My Heart Is In My Boots, and That’s a Good Thing

Home Team

“It’s not… men… it’s just him.”
Ianto Jones
Torchwood
Children of Earth: Day One
IMDB: quotes

Hell has frozen over. I have black field boots. Courtesy of Carousel Tack Shoppe.

My Preciouses

They are so gorgeous and fit me so well, I don’t care.

I needed new boots. My brown Ariats [New Equipment] blew out at the sides. The choice was another set of jod boots to continue using my half chaps, or suck it up and get tall boots. Last time I had to make this choice, my chances of ever riding in tall boots seemed so remote that the thought of buying a pair was too depressing. This time, I have sidled closer to the possible option that perhaps one day I might potentially ride in a venue that might required these. More a matter of needing new footware than of getting ready for any specific outing.

Plus, the failure rate of the brown boots did not inspire me to another pair. To be fair, my first pair of black Ariats lasted 8 years [Boots, Before & After]. The second pair, bought a year before the brown ones, are still going strong. The wear was a factor, but mostly it was time.

Tall boots it was. Black field boots was NOT what I expected walking in the door of the tack shop.

For those who do not understand the nuance here, let me explain how riding boots work. Dress boots have no ornamentation. They come in black. Field boots have laces at the ankles and frilly caps on the toes. They come in brown. Black field boots, i.e. black boots with ankle and toe decor, are wrong. Period. Black field boots have also been around for 30+ years. Black field boots are so popular today that the tack shop does not stock black dress boots.

Ah well, I still have my black dress Dehners if I feel like going old school. Why did I buy new ones if I have these? Old boots are pull-on. New boots have zippers down the back seam. Fit is totally different. Will find out if I like new fit. Old boots need to be fixed. The last heel replacement left nails sticking up into my foot, so I need to send them back home for proper repair. Old boots are in great shape, except for the heel, but I’m not sure they still fit. Old boots represent where I used to be with horses.

Basically, the whole business is so emotionally fraught, it was easier to move forward.

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott

In Which I Consider How Much Schooling Is Enough

Writing, Home Team, Combined Driving
Chicopee Woods Agricultural Center

“Puck … was a right stroppy pig at his only outing in 2017, so he’s going on lots of adventures this year as a non-compete.”
Lauren Sprieser
COTH: Reintroductions

I’m not sure what a “stroppy pig” is, but I’m pretty sure Milton was one at his first driving show [not a post]. Since then, we have taken him as a spectator to two Saddlebred shows [MSSP, NEGA]. Horse and rider have both benefited from the experience of seeing new things and from the experience of living through seeing new things. Another spectator show is coming up. Should we go? Or are we ready to show?

When are you ready? Do you have a choice? If you have a target competition, the amount of time to practice is dictated by the calendar. Reagan better be ready when the gate swings open in Lexington [Road to the World Cup]. For actors in a production, the number of rehearsal is limited by the number of days. They better be ready when the curtain goes up on opening night.

When are you ready? Have you done enough? We thought we had done enough last time. We were wrong. Undoubtedly, we would all benefit from more exposure. OTOH, we could make a career out of being a non-compete. The goal is to become a compete. You can assemble all the rockets you want in computer simulations. At some point you have to get out the sheet metal and rivets to see if your idea can fly.

When are you ready? How many options do you have? When I lived in the Mid-Atlantic region, the show calendar was a buffet. Blow a show? That sucks. Go to the next one. In the Southeast, shows are multi-day efforts that require vacation days from work, long drives, and room/board for horse & human. This is particularly true for driving. There just aren’t that many chances. You don’t want to blow one. If you are run a 5K road race, there’s probably another one next weekend. If you want to finish an Ironman, there probably isn’t. “There are over three dozen Ironman Triathlon races throughout the world that enable qualification for the Ironman World Championships” Wiki: Ironman Triathlon

When are you ready? Is anyone else going? Puck can go along while his barn buddies compete. Milton is the reason we go, not an add-on. If you sell your paintings, it’s easy to toss one more in the van headed to the Art Fair.

When are you ready? Does anyone else care? A professional horse trainer has all the regular pressures of horse training, plus bill-paying owners to keep happy. As amateurs, Husband and I can please ourselves. A sight-seeing trip for yourself is easy enough to move around, reschedule, or cancel. There is less flexibility when planning the annual sight-seeing trip for the garden club, church group, or Boy Scout Troop.

When are you ready? Are there external factors? Milton will not be going to the spectator show in August. Not because we are ready. Not because we are not. We are not going because it will be too hot.

Update: I occurs to me that I might have been unclear. There are two groups of shows:

1) ASB shows that we go to with Stepping Stone. Milton goes as a spectator. There probably are a few classes we could wedge him into, but he’s not the right kind of horse. It’s an expensive way to come in last. Plus, group classes on the flat are not his destiny.

2) Dressage shows, events, driving shows, and – eventually – jumper shows.

We are using the first group to get ready for the second group. Or maybe you got that.

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott

Notes from North Georgia, Us

Home Team, Combined Driving
Another horse show, another dawn over a parking lot.

 
Another showcation, this time sans show. Stepping Stone Farm only brought suit horses to the Northeast Georgia Charity Horse Show & the Mid-Summer Classic Horse Show , at the Chicopee Woods Agricultural Center, Gainesville, GA. Husband Greg and I brought Milton along for more away-from-home experience before summer closed in. Previous adventure [Primitive Trailer Camping, Us at Mid-South 2018]

Living
+ Still enjoyed being on the grounds.
– Lacked the novelty of a new adventure.

+ We had all day to ride/drive and take care of one horse.
– Care of one horse and two work sessions took all day and wore both of us out. I brought projects. I never touched said projects.

+ When the evening session of the show ended at 11:30 on Saturday night, I could stumble across the parking lot and go right to bed.
– Repeatedly stumbling across a parking lot while folks drove back and forth.

+ City matters. More options to eat in Gainesville than in Rainsville …
– … which was a good thing, as we had far more trouble with ants.

+ Every faucet had someone’s hose attached, open to all users. Ours was in the wash area.
– If the hose leaks all over the aisle, turn it off when you are done. Why is this hard?
– Almost came home without our hose. Who thinks to check the washstall when packing?

Riding/Driving
– Milton is not Caesar, never will be [In Defense, Deary Monday].
+ Different does not equal worse. I need to value Milton for his own self.

+ Teaching a horse to do something is easy.
– Teaching a horse to do something until it becomes a habit is hard.
+ Milton has done so much lunging that the routine settled him when he had his Mr. Hyde moment.

– One pea soup explosion, 3(5) hard spooks, and some generalized fussing.
+ 9 work sessions in 5 days, all ending with gold stars.

– The Mr. Hyde/pea soup was the very first day. Usually Milton waits until after spending the night in a stall. Greg started lunging and Milton briefly lost his mind. I didn’t see exactly what happened. I was too busy running around the arena closing gates. It was almost as if Milton thought he was back at the track, had a panic attack, then realized he was with his people, doing his thing.
+ After a few minutes of Milton lunging quietly, I got on. Go me.

– Hard spooks. One, repeated twice, was on day two, while driving, at a trailer next to the ring. Spooked, spun, cantered off. Lather, rinse, repeat. The third time ended with some moderate hopping. Greg settled him, put him to work, and ultimately trotted quietly back at that end once or twice. The heat may have been on our side, re sails, taking wind out of.
+ In retrospect, probably not as bad as it looked/felt. We are both hypersensitive to Milton’s bad behavior at the moment. Coach Courtney saw everything and was not perturbed.
+ Did not turn a hair at hitching. Wondered why we were hyperventilating.

– The other two hard spooks were during grazing sessions. One at a passing trailer. I saw it coming and had choked up on the bat. The other was horses at liberty in a distant ring. I had just finished mentally commenting that he doesn’t mind what other horses do when he suddenly noticed the other horses, thought, ‘Holy Horse Frolics, Batman’ and spun.
+ Either I’m really good, or he wasn’t really trying to get away.

– Generalized fussing. The third time in the arena, on the last day, Milton decided that he had never seen the space before, that he didn’t like the looks of it, that motorcycle in the parking lot was the herald of doom, that the people on the bleachers where on a rampage, etc., etc.,
+ Standard issue green horse behavior that I found ridable.

+ Schooling in the arena with traffic. Oncoming: no rearing. Yay. Caesar did this all the time. Passing: slow down to see what the other horse is up to. Weird, but yay.
– Overtaking: On look, my new best friend. I must go over to them and bond. Tug, tug, tug, stay in your own lane your silly beast, darn this loose steering.

– Milton had to ride AND drive each day. We were very careful about the heat and how much we asked. A lot of the riding was wandering around looking at things.
+ Eventing and Combined Driving have three phases. Fitness is a factor.

+ The horse is allowed physical and mental breaks.
– The rider/driver is not.

+++++ Milton was a trooper.

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott

Notes from North Georgia, Milton

Home Team, Combined Driving
Please note how I have carefully arranged myself so that I can still see out.

Another trip on the rattly box. Another home away from home. (Gainesville GA, ed.)

Trailers is scary. Not mine. Mine is fine. Other trailers, with other horses on them.

Motorcycles is scary. Don’t like loud vroomy noises.

Other horses is scary. Sometimes. Other times, I look at them and laugh. Why use all that extra energy?

I don’t like using extra energy. Except when I need to use extra energy. Then, I have a LOT.

I like to leap away from scary things. But not too far. If I did, I’d be all on my alonesome.

I’m an old hand at bridling and hitching now.

I walked EVERYWHERE and looked at EVERYTHING. Different arenas, barns full of other horses to talk to, even walking down a big – a huge – hill, and trotting in the open.

A bucket of treats. Five pounds of carrots. Constant hay. Home away from home is not without perks.

I need to talk with the brown horse about sharing the load. (Good luck with that. Many others have had the same conversation with the brown horse over the years, ed.)

Update
[Notes from North Georgia, Us]
[In Which I Consider How Much Schooling Is Enough]
[What Happens When One Spends Five Days Sitting About In Northeast Georgia]

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott

Road to the World Cup, Rail Work vs Patterns, Guest Post

Adventures in Saddle Seat

 

Stepping Stone Farm rider Reagan Upton is on the U.S. Saddle Seat World Cup Team. She is sharing her story. Welcome Reagan.

Part 1 [Have Saddle, Will Travel]
Part 2 [First Team Practice]
Part 3 [Three-Gaited & Five-Gaited]
Part 4 [Do I Miss Equitation?]
Part 5 [Traveling for the Team]
Part 6 [What Is Equitation?]
~~~

Reagan and Rare Friends win Adult Equitation at the 2015 Dixie Cup horse show.

The World Cup competition consists of two phases (Phase I and Phase II) that are held on separate days. The riders are required to ride a different horse for each phase. Each individual phase will consist of two segments:

1. Rail work: the riders will all compete together and work at a walk, trot and canter (the five-gaited team will also work at the slow gait and rack) both directions of the ring.

2. Pattern work: this will be executed individually. All the riders competing have received six patterns already to begin studying and practicing. At the competition, two of the patterns will be drawn at random and those will be the patterns the used for each phase.

The rail work section will run like any other horse show, with the exception that I will have never competed on the horse I will be riding. The rail work segment on an unfamiliar horse doesn’t stress me too much. I have been lucky to have many opportunities to catch ride at horse shows on horses I have never ridden before. Competing on an unfamiliar animal is something I am familiar with.

The pattern work section could be tricky. If you have read my previous post [Part 3], you know that five-gaited equitation is not present at USA shows. So doing five-gaited pattern work is not something I have a lot of experience with. I have done 100s if not 1000s of three-gaited patterns, so I am comfortable and well versed in the individual elements of the patterns. I am just not polished in the “gaited format”. Luckily, I have the patterns to practice before the competition. Two of these patterns will be used during the competition. The wild card will be the horses…

USA is required to provide all the horses that will be used for the competition since we are the host county. USA’s five-gaited horses will not be familiar with pattern work since USA does not have five-gaited equitation. So racking a figure 8 or slow gaiting a serpentine is not something the horses have been previously trained to do. At least the playing field will be even. All five-gaited riders from all countries will be riding gaited horses that probably have never been asked to do pattern work before this competition. The biggest challenge for ALL riders will be communicating each required pattern element to the horses who will all likely be thinking, “You want me to do what???”

Baby On Board

Random Snaps

 

When we go over to Stepping Stone Farm with Milton, I bring drinks to store in the tack room.

There’s a future foal in the refrigerator! Tell me this isn’t a weird time to be alive.

I know the idea was to keep the box cold. I took the photo as quickly as possible and then closed the fridge. I even went back to double check that the door was shut.

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott