The Girl Loves Horses
Much has happened since I last posted.
I had a really bad couple of days at work.
I thought I was gonna have a meltdown on account of trying to get things going faster and then suddenly not having anything to do, but that has been reconciled.
My friend and protégé Erin is having her share of difficulties getting started at the racetrack – nobody wants to use her until she has some experience and she can’t get any experience unless someone uses her – and I have suddenly been too busy to help her. The bad horses I was getting made me believe I was causing them; by just agreeing to help the wrong people, or by being inattentive and preoccupied.
I was having trouble communicating my desire to get paid for my work. That issue resolved itself into having even more trouble getting paid, but less trouble communicating about it.
Finally everything broke through and I feel like things couldn’t be better and to top it off, people are thanking me for all kinds of stuff. The money is still slow, but the economy has hit us, too.
It has been cloudy and rainy for a few days and began to rain just as things were winding down Friday morning. My clients are not quite fast enough to enable me to get on 10 or 11 a day, but that has been my choice. I love the people I work for, and feel that it’s somehow wrong to bark out “rush rush rush” all the time.
It can’t be all about money for me at work. It has to be about the horse. I want to ride them to the track and back to the barn and I don’t like people having to lead them down there for me and switch off at the bottom of the hill. If, to do it consciously and without getting all flustered means taking those few extra minutes helping tack up or riding back and forth, I’m happy with that when the people I work with have done what they can to have everything go smoothly.
I’m not getting on six before the break every day as I wished. But I’m satisfied because I let go of my own self-pity long enough to say what I needed. The extra effort to make things go smoothly for me makes me feel appreciated, and I think that is all any of us really want, more than money.
So YESTERDAY…NO, THE DAY BEFORE yesterday, I went out galloping with Erin, who had asked me to help her get a summer job at the track and is now attempting to get up to galloping. She’s too big to be a jock, but loves the track and racehorses - at least so far, better than anything else. She’s galloping a horse we call Captain that is a little too green for her. He isn’t bad, but he won’t go forward. Looks to be that although he's been gelded, his testosterone is still elevated, and especially with male colts you really have to get behind the engine and get them to scoot forward.
The thing about us humans is we like to use our hands to hang on, and most of us, to do this, must lean forward to have a grasp of some part of the horse. It doesn’t come naturally to lean back. Still, it makes more sense to do this when on horseback. That is, if you are short of the level of impulsion that you desire.
If a panther jumps on the horse’s shoulder, the horse will duck away, either left, right, or backwards. Thousands of generations of horses have learned this at the cellular level; it’s a reflex just like jumping when frightened. Lots of weight on the shoulders begs that reflex.
On the other hand, if the panther jumps on the horse’s ass, the horse goes forward.
So it makes sense to get back on the horse’s ass to get it to go forward, except that our instinct is to reach for the closest thing. So we reflexively lean forward and grasp the horse’s mane. In doing so, most people allow their entire body to shift forward – from the hips. But that reflex actually threatens to trigger the horse’s reflex. Or worse, it does trigger that reflex and the horse winds up running free and unhindered probably somewhere in the direction from whence the two of you came.
Older horses who have learned “all about riders” are incidentally kind enough to overlook the mistake, opting instead to go faster. (Actually, that's a sort of tounge-in-cheek joke; because half the reason so many novice gallop people get run off with, only to hang on more tightly, only to get run off with even worse, and on and on... )
It’s difficult to resist the impulse to hang on in that fashion, and it takes a certain amount of inner thigh muscle development. You have to be able to sit with your ass back and your feet forward. That’s at least part of why you can tell someone what to do, but they will look like they aren’t listening; they think they’re doing it, or they’re trying to do it, but it’s just not there yet.
So Erin is riding a bit too far forward and horse is confused. As soon as she gets her center of balance farther back on Captain he’ll go forward instinctively, then he’ll have learned something, too! Then she can stop clucking and tickling him with her stick; right now he has no idea why she is doing this.
After she gets it down pat, she probably won’t remember how to do it the wrong way, but until she does, the horse cannot learn what she wants.
Bear in mind, he also probably wants to play and maybe be mischievous, because after all, he’s a young horse and that’s what’s fun about being a young horse; telling jokes and being spontaneous. In fact what's happening with Erin is that Captain thinks she's playing a game and he's honestly trying to accomodate her. He has no concept of the reality of racing looming in the near future.
I shoudn't digress so far, but I want to add that when you change the scenario it changes the dynamic; place Captain beside anther horse for a week, and his attention will focus on the other horse as playmate, and allow the rider to play a more dominant role as coach.
Cassie has the same problem when she rides him, although she has more hours in the saddle and is a little farther along than Erin. Nobody wants to let the horse’s head go but it's awfully hard to steer when they get behind the bit, which is what Captain is doing. Learning to play with the rider instead of gallop can be counter-productive. Nobody wants a racehorse that tells jokes and is spontaneous when the objective is winning a race.
Poor John Holder needs Junior to pay for his oats in five months, not plod around bobbing his head and kicking the air!
Which reminds me that Captain is a beautiful gelding. I took a video of him with Erin aboard.
And that brings me to the next exciting event of late; that this young woman actually came to visit when I invited her over. I wanted to tell her about my career and how it sucked. No, no, actually it didn’t suck; it was fantastic and I’m so glad to have had it. But my career was about experiencing life and learning to ride any horse, as opposed to getting somewhere or becoming someone – which I still managed to do in my own little way. Oh, yeah, and having something to write about (which I haven’t even begun to do!)
So, Erin comes over on, um, Friday. A nineteen year old person might actually be my audience. It’s one thing to talk to a group, but another entirely to hang out one-on-one, at least for me. I’ve always been nervous and self-conscious about that; still she managed to put up twith me. She stayed couple of hours and I showed her all my photos and tols her about my career. After she left I realized I never said a word about being a jockey and never showed her a win photo.
The last thing I said as she was leaving was; “if you got nothing else out me jabbering at you for two hours, just know two things: first, when things suck or something bad happens, you are not alone. Whatever has happened to you has undoubtedly happened to someone else, somewhere else, at some other time. Second: when it’s good, it’s really good.”
So the next day (Saturday) she agreed to take a horse to the gate for someone she didn’t know, from the receiving barn. Everything bad that could happen happened, except for she didn’t get injured.
It was schooling race time, so he had to tell the trainer she couldn’t jog him to the gate (I guess the horse was gonna be too tough and he didn’t want her to gallop it) then she got on the track and the horse was wheeling or something and she asked Barb to help her, and Barb (the Outrider) freaked out and sent her back, after a tongue-lashing about not picking up receiving barn horses with a provisional license and anyway she (Barb) used to have the horse and it was a flipper, and what the hell was she going to the gate for?
Naturally word spread like an oil spill to poison half the back side with; “what the hell was that girl thinking?” and now she gets to carry that stigma – of having done something stupid.
Nobody seems to remember when they were just starting out and they were the stupid one. Either that or else our "village" uses strong language and sound reprimands to "raise the child". Still, I honestly think there’s an element of satisfaction whenever somebody new blows it; people have only one way of thinking, and that is, if one does something wrong, it’s bad. So when somebody new does something wrong, everyone else is happy to point it out to mitigate the seriousness of their own past offenses (which nobody remembers but them anyway).
As far as I’m concerned there is no wrong, when you are starting out. Or if there is, there's at least no bad. And there’s no right, either. There’s only trying to do whatever you can, and that is all positive, as in; it’s a three-dimensional event. Erin’s acting on her dreams and that’s a good thing. When you start with no prior experience of how to go about something, you have to make mistakes, and almost invariably that’s the first thing you do.
You have to keep going out there with the willingness to bounce left and right if you want to find the center, and bouncing left and right is bound to put you in out of bounds territory. There’s no such thing, in my opinion, as shame in making any glaring mistake. You can do wrong but it doesn’t make you bad. And you can do right and wrong at the same time, even if you are the only one who sees the right part (and you probably will be).
Anyone who does everything right the first time without introduction is lucky. If they never miss they’ve never learned. And I suppose it’s true, too, that they may have never needed to learn, but then so is it that they are lucky. They are the Lucky Few; they don’t even figure in the bell curve. The rest of us could lighten up.
I couldn’t wait to tell Erin how pumped I was that she took the initiative, but she left after that and I never found her till the next day. I told Barb I was helping her and that I was glad that she tried to do something even if it was wrong. It tells me how committed she is, that she could take that bold of a step (for readers who have no sense of what galloping out on a racetrack is like that was one scary thing to try. Some veteran gallop people will not seek work out of the receiving barn).
She doesn’t have any direction yet, though. If she’s anything like me she’ll probably go back to school later when her idea gets a little clearer and she knows what’s out there.
Anyway, I saw her the next day (Sunday) and told her. And in the meantime, Lori’s horse Casey’s Girl won, which is really great because Casey’s education was very incomplete. She was mainly conditioned on the equiciser at the farm. She was very fit but not very educated; not even to do what she would naturally do when placed beside another horse, which is test her speed against it. We put some time into teaching her and encouraging her competitive spirit, and it paid off.
And now Lori can afford to pay me off. We counted roughly thirty gallops since the last time they wrote me a check. So that’s another $300 in my accounts receivable column…
While Erin was visiting, I took her down to the house I bought in ’07. She said it was “awesome”. This morning she asked me if she could show it to Walter, so she really did like it. I told her I was gonna have a bonfire over there, and they could come. Maybe Wednesday if the weather is OK. I have tons of brush and tree limbs that have I have to get rid of. Come to think of it, I better sharpen up my axe and get out the saws and so on…Maybe I can get a little help moving and chopping brush!
It’s been very rainy the last two days, but I’ve been still working. The track surface is holding up unbelievably well; very few wash-outs. The only thing I’m not happy with is that a very small filly that Danny has working with (whom I call “Butterball”) seems to be sore somewhere. I’m hoping it’s only her feet, but she stumbled all over the place yesterday. She needs some shoes, and she needs him to take the warning seriously. I can’t let her get sour – he already has one young horse that has really sore feet. I got on her one day and I thought “she could flip over, and I wouldn’t blame her”. I don’t want to try to make a horse go if it doesn’t want to. I only like making horses go that want to.
Well, speaking of going, I’m gonna sign off. I’m tired and I want to sleep an hour before I go to work. But it’s been good lately. Really good.
I had a really bad couple of days at work.
I thought I was gonna have a meltdown on account of trying to get things going faster and then suddenly not having anything to do, but that has been reconciled.
My friend and protégé Erin is having her share of difficulties getting started at the racetrack – nobody wants to use her until she has some experience and she can’t get any experience unless someone uses her – and I have suddenly been too busy to help her. The bad horses I was getting made me believe I was causing them; by just agreeing to help the wrong people, or by being inattentive and preoccupied.
I was having trouble communicating my desire to get paid for my work. That issue resolved itself into having even more trouble getting paid, but less trouble communicating about it.
Finally everything broke through and I feel like things couldn’t be better and to top it off, people are thanking me for all kinds of stuff. The money is still slow, but the economy has hit us, too.
It has been cloudy and rainy for a few days and began to rain just as things were winding down Friday morning. My clients are not quite fast enough to enable me to get on 10 or 11 a day, but that has been my choice. I love the people I work for, and feel that it’s somehow wrong to bark out “rush rush rush” all the time.
It can’t be all about money for me at work. It has to be about the horse. I want to ride them to the track and back to the barn and I don’t like people having to lead them down there for me and switch off at the bottom of the hill. If, to do it consciously and without getting all flustered means taking those few extra minutes helping tack up or riding back and forth, I’m happy with that when the people I work with have done what they can to have everything go smoothly.
I’m not getting on six before the break every day as I wished. But I’m satisfied because I let go of my own self-pity long enough to say what I needed. The extra effort to make things go smoothly for me makes me feel appreciated, and I think that is all any of us really want, more than money.
So YESTERDAY…NO, THE DAY BEFORE yesterday, I went out galloping with Erin, who had asked me to help her get a summer job at the track and is now attempting to get up to galloping. She’s too big to be a jock, but loves the track and racehorses - at least so far, better than anything else. She’s galloping a horse we call Captain that is a little too green for her. He isn’t bad, but he won’t go forward. Looks to be that although he's been gelded, his testosterone is still elevated, and especially with male colts you really have to get behind the engine and get them to scoot forward.
The thing about us humans is we like to use our hands to hang on, and most of us, to do this, must lean forward to have a grasp of some part of the horse. It doesn’t come naturally to lean back. Still, it makes more sense to do this when on horseback. That is, if you are short of the level of impulsion that you desire.
If a panther jumps on the horse’s shoulder, the horse will duck away, either left, right, or backwards. Thousands of generations of horses have learned this at the cellular level; it’s a reflex just like jumping when frightened. Lots of weight on the shoulders begs that reflex.
On the other hand, if the panther jumps on the horse’s ass, the horse goes forward.
So it makes sense to get back on the horse’s ass to get it to go forward, except that our instinct is to reach for the closest thing. So we reflexively lean forward and grasp the horse’s mane. In doing so, most people allow their entire body to shift forward – from the hips. But that reflex actually threatens to trigger the horse’s reflex. Or worse, it does trigger that reflex and the horse winds up running free and unhindered probably somewhere in the direction from whence the two of you came.
Older horses who have learned “all about riders” are incidentally kind enough to overlook the mistake, opting instead to go faster. (Actually, that's a sort of tounge-in-cheek joke; because half the reason so many novice gallop people get run off with, only to hang on more tightly, only to get run off with even worse, and on and on... )
It’s difficult to resist the impulse to hang on in that fashion, and it takes a certain amount of inner thigh muscle development. You have to be able to sit with your ass back and your feet forward. That’s at least part of why you can tell someone what to do, but they will look like they aren’t listening; they think they’re doing it, or they’re trying to do it, but it’s just not there yet.
So Erin is riding a bit too far forward and horse is confused. As soon as she gets her center of balance farther back on Captain he’ll go forward instinctively, then he’ll have learned something, too! Then she can stop clucking and tickling him with her stick; right now he has no idea why she is doing this.
After she gets it down pat, she probably won’t remember how to do it the wrong way, but until she does, the horse cannot learn what she wants.
Bear in mind, he also probably wants to play and maybe be mischievous, because after all, he’s a young horse and that’s what’s fun about being a young horse; telling jokes and being spontaneous. In fact what's happening with Erin is that Captain thinks she's playing a game and he's honestly trying to accomodate her. He has no concept of the reality of racing looming in the near future.
I shoudn't digress so far, but I want to add that when you change the scenario it changes the dynamic; place Captain beside anther horse for a week, and his attention will focus on the other horse as playmate, and allow the rider to play a more dominant role as coach.
Cassie has the same problem when she rides him, although she has more hours in the saddle and is a little farther along than Erin. Nobody wants to let the horse’s head go but it's awfully hard to steer when they get behind the bit, which is what Captain is doing. Learning to play with the rider instead of gallop can be counter-productive. Nobody wants a racehorse that tells jokes and is spontaneous when the objective is winning a race.
Poor John Holder needs Junior to pay for his oats in five months, not plod around bobbing his head and kicking the air!
Which reminds me that Captain is a beautiful gelding. I took a video of him with Erin aboard.
And that brings me to the next exciting event of late; that this young woman actually came to visit when I invited her over. I wanted to tell her about my career and how it sucked. No, no, actually it didn’t suck; it was fantastic and I’m so glad to have had it. But my career was about experiencing life and learning to ride any horse, as opposed to getting somewhere or becoming someone – which I still managed to do in my own little way. Oh, yeah, and having something to write about (which I haven’t even begun to do!)
So, Erin comes over on, um, Friday. A nineteen year old person might actually be my audience. It’s one thing to talk to a group, but another entirely to hang out one-on-one, at least for me. I’ve always been nervous and self-conscious about that; still she managed to put up twith me. She stayed couple of hours and I showed her all my photos and tols her about my career. After she left I realized I never said a word about being a jockey and never showed her a win photo.
The last thing I said as she was leaving was; “if you got nothing else out me jabbering at you for two hours, just know two things: first, when things suck or something bad happens, you are not alone. Whatever has happened to you has undoubtedly happened to someone else, somewhere else, at some other time. Second: when it’s good, it’s really good.”
So the next day (Saturday) she agreed to take a horse to the gate for someone she didn’t know, from the receiving barn. Everything bad that could happen happened, except for she didn’t get injured.
It was schooling race time, so he had to tell the trainer she couldn’t jog him to the gate (I guess the horse was gonna be too tough and he didn’t want her to gallop it) then she got on the track and the horse was wheeling or something and she asked Barb to help her, and Barb (the Outrider) freaked out and sent her back, after a tongue-lashing about not picking up receiving barn horses with a provisional license and anyway she (Barb) used to have the horse and it was a flipper, and what the hell was she going to the gate for?
Naturally word spread like an oil spill to poison half the back side with; “what the hell was that girl thinking?” and now she gets to carry that stigma – of having done something stupid.
Nobody seems to remember when they were just starting out and they were the stupid one. Either that or else our "village" uses strong language and sound reprimands to "raise the child". Still, I honestly think there’s an element of satisfaction whenever somebody new blows it; people have only one way of thinking, and that is, if one does something wrong, it’s bad. So when somebody new does something wrong, everyone else is happy to point it out to mitigate the seriousness of their own past offenses (which nobody remembers but them anyway).
As far as I’m concerned there is no wrong, when you are starting out. Or if there is, there's at least no bad. And there’s no right, either. There’s only trying to do whatever you can, and that is all positive, as in; it’s a three-dimensional event. Erin’s acting on her dreams and that’s a good thing. When you start with no prior experience of how to go about something, you have to make mistakes, and almost invariably that’s the first thing you do.
You have to keep going out there with the willingness to bounce left and right if you want to find the center, and bouncing left and right is bound to put you in out of bounds territory. There’s no such thing, in my opinion, as shame in making any glaring mistake. You can do wrong but it doesn’t make you bad. And you can do right and wrong at the same time, even if you are the only one who sees the right part (and you probably will be).
Anyone who does everything right the first time without introduction is lucky. If they never miss they’ve never learned. And I suppose it’s true, too, that they may have never needed to learn, but then so is it that they are lucky. They are the Lucky Few; they don’t even figure in the bell curve. The rest of us could lighten up.
I couldn’t wait to tell Erin how pumped I was that she took the initiative, but she left after that and I never found her till the next day. I told Barb I was helping her and that I was glad that she tried to do something even if it was wrong. It tells me how committed she is, that she could take that bold of a step (for readers who have no sense of what galloping out on a racetrack is like that was one scary thing to try. Some veteran gallop people will not seek work out of the receiving barn).
She doesn’t have any direction yet, though. If she’s anything like me she’ll probably go back to school later when her idea gets a little clearer and she knows what’s out there.
Anyway, I saw her the next day (Sunday) and told her. And in the meantime, Lori’s horse Casey’s Girl won, which is really great because Casey’s education was very incomplete. She was mainly conditioned on the equiciser at the farm. She was very fit but not very educated; not even to do what she would naturally do when placed beside another horse, which is test her speed against it. We put some time into teaching her and encouraging her competitive spirit, and it paid off.
And now Lori can afford to pay me off. We counted roughly thirty gallops since the last time they wrote me a check. So that’s another $300 in my accounts receivable column…
While Erin was visiting, I took her down to the house I bought in ’07. She said it was “awesome”. This morning she asked me if she could show it to Walter, so she really did like it. I told her I was gonna have a bonfire over there, and they could come. Maybe Wednesday if the weather is OK. I have tons of brush and tree limbs that have I have to get rid of. Come to think of it, I better sharpen up my axe and get out the saws and so on…Maybe I can get a little help moving and chopping brush!
It’s been very rainy the last two days, but I’ve been still working. The track surface is holding up unbelievably well; very few wash-outs. The only thing I’m not happy with is that a very small filly that Danny has working with (whom I call “Butterball”) seems to be sore somewhere. I’m hoping it’s only her feet, but she stumbled all over the place yesterday. She needs some shoes, and she needs him to take the warning seriously. I can’t let her get sour – he already has one young horse that has really sore feet. I got on her one day and I thought “she could flip over, and I wouldn’t blame her”. I don’t want to try to make a horse go if it doesn’t want to. I only like making horses go that want to.
Well, speaking of going, I’m gonna sign off. I’m tired and I want to sleep an hour before I go to work. But it’s been good lately. Really good.
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