Did you know thoroughbreds have terrible feet? Well if you didn’t, they have terrible feet. The long of the short of it is, Hondo Lane is now in the middle of growing sole for his paper thin tootsies. It’s costing me hundreds to thousands in addition to my will to live, but those are the cards I took off the table. I’ve always had horses with fantastic wheels, he’s the first who doesn’t. X-rays, composite shoes, body work, supplementation and encouraging Hondo to think thick thoughts is the game plan here. This means that since January, I’ve put Hondo on rest and moved Nisha, my endurance champion, to the fox hunting field.
It’s been…. enlightening? Thrilling? Frustrating? Mother effing fast? Yes, all of that.
It is not a privilege to have six horses. I pay for it. If one horse is out for whatever reason, I have others to go to. It’s not luck, it’s bad choices, but we’ll move on from this line of thought for now.
The reasons I wanted to hunt Hondo Lane and not either my Arabians or my speedy Quarter Horse are:
- He’s brave and not spooky.
- He’ll jump anything.
- He’s fast mainly in a straight line, not fast in all directions. This makes him easier to ride for short speed bursts.
- He has a large, “rocking horse” canter, in that he comes up to my seat, making it comfortable to ride.
- His entire background in track racing is running fast and listening (supposedly) to the rider.
- He runs with his head in a more upright position rather than with the tray table down as is usually favored by Quarter Horses and in cases of malicious intent, my Arabian mare (I’ll get to that later).
- Thoroughbreds race, yes, but they race for less than two miles. My endurance horses go for 25-50 miles. Stark difference.
My fear in taking an Arabian out to a fox hunt has now come to fruition: a hunt is not long enough, fast enough, consistent enough to work out the sillies. On an endurance ride, I allow both my horses to move out for the very excited 3-5 miles of the first loop. This is just our style. Other riders have other styles and that’s fine for them. As for me and my equines, we will serve the enthusiasm.
Nisha has now consistently hunted for two months. On her first two hunts she was bored to tears through no fault of her own, the hunts were just slower for us. It was on her second hunt I decided to see if she’d jump and I moved her into first field. Nisha jumped as well as the tortoise raced. Sure, she could do it, but it wasn’t that great, she simply got it done. There’s a few GoPro videos out there of her showing how she’s sticky before and wiggles over the jumps. But in fox hunting we’re not scored on jumping grace. As long as you get over and stay on, you’re a winner.
That was then. What Nisha has now learned is basically everything involved with a hunt. The horn blasts, the hound brays, that when other horses pick up the pace it’s time to haul ass. She loves hunting (all horses do) but she doesn’t love how many stops we make and how soon the hunt ends.
Take, as evidence, video from our most recent hunt in Athens, Texas.
As I said in a caption with the same video on my Instagram:
My GoPro up and died before our longest, fastest gallop of the day in which my horse completely forgot I existed. That was a special moment in our relationship, the part where her eyes rolled to the back of her head and she called forth her Arabian ancestors to carry her spirit to new dimensions. It’s in moments like that where you just have to manifest “I cannot fall off, I’ll just die and no one will be able to find my body” so you hold on for dear life and just go with the flow, I guess. It’s a lot more fun that I’m making it sound and just as terrifying. Multiple things can be true at once, after all.
Though the only way to prove it would be a drag race, I believe Nisha is the fastest horse in the field. She was bred to run long distances at a decent pace and she does, frequently, in our competitions. I’m not exaggerating when I say Nisha can canter and/or hand gallop for 20-30 miles with ease. She has. Many times. Short burst gallops for what cannot be more than two miles at a time is easy speasy lemon squeezy. Where other horses (and their riders) are huffing and puffing for air, Nisha has warmed up. She’s just stretched and is ready to do it again, faster and with more enthusasim.
Which is exactly what happened on the aforementioned gallop in the quotation above. I had only the illusion of control, and even that was fleeting. Further, the longer she ran beneath me, the more her head dropped, not in an effort to catch her breath but in order to pull me down and get the reins longer, so she could run off with me. Oh Courtney, you say, she cannot be that devious. Oh yes she can. This is a game she’s played with me for years now. She drops her head as if to say “Oh I am so exhausted I might just perish” (even though it’s been three miles and usually there’s a herd of slowpokes in front of her) and I “give” her her head. With rein aplenty, she raises her head back up and surges forward. Or so she thinks because as a human being my brain is larger than hers and I have pattern recognition abilities. I gather the reins back and we keep calm and carry on.
In another Athens hunt with my old GoPro 3, you can hear me say “head up” to her a few times since she’s trying to drop and get away from me. And no, I don’t have hard hands. I’m very soft.
But at speeds in excess of 23mph, I wasn’t going to allow her to drop her head and pull me down only to surge and win the race which wasn’t a race. I instead kept my reins in my grip and told her to keep her head up as I braced like a waterskier against her attempts to drop and hop.
Hunting season is coming to a close, and it’s my hope that in between the seasons, I can get Hondo Lane better acclimated to a hunting climate of chaos and mandatory peace. Nisha has been amazing, but this simply isn’t enough running for her. In the final weeks of hunting, my plan is to help another rider open and close gates for the field when we hunt at fixtures requiring such. This will allow us to race to the gate, allow everyone through, and race back to the field. I’ll report back if the plan works of if it’s a failure.
I’m also curious to see how hunting, which is more akin to interval training, helps her in endurance rides. We’ve hunted in lieu of longer rides, so we’ll see if this helped or hurt her abilities for 50 mile competitions.
Regardless, hunting is always a fun time for us both, even when we’d rather keep going long after the hounds have called it a day.
