Fast Track, Week 1, Continued . . .

Day 2 & Day 3

All we did the next two days was testing. We met after breakfast and lunch every day to number off and get our maps, and then we headed for our respective locations. Day 2 we did Online before lunch and Freestyle after lunch; Day 3 we did Liberty before lunch and Finesse after lunch. Usually we had about 10 tasks to complete.

Lupin was still a little up during our Online testing, but I was completely relaxed and treated that morning as a chance to show Lupin the ranch. So we wandered from station to station, embracing mediocrity in our testing while we tooled around and said good morning to everyone. It was kind of interesting just to see what we could do, and I was actually quite impressed with the figure 8 pattern, which he often abhors. The task was to stand on a Frisbee and send him around the cones without using the stick, and by golly, he did it. Sometimes it’s useful to try something you wouldn’t have thought to try and just see what happens.

We also maintained our low-key attitude through the trailer loading: I just walked up, calmly asked him in, and took what he gave me, which was a good deal more than he’d given me the night before. When he came back out, we wandered off again.

By the afternoon Lupin had started to chill, and Freestyle is our favorite thing anyway, so we had some fun. We followed the rail really well with Lupin listening to my focus: I didn’t use my reins at all and only used my stick a little. And we even managed to canter along the rail and have quite responsive transitions. I was then particularly impressed with our test for lateral flexion (head bent around toward me), which we’d never held for twenty seconds before, but again, you’ll never know what you might get ‘til you try. He bent around softly and when he tried to straighten out, he hit the rein only very lightly and came back and stayed.

So we ended the day on a good note with both of us relaxed and happy, though that wasn’t going to be a trend that would continue. I had known all along that the next day wouldn’t be anything too impressive since Lupin and I have done little in Liberty and nothing in Finesse, but I was looking forward to seeing what Lupin would and wouldn’t offer during our Liberty sessions anyway. However, I failed to factor in the cows.

During our first test, Lupin went right-brained—he adopted an instinctual-response-without-thinking mentality—and completely stopped focusing on me. My assessor said Pat was out yelling to his students in another ring, and when we went out, I saw that they were working cows. Lupin has yet to find a level of emotional placidity with cows. Oh boy.

There’s a diagram in the lodge that I quite like that has an arrow going toward the term “Horseman” and along the way there’s a box that says “Oh no!” and then “Oh boy!” The point is that before you can become a horseman, you have to begin to look at what most people see as bad situations as instead exciting opportunities to learn/experiment/practice new things. But I think they’ve left out a phase in between “Oh no!” and “Oh boy!” and that phase is a less enthused “Oh boy,” as in “Oh boy, here we go again.” It’s the stage when you’re no longer panicked by your horse freaking out, but you’re not exactly excited about the opportunity to deal with it either.

There was no point in continuing our testing without getting Lupin’s attention back on me, so off we went to an area where Lupin could watch the cows and started doing figure 8’s. In left-brain (thinking) mode Lupin isn’t keen on figure 8’s, but they do help him when he’s right-brained because they require him to change direction so much that he has to pay attention to what he's doing rather than completely obsessing about cows, etc. So we carried on with that until he was reasonably calm. That set us back about half an hour, and we were pretty much dead last at finishing up our testing. But Pat always says to take the time it takes so it takes less time, and my reward was that afterwards he was at least quite good at the tasks that catered to his horse-anality, like standing on a tarp and having it rubbed all over him.

The Finesse session in the afternoon didn’t give us much to crow about, but it did flip a little switch in my brain. Carmen, the Swiss instructor, noted as I rode into our faux dressage test that I should be fairly good at it. Apparently she’d been studying my information form where I’d filled out my riding history. I quickly strove to take away any illusions she might have there by telling her that all the dressage I’ve done was a long time ago on a different horse. I'm pretty sure that our test drove that point home fairly well.

In fact, I’ve been really resisting Finesse for the past few years, and I’m not sure why. Maybe partly because I assume that Lupin won’t like it, and maybe partly because he doesn’t seem quite as naturally talented as Limerick was. But when we did our test, something about being in a dressage arena with the intent of riding nice, fluid circles and serpentines (notice I say “intent”) made me want to go there with him and made it feel like it might be possible. And as subsequent days have reinforced the fact that we shouldn’t limit our horses by pigeon-holing them in one horse-anality, I’m now quite looking forward to getting a start on our Finesse while we’re here.

So the day ended with a positive vision, anyway, if not an overwhelmingly positive performance.

Day 4

Thursday was mostly a classroom day. Probably the thing that made the biggest impression was watching videos of lions and zebras. The instinctual response for the class was to sympathize with the zebras (oddly, since humans are predators and not prey animals), but afterwards John talked about how lions generally have one successful attack out of five, and that if they go much more than five, they become too weak to be successful again, which means that they die of starvation—arguably a much worse death than being killed by a predator.

Part of the point was that we need to stop our incessant classifying of things as good and bad, right and wrong. In the natural world, things just are the way they are. This applies to right-brained behavior in horses as well. We tend to see instinctual horse behavior as negative because so much of it gets horses into trouble once they’re living in the human world. For instance, panicking when they get caught in a wire is a natural response for them, but it can also kill them. We generally prefer our horses to be calm and think through things, not least because we are often scared ourselves of what our horses do in right-brained mode.

But right-brain behavior is simply what they are programmed to do in nature to survive, and a lion’s behavior is no less right-brained. Neither, for that matter, is ours. We looked at a lot of pictures of sports like football and rugby and soccer where the humans looked very much like lions jumping on zebras to understand the point that instinctual behavior is the source of a lot of talent for both humans and horses, but if we want a partnership between the two, then both humans and horses need to be able to moderate right-brain responses and function on the left side of the brain as well. (Pat defines horsemanship as "the habits and skills that horses and humans need to become partners.")

In the afternoon John did our first demo. He had told us on the first day that the course would cover all the basics from Level 1 starting with haltering your horse and that Level 4 is just Level 1 skills done with excellence. I had been really excited to hear that because I know that Lupin and I have a lot of holes we need to fill in.

True to his word, John started with games 1, 2, and 3 and with basic things like your horse leading off behind you when you walk off and stopping when you stop. As I found playing around with Lupin after the demo, it’s amazing how easy it is to become accustomed to settling for a lack of excellence in the simple things. But with help from one of our coaches, we got much better. The trick, of course, is continuing to pay enough attention to maintain the excellence once you’ve got it.

Day 5

By Friday we began to get a sense of what a normal day would look like. We spend the mornings at focus stations where there’s a topic (like making friends with your 45’ line) and coaches to help you, but not any structured teaching. And we pick which, if any, focus stations we want to go to and play with whatever we need to be playing with.

Part of this is determined by the focus sheets we fill out every Friday afternoon with a coach. The goal is for us to become our own problem solvers and learn how to break tasks apart into smaller elements to build up to them, and the enjoyable effect is that we get to work with a great degree of independence. If you had asked me at home, I would’ve been very depressed at the prospect of working independently (that is, after all, what I do all the time), but here it makes you feel empowered rather than frustrated, and I find myself much more motivated to seek out our holes and work on them.

So here’s what a typical day looks like for Alex and me:

6:30 Arrive at the ranch to feed & water the horses and muck their pens

7:15 Head down to the lodge to eat breakfast and find out what our focus stations are for the morning

8:00 Gather whatever equipment we need (and at some point our horses) and play around at focus stations until around 11:00

11:30 Meet without horses to watch a demo that our coaches present with their horses

1:00 Eat lunch

2:00 Either have some sort of class session first or head straight out to play with demo material with our horses, or have a riding session led by John

6:00 Eat dinner

7:00 Bed the horses down for the night, cleaning their pens again, giving them evening feed and water and blanketing them

8:00 Head home

8:45 Pass out

Day 6

On Saturday mornings the Parelli Games are held. Once again, when I heard about these before I came, they sounded like one more thing we’d be expected to do that we wouldn’t really want to do. But now that I’m here they seem like as good a way as any to get your horse out and moving around on the weekend.

The Parelli Games are basically combinations of the 7 Games done within certain time limits, either online or freestyle. They’re yet another good test of whether you’re willing to put the relationship first under pressure, and they’re also, as Lupin and I discovered, a great way to find more holes.

The first task we tried to do was to play the circling game with me standing on a pedestal. Lupin refused to go out and around me; instead, he practically fell over himself trying to climb on the pedestal with me. It wasn’t until later that I realized he thought I wanted to mount him, and he probably thought I was insane because I kept asking more while he was practically on top of me. I had apparently done a very thorough job of teaching an assumption: that whenever I’m up on something, I want to get on him. Needless to say, we promptly went off and practiced playing some different games with me up on top of things.

Then I rode Lupin bareback for the “Barrel Race,” which we came in second on at a very slow trot, largely because we were in a small minority of people who actually managed to remember the pattern (to be fair, it was a double barrel pattern).

After the Games, we were free to kick back for the rest of the weekend . . . with a list of things to play with, of course. But the weekend has never felt so good.