Cob Jockey

It occurred to me recently that Disco is the absolutely perfect horse for me to learn how to start.

He's just so darn easy. I trust him under saddle more than I trust Connor, and for good reason: he doesn't spook, doesn't buck, doesn't bolt. 

Left him standing in place while I set my Pivo up, and Brynne marveled, "I think he's the most chill stallion I've ever met. Normally they're quite full of themselves, and he's just...not!"

I mean - this was his first ever "buck" under saddle during my lesson last weekend. 

Did you miss it?

His good behavior has meant that I get to focus entirely on the process of starting a youngster without dealing with some of the more challenging behaviors that often occur. And I need that - I'm not the most confident rider, and this is a big deal for me, to start one and not screw him up in the same ways I screwed Connor up.

What I haven't done yet is worry about where his head is. Brynne has been great for me in sketching out a roadmap of skills that we need. The first thing we needed was forward - go when I say go, maintain a given speed/gait without nagging until I say otherwise, and take me forward. Absolutely nothing else mattered.

Now that we finally have that, at my last Brynne lesson, we introduced the idea of following the bit, which is a precursor to a lot of other things. It's also something I was not going to introduce myself without trainer supervision to help me with the timing and just knowing how far to push it in the moment. It would be so easy for me to get against him or to not release in the right moment and leave him confused and frustrated.

Erring on the side of giving and letting him walk out of it a second too early rather than a second too late.

Brynne, who has started many young pulling breed horses in Dressage, gives me so much confidence and is such a good fit for us right now. On Sunday, she figuratively sat me down and said, "You're going to need to ride him a bit differently to teach him this skill. He needs a big, clear aid for this and the space between the reins to feel like he can turn. It's still effective riding, but it's not going to look like you'd ride a trained horse."

I needed to hear that, because I mostly have been riding him like I ride Connor, which is good and bad. Good, in that he's generally rose to the occasion so far, but bad, because when he needs me to be loudly clear, I sometimes am not giving that to him and it might make certain things harder for him to learn. 

Rocking vetwrap on his bridle because his forelock got stuck under his grazing muzzle halter and rubbed him raw last week

As she was walking out last weekend, she said, "I know it probably feels like you're not getting anywhere fast with him, but trust me, you're making a lot of progress and you're right on track. Just keep doing what you're doing and trust that this is just a stage."

...and what we're doing is creating sleepy baby horses

"It's almost like we have to make him anticipatory right now."

I didn't fully get to process those words from my trainer in the moment as I sat on Disco panting from the effort of getting him to canter, but I sure did later.

Disco has finally earned the "nice" bridle. Also, the Fairfax drop is the most attractive drop noseband of all time and you can't convince me otherwise.

Once again, she had asked me how much I'd ridden since my last lesson 5-6 weeks ago, and once again, I told her "Not much." 

To be fair, he was at Lisa's for 3 of those weeks and waiting on the saddle fitter for almost one, but still. How am I going to "almost make him anticipatory" if it's quite frankly been years since I rode anything on a consistent schedule?

My partner asked if he could keep bush hogging for me during that lesson, and it helped SO much. There's only so much weekend daylight for bush hogging and it all has to be done every 3-ish weeks in the growing season.

It was during a heat wave that I figured out the answer. It was going to be way too hot and humid to ride after work, and although I'd never done this before, I had the thought that I might be able to cram a ride in before work now that the barn is a quarter mile stumble from my bed. 

Turns out? I LOVE riding before work. And it might be the key to everything given the stage of life I'm in right now.

Connor holding court for the main herd outside his dutch door during my morning ride, because he can be trusted to mostly ignore them.

...mostly.

Disco doesn't need duration, he needs frequency and consistency right now, so the 25 minute rides are perfect. We warm up and practice "old" skills for about 10 minutes, I pick one new skill to work on for the next 10, and we cool down for about 5. 

"Send help, call PETA"

The change in him was almost immediate once I started giving him consistency. Everything that was previously dull and slow started to become sharper, and I could feel him paying closer attention to my aids.

Proof that I am, in fact, sitting on a horse before 7am.

It's a whole separate post, my thoughts about where I'm at with starting a young horse for the first time, but giving him a schedule and patterns that he can recognize and think through has been a game-changer for his training. Who knew.

A slightly slow mo canter GIF. Canter is a normal part of our lives now, finally.

Finally, it has been a major personal win for me too. I'm enjoying these quiet mornings and the guilt-free kid/partner time I get after work now, plus the sense of "going somewhere" with Disco is so gratifying after treading water with him since he came home. If I can keep being diligent about my bedtime, this feels very sustainable, even as I look ahead to when these mornings will be cold and dark.

Lyss, formerly of Gooseback Riding and now of Chantilly Tales, commented on my blog post about Wow saddles to say that she had two barnmates that both had Wows they were looking to sell, and long story short, it ended up that one of those saddles was in my and Eva's exact specs (which are very likely to also be Disco's specs). The seller's horse had hated it and she only rode in it for a couple months before getting something else and putting it in a closet, so it was nearly new.

Not unattractive either, but those f****** blocks (we'll get to that)

Wow has three front-to-back tree shapes: curved, semi-curved and flat, with flat being the most rare, and naturally that's Eva's tree shape. Of everything on the saddle, the seat/tree is the most expensive, so it's the only thing you really want to get right. Everything else (panels, flaps, blocks, billets, headplate) can be easily/relatively cheaply swapped out later.

Because of that, I didn't ask too many questions or request hardly any photos once I learned it was a flat tree in my size. The price was fantastic, the saddle was gorgeous, and the tree was right, so I could deal with anything else being wrong. Lyss ended up facilitating the entire sale for both of us through email, which was awesome.

It wasn't until it got here and I saw the underside of it for the first time that I realized the likely reason why the seller's horse had hated it: that saddle's panels have a combination of features that my own fitter won't sell, and in fact she confiscates them anywhere she finds them, because they create a pressure point on the horse's back that she has seen lead to pain and injuries in horses many times over the years. Her words: "Do not even sit on her in those panels."

The good news? My fitter can add a stitchline to these panels to make them safe to use, AND I had just ordered new panels for Connor's Wow that are basically the same as Eva's except that they don't have tabs, which serve to lower the panel on wider horses with less withers.

Thanks to Wow being Wow, I spent 5 minutes in my living room with a screwdriver moving panels between saddles and voila, I had a saddle I could start Eva in. It fits beautifully, aside from Connor's no-tab panels sitting higher than they should on Eva.

The fit is just freaking perfect. I am in awe of that little plastic Wow saddle fitting gauge every time I see this saddle moving perfectly with Eva like it was custom made for her. Dr. M and the gauge told me what parts to look for, a blogger helped me find it, and from the moment a saddle was ever first put on her back, it fit her.

Such a lucky horse

I love it for me too. The balance is incredible and it sort of disappears underneath me. The only thing I don't love are these giant honking thigh blocks, which do move, but not enough and not in the directions that I want them to.

When I came off Eva, Kate joked that those blocks were like a pivot point for my body as I flew off, lol

Fortunately, Dr. M is both a leatherworker and a Wow enthusiast, so short term, I am just going to take the blocks off the saddle, and long term, she is going to help me fabricate a custom block. Like anything else on the saddle, the blocks are modular and are held on by two flat screws.

You can just tell my body wants these blocks out of my way. With them gone, I will be able to move the stirrup leathers forward and my leg is going to hang in a great place.

So, a big hearty THANK YOU to Lyss for helping me find this saddle. I think I am officially on the Wow train after this experience!

To recap, on Day 1, I just sat on her for a while and then got off.

On Day 2, we introduced steering. And on Day 3, we introduced trotting.

Again, this is a horse that has had no directional steering training beyond leading and lunging. And again, Kate had a well-researched and personally tested system for starting them that worked flawlessly.

She had me using a rudimentary system of aids, using the 4 seconds to light pressure pattern based on how quickly horses process new information, that set the horse up for inside leg to outside rein success later in their careers right out of the gate.

I was to never use two legs on her, not at first. From the halt, we would turn by applying the outside rein against the neck. If that didn't get a response, I would use the inside rein in a direct/opening rein fashion, and at the same time apply my inside leg in a bumping, nagging "Chihuahua barking kind of way".

Then once she was moving, I held both reins out far in front of me and wide, creating a "box" for her to stay in. As long as she stayed in that box, she didn't get any cues, but if she strayed out of it, I repeated the same system of aids.

It wasn't perfect of course, but I was able to generally get her going where I wanted her to go in the whole ring right from the get-go. The biggest problem was me - it required a whole rewiring of my I've-only-ridden-Connor-for-13-years aid system to ride a horse like this, and sometimes the wires got crossed and I'd use the wrong leg or things like that. But, this is a new skill to learn like any other, so I'm not beating myself up about not being great at it immediately.

On Day 3, Kate's last day here, we pushed it maybe a little further than Kate would have if she was at home, but I got the impression she wanted to set us up for success after she left. First of all, we saddled her. No pomp and circumstance, just put it on her in the indoor and she was fine.

I gotta write a whole blog post about this saddle, but for now, let's just say the incredible power of the blogger network strikes again. Can you BELIEVE how well this saddle fits her? It's silly. And how wonderful for Eva to be able to start right off with a saddle that doesn't hurt or annoy her in any way.

We also graduated from the rope halter to a leather sidepull that I had originally bought for baby Disco. Kate: "Um, why do you even HAVE a sidepull this small?"

On Day 3, the wheels fell off the bus in a very honest way. We were introducing trot, and suddenly Eva had a very honest green horse moment and got overwhelmed by me moving around more up there, and my lizard brain didn't even try to one rein stop her as she started very athletically bronc bucking. 

And that's the first time I ever fell off a Welsh Cob, and my first fall off anything in well over a decade. After watching her airs above the ground at liberty, I just knew it would be her and had a feeling I had it coming.

(Side note: although I sure wasn't thinking about it, the video shows I had a textbook Landsafe over the shoulder fall. Protected my head at the expense of my limbs, and my helmet didn't even take a hit. Glad that clinic paid off!)

I have video, but it was so honest of her, I won't put it out there on the Internet, because it was more my fault than hers. I surprised myself that I wasn't even remotely scared to get back on. I understood exactly what happened and why, and I know she's a lazy potato at heart, so I knew it wouldn't happen again. We ended the lesson trotting loose in the ring again no problem.

After the fall. The only casualty was my brand new Canter Culture breeches which got a hole in the knee, wah.

Since then, I have been lunging her with the saddle on and stirrups flapping to get her used to movement up there, and I have ridden her multiple times without an ounce of fear. Which still surprises me. I am much more confident in my late 30s than I was in my teens and 20s. I guess we can thank Connor for that.

So, I started the clinic with an unbroke pony, and I am now able to confidently ride her on my own every day (well, 5 days a week), putting her a month or two ahead of where I thought we'd be. Kate is a wizard.

My goals for Eva for this clinic were simply to find out what she still needed to learn before I got on her, which I assumed would be sometime in September. When Kate got there, Eva had still never been saddled, bridled, long-lined, ground driven, ponied, or any number of other things I thought she needed to know before having a rider on her back.

So if getting to this point

First moment sitting on her

on the very first day Kate was here seems premature, well, I don't blame you for thinking that. But in the end, it was the opposite of premature. It was incredible. And it was no accident.

On Friday morning, Kate spent a long time doing groundwork with her. Figuring her out. Where she holds tension and how to help her work through it. How she reacts to pressure, and not just pressure applied to her head. How to help her feel and deal with her emotions, not just shut down and bluntly accept whatever humans ask of her. Doing many of the "advanced leading" exercises with her trying to establish that communication and bi-directional respect that underpins everything. 

She also taught Eva a skill that she had tried to teach Pyro and I on a virtual lesson last winter that just did not compute with my brain. In a sentence: you stand on the mounting block and hold your arm straight out and the horse, from wherever it is in the ring, even eventually at liberty, sidles up to you, puts itself in the right place for mounting, and stands there. 

Horse starts here (or wherever)

Horse ends here

This exercise does a few things. Obviously, it's great for mounting, but it also gives the horse a lot of control. You cannot force a horse into this exercise, there's no physical way. You can only ask, in kind of a vague way that almost doesn't have anything to do with the motion the horse has to perform. 

You just keep asking, slowly, patiently, and the horse has to figure it out, with the timing of your release telling them when they've made even a baby step toward the right answer at first, and a re-start of the exercise telling them "good job, but not quite."

For clarity, we started this exercise with me/Kate on the gate for more height and control, and then moved to the mounting block placed against the wall when Eva was solid with it.

It also teaches them self-control. They learn that their only job when in position at the mounting block (or gate) is to stand. No matter what happens to them. With less tolerance over time as they get good at it, if they swing their head around, or dance around, we re-start the exercise.

Eva soaked it up like a sponge, and was quickly a pro at the mounting block game. I mean, QUICKLY. She is so engaged with people, and has a quick mind for figuring out each new game. 

At the end of that session, Kate said "You're definitely going to get on her. Want to get on her later this afternoon?"

Record scratch, excuse me what?

Now here is where I say, that my actual reaction was "Sure!". Because as I have told Kate, many times in all of the lessons she's given me since 2016, I have thought "That sounds like total bullshit." But every time, whatever she is teaching me WORKS. So now, my reaction to anything she says is "That sounds like total bullshit, let's do it!" 

So, weenie adult amateur starting a green horse that has never even been saddled before bareback and in a rope halter after calling the horse to her on the fence Disney-princess style? Total bullshit, let's do it!

By this point, Eva had really internalized the idea that no matter what happened at the mounting block, it was her job to stand still. From the gate position, Kate had me start by rubbing her all over her back with my foot. Then walk away from it to release that pressure, and then we restarted the mounting block exercise. 

This time I got on. My instructions from Kate were "Don't sit up. Align your spines as quickly as possible while on your belly and then slide off the other side immediately."

That went perfectly. We repeated it a couple of times, and then the next time, I sat up. And just sat there. And breathed. And everything was fine.

To be completely fair, this was also the reaction the first time I sat on the only other Castleberry Cob I've started, Shae, so it has quite a bit to do with the generous nature of this breed also. But that was, let's call it a more traditional way of starting (since I was in college taking a class from an established colt starter)

At this point, my mind was thoroughly blown. And I had only just sat up there! But it was completely stress-free for both of us. It felt like I had not forced Eva into this, that Kate and I had created a communication framework between us, that Eva understood her role, and that she was not over-faced, even though on paper, it looked like we went from A to F on the alphabet and skipped a bunch of steps.

"Isn't it great? I start all my horses like this now," said Kate, beaming, as I sat up there trying to remember to breathe and still incredulous that I was sitting bareback on an unbroke horse.

Guess who has been started?

Maude and I have always been on the same page about starting him. I told her that my original plan was to start him very lightly the winter of his two year old year, because as a young stallion with a busy mind and a bit of an attitude especially about submission (anyone remember his indignation about being haltered the first time? lol), I wanted him to learn that riding and submission are A Thing while he's still young and impressionable.

That said though, Maude and I don't talk as much as you might think we do. Her English is very good, but it's her second language and she's shy about speaking it. Which is fine - I trust her implicitly and have yet to disagree with any decision she's made with him. I knew she had been getting him used to the harness since last summer and had been ground driving and long lining him:

An unusually warm and wet winter in Quebec!

But it was a surprise to me when she sent me this out of the blue one day:

She sent me the video when she got signal, and I had to ask: what number ride is this?

"First!" she replied with delight. She had hauled him out alone to a place he had never been before and had a trainer she trusts get on him, someone Disco had never met. And he was able to w/t/c both directions loose in the indoor no problem. On the first ride! My jaw was on the floor. It seriously looked like a fifth or maybe tenth ride.

Guys, CONNOR wouldn't have gone around this well in a strange indoor alone.

He had one naughty moment partway through the ride, and having watched it, I am SO glad it was this guy and not me or even Maude that was on his back for this. You can tell by how defensively the trainer is riding that he has started a lot of young stock, so when Disco tried this one prop-and-bronc move, the guy sat it well and carried on, and Disco learned that that behavior doesn't get you anything.

If the trainer had come off in this moment and Disco learned he got something from acting like this, I firmly believe it would have changed everything. As it was, this was the only time he pulled this move.

According to Maude, he put his head between his legs twice more that ride but more "gently" and then never tried it again. "[Trainer] corrected him, and he understood!"

But did that lesson stick? I am happy to report that it did - because at the next ride two weeks later, it was Maude that was on his back!

Maude is about my size, maybe an inch shorter and 10 lbs lighter than me, so this is a good idea of what I would look like on him right now.

This time, the trainer got on him first and Disco "didn't put a foot wrong at any time!!!" according to Maude. And then the trainer handed the reins to Maude, saying "he had not done that a lot in his career, trusting a young horse enough on the second ride so that the "owner" can ride him."

It occurs to me listening to these videos that he's going to come back "speaking" French, lol. Might be lunging my stallion in French when he gets back.

Maude admitted she was nervous and gave him a little less rein than the trainer did (I have been very happy with how forward the trainer has ridden him, and on a loose rein), but he was still perfect for her, giving her w/t/c both directions with no issues.

Look at her big smile!

That will probably be the last time he hauls over to that indoor this winter, as we both agree he doesn't need drilled on riding at age 2 years and 8 months. I'm glad she did it twice - once wouldn't have been enough to convince him that this is A Thing, but he got a lot out of going twice. Maude and I did too - we learned he can figure out a new game quickly and can take correction and have that lesson stick.

Tucked into Maude's gorgeous barn for the night during the winter

For the rest of the winter, she plans to continue driving training and to continue to haul out to new places any time she can, likely for low speed trail rides with friends and things like that. She said: "I don't think he needs to be on a serious training plan. Just enjoy what he's doing and do it for fun." 

I am so on board with that - I want him to come out of the stall like "What cool thing are we doing today?" and not get burnt out or drilled to death.

And with that - we have a riding horse 😍