As my students all can attest, I’ve been geeking out all week about an article featuring nuggets of wisdom from Carl Hester. I’ve been so stoked about it because a) he’s awesome, and b) so, so many of the things he highlights in the article are things that I believe in, and preach to my own students.
He’s also got a great way of putting some really wonderful but complicated things about horse training. One of my favorites from the piece is that when it comes to training a young horse from the beginning of his career to Grand Prix, you’ve got six years of dreams.
What I believe he means is that, from the time we get them going at 3.5 or 4, to the time they’re 9.5 or 10, you’ve really got no idea how good they’ll be, or how far they’ll go. And has this ever proved to be true in my own horses: most of the ones I’ve gotten to Grand Prix were pretty unpleasant at 6, 7, even 8, and some of the ones that I feared wouldn’t make it have been some of the best.
Ella was never, ever unpleasant to live with; she didn’t go through the hissy fits that the boys did. But she was neurotic and weird and tricky, and there was a window in the middle where I wasn’t sure she could dig in and fight for the Grand Prix like a horse has to in order to get there. And then she turned 9 and did it all, and then she turned 11 and got good at it. And the rest is history.
Midge was a whackjob at 5 and 6 and 7 and even 8, with all kinds of naughty in him. More than one trainer told me to not waste my time, to get him sold as a young horse, as he’d never get there. But then he turned 9 and got it together, and then he turned 10 and did it all. At 8, Midge stood up (his favorite trick as a kid) in the middle of a Prix St. Georges test and stayed there so long I could have had a spot of tea. We got eliminated. At 10 he was scoring to almost 69 percent at Grand Prix as a very, very green horse, and now anyone can ride him. The dream came true.
We talk all the time, when my trainer friends and I get together, about how to pick ’em—it’s easy to get caught up in the Young Horse stuff, which is not a program without merit, as we’ve seen some very good products of that program as Grand Prix horses down the road, though it’s far from a guarantee. I even catch myself now and again fretting the Developing program, how oh-my-gosh what if Horse X doesn’t make it to Prix St. Georges by 9, or Grand Prix by 10? And then I am reminded: if those things don’t happen, the horse will be normal, developing at the rate that most horses who achieve those levels develop.
So when I pick horses for myself, I pick ones that, for sure, have three good paces, a conformation that I like (the longer I do this, the more I realize that while I can ride lots of different types successfully, I prefer short-coupled, long legged and erring on the side of pulling rather than sucking back behind the bridle), lots of energy, and more than anything some inherent ability to accept pressure, with the kind of mind that doesn’t lose its cool about being told what to do.
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And then… I wait.
I’m not idle. During my six years of dreaming, I cultivate that innate talent for taking the pressure of the leg and seat and hand, and teach the rest. I teach the horse to carry himself, without my assistance. While I never ever want any horse to be dull to the leg, I don’t necessarily want him to be super duper sharp, not until the end, when I know he doesn’t get silly about the changes or about the pirouettes or about the piaffe. I want to have to dig in just a bit, to have to ride hard just a bit, so that when the going gets tough and when the tent is flapping or the flowers are scary, I know that I CAN dig in and have my horse accept me and stay focused, rather than pitching a fit about being Told.
And I see the big picture. I don’t school movements on the daily. I spend a colossal amount of time on the 5- and 6- and 7- and 8-year-old horse on a big circle, picking away at my horse’s gaits, his way of going, and making it mine. I make transitions, within and between paces, until they are seamless. I change direction and bend and line of travel until there’s no muss, no fuss. While some horses thrive in the snaffle and some horses love the double, I try and do most of my schooling in the snaffle until they’re pretty solid at Prix St. Georges, because I want to preserve the double’s power and use it as a finishing tool and not a training one. And I do really methodical and repetitive and, to be frank, pretty damn uninteresting work for a really long time, as if I was taking my horse to the gym and plugging away at lifting 10 pound weights over and over and over again, because that’s how I know I’ll make him strong without breaking him.
It is really pretty boring stuff.
Some of them will figure out Prix St. Georges by 8, or even 7. Most won’t. I’ve never had a 7 year old Prix St. Georges horse or an 8 year old Grand Prix horse, and I’m not saying those aren’t possible to do WELL—we see them, and we see them go on to long careers with great success. But we also see the ones who don’t get it together until 10, or 11, or 13, go on to be just as successful. There is no One True Path. There is no timetable.
So we dream. And we do the work, the slow, boring, detail work. We turn the horses out, hack them, play with them, to keep their minds fresh. And we wait.
