Living with dressage horses

Press, 22 October 1986, Page 49

Living with dressage horses

By

JENNIFER STOBART

My daily routine is dictated by various influences, weather being the greatest decider. I like to ride when the morning is well thawed-out during winter or early spring. Later on, it is wise to get through before it gets too hot, but an advanced horse can be expected to perform in the middle of the day, so he might as well be acclimatised to heat.

On an ordinary day, with a competition coming up in a day or so, there are not many difficult decisions, but a lot of hard work ahead. The horse has to be dealt with, and if he is happy and relaxed he has probably had a good roll shortly before you go out to catch him.

It helps to put the judges in a good frame of mind if you look as smart as possible, so there has to be some hard grooming done.

If you have a horse with white socks, like mine, you have to remember to get plenty of white canvas shoe cleaner for them, as well as linen thread to sew up his plaits, and possibly white adhesive tape for special days to finish them off. I

use baby oil round his eyes and muzzle, and I like to give his tail a rinse with conditioner to give it more body. I have two horses to ride, and usually tackle the young one, William, first. Warming him up takes a little while, as he enjoys his stretching exercises and is not over anxious to get into the more demanding stuff. We work on his vertical balance with a series of transitions, changes of pace, and include a relaxed canter to get all the long muscles working. Suppling comes next, circles and serpentines, to get both sides working evenly, then w.e can go on to some lateral work, legyielding at least, on straight lines and curves. When the work goes well, I must try and stop while we are both still in a good mood and go off for a ride round a block or two, which gives us plenty of chance for going briskly forward while still practising our transitions — perhaps even jumping some ditches, and generally keeping him amused. Young William does enjoy his hunting and jumping, and as his schooling improves his balance and self-control he is becom-

ing a very pleasant ride both out hunting and round little cross-country or derby courses. He is now graded N 1 for dressage. It does not take long when we get home to change to the other horse, as I have groomed and tidied them both up before starting to ride — boots and breeches keep cleaner that way. Now, however, the attitude to work has to change. Douglas is older than William, more definite in his own ways, and needs a different technique to warm him up. I have to be more particular about my aids and take no excuses from him or myself — not an easy attitude for me to take. We do a fair bit of the early stages in walk, getting the bending and suppleness in slow motion, as it were, and then go on to the forward-going trot, a bright canter and lots of counter canter; we try to make the transitions not only smooth and wellprepared but extremely accurate. This is where a clump of thistles or a tuft of tall grass can be a useful marker, and we must make things happen right “there.” Douglas delights in breaking our concentration whenever possible, and it only takes a friendly duck to drift past down the river, or, better still, a fish to rise, and he blows his cool. I have to keep mine, regardless. Work in the sand arena can be more productive of attention, but we have to be able to work on grass as well, and there is more room out there for long diagonal lines of extensions and changes. On a good day we get to the point where I can build up the level of demand and try to improve Douglas’s more difficult exercises. He finds going sideways in the half-pass quite difficult one way, so has to have lots of improving work to get that anywhere near as good as going the other way, but he is a great tryer and never gets sulky. He thinks canter pirouettes are great fun, even if he doesn’t often get round in a small enough turn, but he is always ready to try. His flying changes are extremely reliable and we

can count on getting them right if I sit well enough, right up to a series of twotimes.

Being a bit of a showoff, Douglas enjoys the free-style tests to music that we sometimes have the chance to take part in. Tack gets cleaned while the horses are having their evening feed, and then the best bit of the day comes, when all the hard work is over and they can wander away down by the river to dream about whatever horses like to dream about, and I can watch them and fantasise about how well we are going to perform next time out. Somehow the expectation and promise are always better than the moment of truth!