With our return to campus came the return to the Horse Program for a good many of our students. After riding our horses back from Pasture (an area on the other side of the valley) on Wednesday and getting out to the Gymkhana Field to practice our skills on Thursday and Friday, it was time to get into the thick of our competition season.
Most of the freshmen and new upper-class riders have passed their Riders Test by this time. To pass, students are asked to perform a number of maneuvers on their horses that test their horsemanship skills. These are the same skills that they will need to perform well in both the Extreme Cowboy (XCR) and gymkhana races that will be the focus of our riding throughout the spring. Among the skills that the students will have mastered are being able to walk, trot, and lope in straight lines, balanced stops, drifting, counter bending, rollbacks, turning on the forehand, lead changes, and balanced stops.
Yesterday was our first scored Extreme Cowboy Race of the season, obstacle courses that include walking through and over tarps, weaving through poles, jumping cavalettis, and weaving either forward or backward through barrels. As a member of the Horse Faculty, I found it a thrill to watch how much the students’ skills have improved throughout the year and to see them work with their horses as partners in order to complete the courses. As a teacher, I know that these races are one of the best kinds of experiences our students can have on horseback, as the feedback from the horses is immediate, and the students come to understand that their attitudes and emotions have a lot to do with whether or not they are successful. If they are relaxed and confident, their horses will be relaxed and confident. If they are uptight and nervous, guess what? Their horses will be, as well.
In these “races” it isn’t always how fast you can go through the course, but rather how well you can go through the course, and because small errors or increases in speed can compound themselves very quickly, patience is a virtue. Many of the students came to the understanding that sometimes in order to complete the course quickly, they needed to go more slowly. As the morning ended and the students rode back to the barns, each one knew that his or her skills had been tested and knew what to work on before next Saturday, when we have our next set of cowboy races. It’s now time for our students to change gears a little bit and get ready for the gymkhana races that will take place this Wednesday afternoon, where they will be have a chance to test their skills on race courses of poles and barrels.