Fast Track, Week 2: Never say never, don’t always say always—usually say usually.

As soon as we thought we had a pretty good idea of how things would go, of course they changed. Our second week was a little scattered, in part because of the weather and in part because of the Summit that was held at the ranch the following weekend.

Monday, though, went along pretty much as expected. We had focus stations in the morning, and I went back for more development of my relationship with my 45’ line. This time we paired up and simulated run-away horses online, which is actually quite a relevant issue for me. In fact, I prefer to be on Lupin’s back rather than on the ground with him because online seems to be where he has the real advantage and where our biggest disasters take place. This kind of thinking is, to be sure, a little predatorial, since predators also feel safer once they’re on the horse’s back where they’re out of range of hooves and teeth and the horse can’t run away, though I prefer to think it’s just that I have years of comfort being on horses and have spent many fewer years developing comfort on the ground, where you have to deal with things like, ah, let’s see—45’ lines.

In any case, despite the fact that Kick-ass Carmen was helping us simulate our problems, I was not at all confident that my ability to shut down 100+ pound Juulke would translate into an ability to shut down 1,000+ pound Lupin. It transpired later in the week that I was correct about this.

We also had a focus station on preparing for riding as a follow-up to the demo John and the instructors had done the week before. John had advised us to play hard on the ground so you can ride softly in the saddle, by which he meant that we should get all 5 gaits online before mounting up. If you’re a horse person, and you’re counting, you’ll realize that he’s including the gallop in that list. I’ve only ever gotten a few strides of canter out of Lupin on the ground, and I’ve only even seen Lupin gallop once. Hmmmm.

But I tried to set myself up for success by going into an area that was fenced in case Lupin broke away from me and by taking him away from all the horses so that he might have a little right-brained stuff for us to work through. But no. He was beautifully cooperative in many ways, but we weren’t going to get any high speeds. We did get some fairly snappy transitions in our circling game, though. Then we continued through our morning playing around with some indirect and direct reins, where once again I found myself in my less-favored position on the ground, since Parelli strongly believes in getting everything really good on the ground before you ask for it in the saddle. As my roommate Alex would say, “Buh!”

In the afternoon we spent a little time on the seat builders and had a demo on shimming saddles and muscle development by John’s wife Kathy and then finished the day playing around with our horses a bit.

On Tuesday we started with focus stations, and my main break-through was when Lisa helped me with my change of direction on the circle. Lisa’s great because she’ll appear next to you and say cheerfully, “How’s it going?” Pretty much any answer you give her will result in, “Great, let me see it,” and once you show her what you’re working on, she gives you some pointers for improvement. It’s useful to have someone like that around because you don’t always know what’s mediocre enough at any given moment to merit serious attention. Of course, pretty much anything can be since it’s more about your level of savvy and your horse’s level of respect than about the particular task.

I quickly found out that what I thought was a fairly reasonable change of direction on the circle was actually riddled with disrespect from Lupin who, as usual, was not giving me snappy responses because I, as usual, wasn’t expecting enough out of him. So we both rounded out our morning with a little emotional growth courtesy of Lisa’s counseling.

The afternoon demo was excellent because it was on trailer-loading, which I never get tired of watching, and because John picked a left-brained introvert to play with. Trailer-loading is probably the most dramatic example of the need to get the horse’s mind before you get their feet. So many, many people care only about what the feet do, which is why so many trailer-loading explosions happen, but if you get the mind in the trailer before the feet, then you’re all good. And of course that applies to everything else you do with horses as well (because, as Linda is fond of saying, it isn’t about the trailer).

In the course of playing with Pepsi, John talked a good deal about problem-solving, for both the horse and the human. He told a story about one time a student asked him a question, and he gave what he thought was a helpful answer. Immediately afterwards, the usually affable Linda Parelli descended on him and demanded, “Why would you rob that person of their journey?” John had apparently just given the student the answer rather than asking questions that would lead the student to discover the answer for themselves.

John told us that we need to have the same attitude with our horses. Micro-managing them robs them of their own journey and results in horses that don’t use their brains. Instead, we need to set things up for them to figure out—preferably without us being right on top of them—and ALLOW THEM TO MAKE MISTAKES. When they do, have the attitude of “Yeah, I make mistakes, too,” and fix it up.

For humans, it’s equally important that we’re willing to experiment with different answers. John told us probably the most depressing and the most liberating thing we’ll hear during the entire course: that no one ever gets to a level of horsemanship where they always know the right answer. You always have to be willing just to try something and see if it gets better, and if it doesn’t, change your strategy. The consolation is that you usually have at least a 50/50 chance of getting it right.

But John also re-defined mistakes in a way that is helpful. He said that if you never make a mistake, you’re not learning, and that the only real mistake—the only kind you should feel bad about making—is when you make a conscious choice to do something that you know is wrong. Otherwise, you’re just exploring new strategies to find out what works. And you’ll only find that out by trying it and seeing what happens.

He advised us to spend our horse time that afternoon playing with all kinds of squeeze games and with the concept of encouraging our horses to be puzzle solvers. Unfortunately, we had two guest speakers that afternoon, so we didn’t get much time at all with our own horses.

That problem persisted on Wednesday, when torrential rains forced us inside all morning. Pat said it was the most rain he’d ever seen in one day on the ranch, and while we were thankful not to be out in it, we were all getting a little stir-crazy by the afternoon, despite the excellent presentation that Carmen did on horse-anality.

While the presentation as a whole was quite good, the biggest and best thing that I took away from it was Carmen’s negation of my suggestion that one characteristic of left-brain introverts is their tendency to get angry. Carmen said that horses don’t feel anger—that’s a human emotion. She allowed that left-brain introverts can be highly aggressive, but not angry.

For me, this was a huge break-through. One of my mental blocks with Lupin has been the belief that he gets angry, and that perception has made me feel that, at root, there’s something in Lupin that makes me want to keep my distance a little. (Never mind the hypocrisy behind this sentiment, since I myself am quite capable of getting angry and Lupin is usually the recipient of that anger.)

But while it may seem too nice of a distinction to care much whether horses get angry or aggressive, to me it makes a world of difference. Aggressiveness is just an inappropriate or exaggerated response, whereas anger is an emotion directed at someone. If Lupin merely needs to learn that his responses are sometimes over the top, that’s doable. If Lupin has anger issues, that’s a bit more complex. I was quite relieved to learn that it’s the former problem I’m facing with Lupin.

I felt my sense of simpatico with Lupin growing further as we moved into the small Coverall to do a simulation. We talked about matching and mirroring your horse before you ask them to change what they’re doing. We simulated right-brained extrovert behavior, where two people connected through their hands and the “human” had to match the intensity of the movement from the “horse” and then add four ounces. Then we simulated right-brained introvert behavior, where the “horse” goes internal and the human has to mirror and then try to get them out of it.

I had no problem with going introverted. I do it quite a bit when I don’t want to interact because I’m tired or I’m feeling emotionally pressured. But that’s still a thinking kind of introversion: it’s a conscious decision, and I’ll come out of it if the topic becomes interesting enough or the other person handles the situation in the right way. What I can’t do, at least not since I was a kid, is go introverted out of fear. I just couldn’t simulate it, nor could I find a way to bring my “horse” out of it: I treated her like a left-brain introvert and did what works with Lupin. I guess that for better or worse I do understand Lupin, even though that understanding doesn’t always give me the tools I need to move forward with him.

In the afternoon, as if by arrangement, the sun came out for exactly the 3 hours we had planned to spend riding. We had our first group lesson in Arena Grande with John where we followed the rail, asking for lateral flexion as our horses walked forward, with some of us following the inside rail, some following the rail outside the ring, and all of us periodically switching positions. The rhythmic consistency of riding the rail was soothing after so much time inside without horses, and I was pleased with the progress Lupin made giving me lateral flexion as we walked along without coming off the rail.

But then we started doing walk/trot and trot/walk transitions. John wanted us to get 5 steps of trot and come back down to a walk without using our reins. Lupin—ironically, given that he’s an introvert—is usually happy enough to jump up into a trot just when I raise my energy, but downward transitions have been a bit of a struggle for us. Even with the rein I was having some problems, and John kept barking, “Do less sooner. If you have to ask for the trot after one stride, do that.” I did that. That didn’t work. He kept on, though, insisting on what seemed to me an impossible conundrum: that we absolutely under no circumstances trot more than 5 strides, but that we also not use our rein to get the downward transition. I’m not saying at all that that can’t be achieved—one of my big goals is to get Lupin listening to my energy as much on the downward transitions as he does on the upward transitions, but the only way to do that, it seemed to me, was to get effective with the rein to back up what I was doing with my seat.

My frustration grew as we went along, and I became increasingly frustrated at my inability to curb my frustration, and my feeling of being put in a situation that I didn’t know the way out of. Unfortunately, that was the end to what was an otherwise lovely afternoon. I’m still not really clear on why John didn’t take us through the phases that would have gotten the end result he wanted. But I suppose I did at least learn what it feels like to Lupin when I insist on something out of him that he doesn’t know how to give and I don’t allow him to do what he needs to do to get there.

On Thursday the chaos of the week continued. We had our “remudas”—our focus sessions—a day early because the Summit was scheduled to start the following afternoon. Starved for time with my horse, I got him out while I waited on my coaching session. Lupin must have been a little starved for activity too, because he let me know on the way down to the Lower Savvy Park that he could kick me in the head if he wanted to, and then when we got there he broke away from me on the circle, which is an old pattern that he periodically reverts to.

So when I went to meet with Carmen, I had my number one focus clearly in my head. She gave me a few strategies to play with, some of which she had demonstrated the day before with Aspen, and I moved along toward Friday.

I told Alex on Thursday night that it felt like we were going to have a field day because we were having a half day at the end of the week, and it turned out that we did have a field day. We spent the morning in the Lower Savvy Park having races in our different groups to see who could go backwards or sideways to the fence fastest, playing Simon Says, and things like that.

Bit by bit spectators for the Summit began to trickle in, and by the first session in the Big Top that afternoon, there were 1,000 people on the ranch. I coped with this as long as I could, which was about two hours, at which point I was worn out and took a nap in Alex’s truck.

It’s not that I’m uncomfortable around crowds, but time spent in crowds does not count as down time either, and I was seriously in need of some of that.

I wasn’t able to face the Summit until Sunday, in fact. I spent Saturday with Lupin up in the area that had been roped off for us, and it was actually kind of nice to have the contrast of the crowd and noise across the way to throw the peace of the pen area into relief. I couldn’t go much of anywhere with Lupin, but I still spent a nice quiet day with him playing and riding a bit in the round pen and then wandering up into the woods a little way to eat some grass. In a way, it was more peaceful even than the previous weekend because everyone was up with Pat in the Big Top instead of scurrying around making all sorts of complicated plans about how to spend the weekend.

By Sunday I thought I could tolerate the crowd again, so I wandered up and saw some really cool spotlights with some of our instructors and some of the interns. I enjoyed sitting on the fence and watching the show, and all in all it turned out to be a perfectly balanced weekend. So I moved into Week 3 in a pretty good state of being.