Ridecamp: Re: [RC] [RC] Born to Trot?

> My neighbor who rides Grand Prix level dressage as said many times, to
> look for a horse with a good walk and a good canter and forget about the
> trot. A good trot can be taught, a good walk and good canter has to be
> there.
>
> Truman
>
> Tamara Woodcock wrote:
>
> > Hmm..  My training numbers must be *way* off then...  a 15mph canter?
> > That would be closer to hand gallop for us...
> >
> > I want a nice steady 8mph trot and a 12mph canter...  And I would
> > absolutely love to get an actual honest clockable 4mph walk...
> > Without having to use *my* legs to keep it up.  Sadly my horse doesn't
> > have this walk on his own, more like 2.5 to 3mph...

Truman, this is SOOOO true.  One of the most exhilerating rides of my life
was doing the final leg of the Santiam Cascade 100 (12 miles that goes up
over a big mountain, up a little mountain trail, with kind of a jeep road
down the other side, and then a USFS road on into camp) in the dark in 2:05
and never breaking out of a walk.  My old stallion Abu Ben Surrabu (aka
"Junior") has a 5.5 mph walk (actual, clockable) that I call "march mode"
and he just swings along with this big huge overreach.  You can improve on
such a walk with training, but the ability is born in them.  I get
goosebumps when I see young broodmares hiking around out here in the pasture
with an 8"-12" overreach, just "plodding" along to the water trough or to
another patch of grass.  And the canter likewise has to have the reach and
the smoothness--one can't teach that.

But in my experience that "big trot" is both metabolically and physically
hard on a horse (back to the HR discussion about this--Howard and others, if
your horse's HR isn't going up in the faster phases of the trot, then he
just doesn't have this gear--it's like revving an engine up into the red
zone instead of shifting gears, and that's how it gets on the HRM, too) and
has very little application to our sport anyway.  I agree with Tamara that
an 8mph working trot is great.  Yep, I've ridden horses that can "clock" at
a 15 mph trot--and we used to laugh about horses that had to canter to keep
up.  But I also noticed that the horses that break (even though they may be
able to DO the "big trot") and go into a nice easy canter tend to go farther
and last longer...

But back to that walk--it's sure fun to be able to outdistance your
competition in the dark, knowing that they are trotting trying to catch
up...  :-)  (And Tamara, having vetted a great many 100's, I can tell you
that your 2-3 mph walk is pretty typical, as that's the average most horses
make in the dark when they are walking, and when we're waiting, waiting,
waiting for them in camp....)

Heidi


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