough, independent riders, so I guess I should thank him for that.)

My horse Lifeguard had a feather-light mouth and I always rode him in a hollow-mouth eggbutt snaffle. Their heads were about the same size, so it was easy enough for them to share. I waited until the arena was empty for the night, tacked him up and took him into the indoor. I didn’t really have a plan at this point; it was more of a fact-finding mission. Up to this point, my only frame of reference for riding and training horses was my own horse, and he was nothing like the horse at the other end of the reins now. I lead him up to the mounting block tentatively, spoke to him, gave him a pat on the neck, and climbed aboard.

In typical nervous-horse fashion, he walked off as I was getting on, but I let him, and left the reins loose as I put my foot in the other stirrup and slowly sank down into the saddle, rubbing his mane with my free hand and speaking to him. He didn’t panic, though his head was up and his ears kept turning back toward me. For a moment, I just let him walk wherever he wanted and didn’t touch the reins.

He hurried around in random circles for a few moments and then threw his head up, inverted his topline and broke into a rushing little trot. I think he was expecting me to grab him in the mouth but,remembering my trainer’s warning about him freaking out when you pulled on his mouth, I was determined to keep the reins loose, so I just sat the trot as relaxed as I could and gently turned him in with a wide leading rein and he came back to walk quietly.

First crisis averted.

So we made some big circles at the walk while I tested all of his buttons. Did he respond to leg pressure? In a big way. Did he understand bending off the leg? No. What happened when I put pressure on the reins or tried to halt? He set his jaw, threw his head up and got quick. Did he steer? Just barely. Did he understand voice commands? Nope. We had a lot of work to do, but at least it was beginning to make sense to me why Mellon was such a difficult horse to ride: he didn’t know anything. He maybe knew “go” and “whoa,” “left” and “right,” but absolutely nothing in between. And they had been jumping him over 4’. All anyone had ever done with him was muscle him around and use strong equipment to force him into submission. No wonder he fought back.

Suddenly, I respected him more. Good for him for not putting up with that kind of treatment, I thought. I’d like to think if I was a horse I’d do the same. I quietly promised him then and there I’d never force him to do anything that scared him or he didn’t understand. I just hoped the damage was reversible.

That night we worked a little in walk and trot on a loose rein, just trying to stay relaxed. When his head would come up and he'd get tense, I'd just rub his mane, tell him it was okay and eventually he'd settle again. We finished on a good note, thinking it would be best to keep the first session short so he'd know I wasn't going to rush or hurt him.

I entered the barn where my trainer had been waiting for the verdict; "You survived! How’d it go?" he asked, though I knew he had peeked in the door a few times while we were in the indoor. "It went fine," I said, "he was a good boy." "Good," he said, "then keep riding him if you want." As I led him into his stall to untack him and put him to bed for the night, I wondered how I would proceed the next day.

I had no idea. I was a “seat of the pants” kind of rider anyway, relying more on instinct and feeling than technicalities, so I figured I’d make it up as I went along, and Mellon would be sure to let me know if it was working or not... I have always liked challenges and “impossible” missions, so I was determined to find a way to work with him if it killed me. Something was bound to work...



To be continued...