Something that has been hard for me to reconcile is the understanding that trainers, with their knowledge more vast than my own, still can be limited in their desire to see beyond the immediate and obvious. I suppose everyone in some way exhibits that quality, but when you look to trainers for advice, and receive advice that is inconsistent with the evidence in front of you, with no logical explanation for the difference, the discrepancy is unnerving to say the least. I'm a person that looks at an issue from every angle, weighing the raw data as well as the possibilities one can postulate based on that data.
As an undergraduate, the first educational lessons I received taught me that Truth, and Truth’s bastard child, Opinion, are spider webs—silken, sticky, dangerous as a double-edged sword, as scarce and transparent as the Hope diamond, yet ephemeral and easily torn down. I struggled for a while with this concept and its subsequent conclusion which is that we really know nothing for certain.
When receiving advice from trainers, it’s tempting to hide in opinion’s heroin embrace. After all, you trust your trainer’s knowledge, and it’s easier than thinking for yourself. But the sense of insecurity that derives from the conclusion that opinion is a matter of perspective forces one to look at concrete evidence to maintain sanity. Unfortunately, opinion is as a rainbow—a multi-colored image resulting from intangible light (trainer’s knowledge) reflecting off tangible water (the horse), forever seared into one’s view of rainstorms so that forgetting it is impossible, but still just an image that is never permanent.
It's been hard for me to reconcile that there are trainers out there who talk a good game, but when push comes to shove, and you look under the shiny veneer of their words, you see that sometimes there really isn't much tangible substance to their opinions at all. Over the past year, I've learned to actively question the advice I receive about Nicole, compare it to the gospel of the great masters, and, ultimately, look to the horse to tell me if the advice holds water. This is why the trainer who regurgitates from books basically holds no esteem with me, regardless of background; I can read also, and they aren't saying anything I can't discern on my own (this doesn't apply to those trainers universally agreed upon as being a master, since they wrote the book, so to speak).
Part of my absence from this blog has been because I've been trying to make sense about the varying opinions I have received regarding Nic. Her talent hasn't been up for debate; every trainer I have taken Nicole to has agreed that she is talented. What has been questioned, however, is how far her temperament will allow her to go. Relaxation being the key to successful dressage, and with Nicole lacking relaxation, I've received varying opinions about her ability to become an FEI horse, and over the past couple weeks have sought to resolve my own opinion about the matter.
This week I took Nicole to a clinic with Walter Zettl to seek his opinion on Nicole. You will recall that Mr. Zettl has seen Nicole in the past, and has given me a favorable opinion of her abilities. What I did not ask him in the past, however, is how he feels her temperament will affect her ability to progress up to the highest levels of dressage. I made sure to ask this time, including information about her age and temperament, and he again gave me a favorable opinion of her abilities, citing that her temperament will be the better for more training, and her age has nothing to do with her ability to progress.
Most importantly, however, he gave us some exercises to help loosen Nicole up, which in turn helps her suppleness. I repeated those exercises, and although Nic was a little over tempo, I had more success with her being loose in her muscles than I have had in the past few weeks. She displays more swung, and as a consequence, her tension has subsided.
One of my biggest issues with Nic is my tendency to default to cramming her between the reins and her hind end; in other words, not letting the energy flow through her. I blamed it, the past few months, on her tension, and claimed that she built a wall that made it hard to recycle that energy.
My past assertion was just wrong. This isn't to say that her tension doesn't contribute to building a wall, however, my approach to eliminate that tension just was not correct. Mr. Zettl said that when the horse is tense, give the reins. I was willing to do as he said in our lesson, but didn't really believe that if I gave the reins, the horse wouldn't spook every time she got the chance. Well, she didn't spook, and I realized, looking at the video, that when something bothered her, she looked at it for a few seconds, then went back to work. The next day, around the scary door in the indoor, she looked a little longer, but the video showed that it was for no more than 2-3 strides.
The difference is this: she didn't get less nervous about the scary door, but once she was done looking at it, she was loose again. She stopped holding that tension in, as she was doing before.
I also realized the past couple weeks that she is doing much better as far as tension goes. Nicole hasn't had any real mare moments since we moved, and at the clinic we had none, even though she previously had many at that barn. I described Nicole to Mr. Zettl and the auditors as being a spooky horse, however, the mare made a liar out of me, and displayed few signs of being tense at all.
Since this clinic, I’ve been trying to resolve just WHY one trainer sees Nic as a liability and yet another perceives her as an asset, and why the evidence I see that her mind is trainable isn’t obvious to everyone. Nicole, although older, is a horse in her 2nd year of training—basically a 4 year old horse both physically and mentally. The FEI 4 year old test is effectively a Training/First level test. The FEI Young Horse tests are for gifted horses; some will successfully be able to perform that test, but most will not. Using the young horse tests as a guide, one can determine that it’s expected that a horse like Nicole, while probably not gifted, is only expected to be at Training/First level, which means 15m canter circles, 10m trot circles, and lengthenings.
Viewed through this lens, it’s hard to expect too much out of her training-wise. Most horses at her level of training, although younger, are just coming into their own. She is in the adolescence of her training, if you will. I’m the first to forget this, believe me, yet it seems others, with broader experiences, forget it also. I don’t know why.
