On Monday I had my longest ride yet on Belle. So far, her rides have consisted of getting on, walking around aimlessly (steering is still a problem), getting off. I haven’t trotted but a few steps and those were mostly by accident. In the past month or so, however, Belle’s stopped looking like a kid-horse and started looking more adult, so I figured it was time to get serious.

I’ve been reading Reiner Klimke’s classic, Starting the Young Horse, which is stunningly hard to understand since whoever translated did a terrible job. Or maybe Klimke himself wrote it in English. The information I’m looking for seems crucial to starting a young horse, but seems to be absent from the text. How do I teach my horse to steer? Klimke skips right over this part, launching instead into a long discussion about the scale of training. Important information, to be sure, but you can’t achieve Losglassenheit, whatever that is, without steering. 

In the meantime, Belle and I are out in my arena, wandering. She likes to stay on the south end because her buddy Baleno is observing the proceedings from his pen there. So, while we manage, with leg and direct rein, to make it to the north end, she’s in a hurry to go back to the south. So we turn around again and go north, and again she goes south. When we get to the south end her neck turns into a big rubber band: It goes south even though I’m directing her head north.  So far this is me asking and her responding, eventually, and there haven’t been any temper tantrums, although she is little and quick. At one point she turned hard left and I almost didn’t.

On Monday, though, Belle was pretty cooperative. We walked in a somewhat straight line to the north end and then she let me regulate her walk with my seat. She did want to rush, but I made her wait for me, and she did. Then we actually did a kind of drunken serpentine at the trot, and then we trotted around the whole arena rail one entire time without veering off course. Much praise ensued.

Klimke’s book talks about lots of great theory, but what I’ve come to understand is that the answers are in the arena, not between the covers of a book. And while I keep trying to foist Belle off on other trainers for this particular part of the process, no one has time for her right now. So it’s up to me to direct her on the right path.