2020 Verne Batchelder Instructor Fund Grant Recipient: Angelia Bean

I don't think I can talk about the impact of this grant without talking about the horse I took to work with Kathy Rowse at Silverleaf Farm. So please indulge me for a few minutes.

But even before I get to him, I want to talk about how important this opportunity was to me as a professional. Us professional dressage trainers get into this because we love to train horses and riders. But over the years, we find we are helping our students more than we are challenging and improving ourselves. The biggest thing that keeps a dressage trainer from burnout is having a horse they look forward to working with. 

Every dressage mount presents a challenge. If that challenge is interesting, it’s a good challenge. If it’s an intimidating challenge that leaves you feeling inadequate and ineffective, that challenge can lead to burnout. 

Larry, the horse that I applied for the Verne Batchelder Instructor Fund grant with, is a bit of a challenge. A fellow dressage professional passed him along to me. I took him on because I was curious if I could help this big, fancy, insecure horse become reliable enough to compete in dressage. 

Larry is a super athletic horse. When I got him 18 months before my first trip to Silverleaf, he was out of shape. His natural stance gave him an impressively muscled neck and a weak loin and back. He also had a very worried look in his eyes and was quite claustrophobic. He didn’t like the wash stall (well, truth be told, he still doesn’t), was not a huge fan of my two-horse trailer, was nervous going through gates, and I could only ride with one aid on at a time. If I tried to use both legs, or both reins, or one leg and one rein during those first few weeks, I got a great view of his browband--usually with some spit thrown on my shirt for good measure.  

What became clear is Larry needs a different training path than it appears at first glance. But that’s no surprise; if he were a straightforward horse, my phone wouldn’t have rung in the first place.

I am a huge fan of eyes on the ground, so that summer and fall I hauled him to a few instructors for their input. Some trips were helpful. Some were just tiring. Some sent me a bit on a garden path, some were clearly on the path Larry needed. I had started taking video lessons with Kathy.  

Because of Larry's conformation and his personality, whenever he is uncomfortable, it shows up in the contact. Sometimes the problem was confusion, sometimes physical discomfort, and sometimes it is good old-fashioned submission issues. Kathy was the best at identifying, even over video, when Larry needed to be pushed through a submission issue and when he was truly trying and needed a bit more time or a break to sort out the work.  Kathy was spot on, every time.

My story is delayed because I had originally planned on two trips to Kathy’s farm. Once I was awarded the grant, Kathy generously offered me the use of her guest room, which was a huge savings, and let me work off my stabling by helping around her farm. This meant my grant funding could be extended to cover four trips, which I was all for. But then Kathy needed emergency surgery on her neck, so my final trip happened in February 2022.

Below I will recount some of the details of things that I learned on each of my 4 separate trips to Silverleaf Farm. Above and beyond the details of the lessons, Kathy was able to show me when Larry was being unsubmissive with his neck, and when he was truly trying but using his neck for balance. That lesson has been the most valuable thing she gave me, and it serves me well every time I get on Larry’s back.

In our first trip, January of 2021, Larry was a looky, dramatic mess. His shoulders would fall left, then right, then left again, often crashing into the rein, then using it for support. I really had to ride each side differently almost every stride. In the canter, when I did transitions within the gait, Kathy asked me to bring Larry back with one touch of the rein, then give. If he tried to pull on me, I just wasn’t there. His head was all over the place at first, but he started to understand that his balance was his problem to solve, and he got much lighter. He had short glimpses of self-carriage. 

On the second and third days, Larry was much better in his neck. We took the “touch, let go” approach into the trot work also. Then we used half steps to canter exercise to help get him quicker and shorter behind the saddle before the transition. We attempted some changes, but they were a mess--I didn’t have enough adjustability over his hind legs to get them to jump up enough. 

My take-home messages from trip one were:

• Ignore the neck drama, ride his hind legs, and balance.
• I need to be careful not to fall into the lofty trot and make sure he's really in front of me in each transition. If he is even a little behind the leg in any transition, he uses his neck. If he’s with me, he uses his hind legs. He needs to be quicker in the collection.
• I really need to be pickier about how I ride my first step. The quality of that first stride really matters--it makes all the difference in Larry’s balance.
• I need to be faster in my corrections when he needs straightness support--tap them back to between my aids instead of pushing them from one side to the other.

Our second trip to Kathy’s was in February 2021.  The trip down was grueling. I left Pennsylvania in time to be ahead of the snowfall but ran into high winds and rain at the Bay Bridge, meaning we were parked in the holding lot for four hours. We arrived tired and happy to be done traveling.

Since the last visit, I had been working on my homework. I had been practicing the “touch, let go” for a month and Larry was much less inclined to dive into my hand whenever he lost his balance. This trip was about attempting to speed up his slow, lofty hind legs.

Kathy used an in-hand whip with Larry, who was surprisingly dull to the whip. After a lot of variations of the pressure, he finally understood that he needed to lift his hind legs off the ground faster. And he promptly fell into the bridle again, creating more head tossing.

We moved the quickness to specific places and for only short bits of time. We utilized the square, so when I’d ask him to quicken, the turn would help him understand to quicken without diving down. Once he started to understand that we could move the quick steps to occur each time we passed a letter--with a turn if he dove down when I asked for more activity. By our third lesson, I was able to create one or two quicker steps in lateral work as well.

My homework from this trip -

• Make sure I was in control of the speed of his hind legs. 
• Continue to ignore his neck drama and ride the hind legs. 
• Use every opportunity to make staying uphill and quick the easiest answer for Larry--shoulder-in to renvers, square corners, frequent transitions.

Our third trip to visit Kathy was delayed because of her emergency neck surgery, so we headed back down at the start of July 2021.

The travel was thankfully uneventful, so on this trip we started to add some accuracy to Larry’s improving balance. Or shall I say, we tried?

On our first trip, I worked on being able to really control the first step of a movement to help Larry’s balance. Now it was time to create some consistency. 

On the first day, we worked on getting the hind legs to stay on the same 10m circle that the front legs were on. Then added shoulder-in and haunches-in on that circle. Days one and two made great progress on controlling his leg placement, particularly in the canter, so well that we were able to make a few authorized flying changes.

Then, between days two and three, the trees alongside the arena were trimmed. That just blew Larry’s mind. Our last ride was all about getting Larry’s attention without getting him more anxious. Lots and lots and lots of bend changes and transitions were on order.

My take-home work from this trip - 

• Still, ignore the neck, get the balance and the hind leg speed.
• Control every single step. 
• Be really accurate about how I sit so I can feel those wandering hind legs. He’s a big horse and I’m 5’3”, so I need to really be sitting well to influence what I need to influence. 

The crazy fall show season got going, so I couldn’t get back down to Kathy’s until February 2022, almost a year after we started this journey. 

And wow, was there a change in Larry. He was more settled, less reactive to the environment, and more willing to let me control his balance and his hind legs. Additionally, Kathy’s barn was full this trip, so Larry had to stay at a place about 20 minutes away. Each day he loaded up, unloaded, and went to work without any additional fuss. 

Our first day was spent on the basics because that’s where the balance grows from. Then we moved on and worked on all his newly developing Third and Fourth Level movements. We used to shorten his steps while in a stretch frame to get his hips more under, then took that to more cadenced lateral work. We played with the schooling pirouette and changes, and even a little half steps to passage-type swing. 

Shortly after that visit, Larry made his slightly-messy Third Level debut. 

This grant gave me the opportunity to learn on this talented and challenging horse. I have gained so many skills that I use in my teaching and training. It has been a pivotal point in my training. My time with Kathy moved him from being an intimidating challenge to an interesting challenge that I enjoy working with every day. Learning the tools I needed to help him have made me a stronger instructor. I can’t thank you enough.