From Smokin' Cole Train to the Slow Train

From Smokin' Cole Train to the Slow Train

When you ride with another horse, you can lead or you can follow.  That is pretty obvious.  Back in the old days, we usually put Ranger in the lead and Cruiser would reluctantly follow.  Cruise preferred to be the leader, too, but that tended to get Ranger angry.  Innocent Cruiser never learned his lesson.  He would keep on trying to burst past Ranger--only to see the flash of his teeth.

Cole likes to follow, but Dante is slow.  If we are trotting along, I have to give them a head start.  Cole then catches up, we go back to a walk and let Dante trot on.

If Cole is the leader, we go a while until we get too far ahead.  Then we walk until Dante catches up.  Either way we do it, it seems like I don't get to spend much time with Ellen.

I decided to try to work with Cole to slow him down.  It seems that it is as hard to slow Cole as it is to speed Dante up.  Cole, at least, doesn't try to burst past other horses often.  He was intimidated by Ranger on those early rides.  Ranger taught him to stay in place.

I started this way.  Ellen and Dante trot along.  We give them some space, and then I ask Cole to trot slowly.  In the beginning, he just didn't seem to get it.  We would quickly catch up with Dante.  At that point, my challenge was to get him to slow down without stopping.  Most of the time, he would stop.  Sometimes I had a few seconds where he matched Dante's speed.  I gave him a lot of praise.  When he stopped, we just started all over again.

I like a training challenge, and this was a good one.

There is one section on the trail where Dante tends to go a little faster.  One morning, I was riding with Ellen and Kevin.  On the way home, we put Starry in the lead--to get him out of the way.  I then followed Dante.  From beginning to end on the trail, Cole matched Dante's speed.  I praised him all the way.  It did required a certain amount of give and take pressure on the reins.  Whenever he started to get to close, I would take pressure until he dropped back--but not so much that he stopped.  When he did, I relieved the pressure, of course. 

With our clicker training, I have conditioned Cole to understand that if he gets the "good boy" chant, it means to keep doing what he is doing.  At the end, he will get a click and a treat.  We have worked on this so much that I am certain he knows what it means.  He shows it by doing what I am asking.

Needless to say, when we came to a halt, he got a click and a treat.

As luck would have it, not long after that ride we had a lot of rain.  That meant we weren't able to cross the river.  Ellen and I were relegated to riding the loop at the barn.  That is a pretty boring ride--but better than riding in the arena! 

We trot a lot of the loop, so it was a good place to continue with our training project of teaching Cole to slow down on command.  Since he is less enthusiastic about loop riding, it made it a little easier for me.

I started to see improvement.  I still had to ask him to slow down, but when he did, we could trot a little bit with no rein contact.  A few times, we made it up to 3 seconds!  That might not seem like much, but it was a big deal for me.  It showed me that we could do it with more work. 

I started to click him for going with a loose rein behind Dante.  What better way to encourage him?  The only problem with that is that then Dante would get ahead of us, and we would have to catch up.  Still, once I started to do that, it seemed to get easier.

Another thing I noticed is that it took longer for us to catch up with Dante when I gave him a head start.  Cole was going slower, even if it wasn't as slow as Dante.

After working on this a bunch of times, I decided to try putting Cole in the lead and asking him to go slower.  It worked!  Well, it didn't work perfectly.  Dante still got left behind--but he wasn't as far behind as he would have been in the past.  Ellen said Cole got lower and wider in the hindquarters; which he does when he turns on the power to take off quickly.  He just didn't go quickly.  He was using all his energy to go slowly.  I do believe that is the proper definition of collection.

Towards the end of the trotting stretch, to no one's surprise, he started going into his "show trot."  I didn't want that, so I nudged him forward.

Due to the weather being troublesome, we have practiced on the loop a few more times.  Cole is gradually getting control of his body.  What once seemed physically impossible for him--to trot just a little faster than he walks--now seems like a real possibility.  At least it gives me something interesting to work on, and Ellen and I don't spend as much time riding apart when we do this.

Soon, we will be back on the trail to put our training in action.  I will keep you updated.