September 3, 2010

Fast Track, Week 1: The Adventure Begins


Right, so I’m here in Colorado and have just completed the first week of my Fast Track course. As I’m too tired to write anything during the week (and really need to go to bed as soon as I get back to the condo anyway), all of my blog posts will be written on the weekend and will be, as my roomie and travel companion Alex would say, epic. Those with great intestinal fortitude, read on.
Week 1 of our adventure was really our journey to Colorado, which took almost a week from the time we left home to having the horses settled at the Parelli Center. The length of the trip had given me great pause when I signed up for the course, but it turned out to be much easier than I had imagined possible, in large part because Lupin and I both had excellent travel companions. 28 hours on the road by myself with a horse to worry about would have been tedious if not downright harrowing, but with Alex and Indy along, it was actually kind of fun. They’re both easy-going spirits whose company it would be difficult not to enjoy, and Alex and I were able to stay onsite with the horses every night on the road, which made things much less stressful.
So with nothing much to report from our trip, we’ll move on to the course itself.
Day 1
Monday morning we got up at 6:30 in order to have the horses, who were boarded down the road for the weekend, to the Parelli Center by 8. As we hadn’t spent much time on trailer loading beyond what was absolutely necessary on the road, we took a little time loading both boys before we left—an activity that indicated we might have had a little slippage in that area over the course of the trip. But we got a little improvement, got them loaded up, and headed for the Parelli Center.
Check-in was uneventful despite the mostly rainy, slightly chilly weather (rain in Colorado is more like Irish rain than Southern US rain: an intermittent, mostly light downfall that doesn’t impede activity). We were assigned pen numbers for our horses and off-loaded our stuff into corresponding locations in the tack cabins, feed containers, and cubby holes in the lodge. (Lupin’s pen is at the top of a hill, so that I get plenty of exercise carrying blankets and water buckets and pushing wheelbarrows up and down the hill. The appropriate response to such a situation in Parelli land is: “Oh boy! I get to build some extra physical stamina!”)
After we had our horses and stuff somewhat sorted out, we met in the lodge for orientation, and I was quite impressed with the talk that John Baar gave. I will confess that I had heard some things about the Fast Track course that concerned me a little: about how we would spend the first 3 days being tested, and about how they don’t really teach you the way instructors do in a clinic, instead leaving the students to work mostly on their own. I worried for months that the testing would make me feel the need to prove myself at the expense of my relationship with Lupin, thus getting our month off to a horrible start and clicking me into hyper student role instead of caring partner role. It also seemed like if we were mostly left on our own to do things . . . well, I could just stay home and do that.
Horsemanship Principle #2: Don’t make or teach assumptions.
John explained the rationale for the testing—that in Pat’s dream course, the teacher gives the students the final exam on the first day of class so that they know exactly what they’ll be graded on at the end. He assured us that he wasn’t going to test us on anything he wouldn’t subsequently teach us. And he told us to trust the process, even when we don’t understand it—a thing that is sometimes hard to do at home, but that seems so much easier when you’re actually on the Parelli ranch surrounded by so many positive people. I found it surprisingly easy that Monday to let go of all my concerns about how the course would be run and just go with the philosophy that it all would work out well.
John also talked about the need for us to take responsibility for our own learning by being proactive when we need help, which I’ve heard before, but I liked that he added we need to take responsibility for our own attitudes. He said that you can choose to be a victim and complain about the things that are done to you, or you can choose to be proactive and make things happen for you. I like the correlation between this and the way that Parelli teaches us to do things with and for our horses rather than to them. (For an apropos aside, visit complaintfreeworld.org.)
As we moved into the afternoon and the written theory test, I was just happy that the horses got a day to settle in and chill and that all the testing for the day would be without the horses. That took away the chance of my doing anything negative with Lupin as a result of my own stress, which in turn took away most of the stress. By the time we moved outside to do our tool tests, I was actually having a lot of fun. All of the remaining testing involved different stations, with all of us numbering off so that we’d be evenly distributed but moving individually from location to location. We were given maps with numbered locations, so it became almost like a treasure hunt, and I had no great illusions about my tool savvy, so I was able to just have a good time with it. We have about 50 people in the class, almost half from Europe & New Zealand, so it was also fun to pass them going from task to task and learn a little about them.
In the evening we were free to get our horses out and spend some time with them. Lupin was, of course, a little up, but being an introvert, his “up” is rarely extreme. This is perhaps a bad thing, because it makes it easy for me to avoid dealing with the fact that I don’t have his full attention. Alex said she has to get Indy’s full attention because, as an extrovert, he can get quite dangerous if she doesn’t have it, but I can always choose the lazy route with Lupin, though sometimes there is a price.
By the end of the day Monday, my tiredness created both laziness and bad judgment in me. I should have just let him walk around, asking nothing. But there were some obstacles, so we played a little bit, and one obstacle was a trailer. I wanted to follow up on our trailer loading session of the morning, and I’d also heard we’d be tested on trailer loading the next day, so I couldn’t resist doing a little prep. But I didn’t set it up very well, and it was getting dark, and I couldn’t really tell whether Lupin was unconfident or just testing me when he refused to go in the trailer.
I’ve been working on myself to ask more out of him because I tend to ask too little, so I defaulted to being fairly strong with him, and he started to pitch a fit, trying to come over the top of me and kicking out at my stick and string. I, in turn, got even stronger with him because I don’t want him to think he can intimidate me. I don't say this was the wrong response, but it didn't do much for our relationship, particularly as we had to quit without reaching much of a good stopping place because it got dark while he was still emotional. In the end the only thing I could say that was purely positive was that I hadn’t gotten emotional--which, given Lupin's level of emotion, was pretty impressive. I may have been stronger with him than I needed to be, but I hadn’t done it out of anger or fear. So I called that one little thing a win, and I made the promise to myself and to him that that was it: I absolutely would not do anything else over the next few days that would put our testing before our relationship.
That promise made Day 2 and Day 3 infinitely better, but as it is now infinitely later than I should stay up, even on a weekend, my narrative of those two days will have to wait.

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