Listening Despite Enthusiasm

By Terry Golson


While Tonka and I did our warmup walk in the ring yesterday, we stayed out of the way of a lesson. The horse being schooled is a big, powerful mare, with a goal of competing in the jumpers. There’s a lot of energy and drama when she goes. The fences that she trains over are three times larger than what Tonka and I do. Tonka didn’t seem much interested. I was mistaken. He was taking notes.

The mare left the ring and our lesson started. Steph was attempting to teach me to count strides and see distances between jumps. For that we do a line of two cross-rails, with some poles on the ground. This is very challenging for me! However, Tonka soon decided that it wasn’t interesting enough for him.

 

 


4 thoughts on “Listening Despite Enthusiasm

  • Gin

    Surely enjoyed this post. The speech bubbles add so much. Good thing his paddock fences are high. When my mare was a 2 year old she liked to jump by herself. She jumped over a low place in the fence, but it only went into another fenced area, she also jumped over the garden gate which wasn’t very low and various other places until we raised any likely looking places. When I started her on trails she did a Tonka high jump over any little mud holes or small ditches. I finally convinced her she had to walk over that kind of thing. Always a challenge trying to think ahead of them.

    • Terry Golson Post author

      Years ago I had a TB mare who thought nothing of jumping out of her paddock and finding another to go into. Tonka doesn’t do that, but he has jumped ditches, which I try very hard to convince him not to!

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