A Mixed Blessing

Life is nothing if not seasoned with ironies and, while I try to see it otherwise, this reality often brings colossal disruption to my days. Fortunately, on lighter-hearted days it delivers a humbling chuckle to a task I previously might have thought I had the answers to. At that moment, some unexpected twist brings its irony to the storyline.
Lately, these moments have proven the certainty of a mantra my father used to chant when I was growing up. "A fit horse is a mixed blessing," he said at the beginning of competition season every year. He liked to remind us of this at the height of our intensive conditioning period during which my family spent what seemed like every waking minute either exercising our horses or researching and planning how to get them even fitter. Then right in the middle of all this focused relentless effort, my father would utter his mantra.

At the time, it felt like he was being a curmudgeon. Why would we invest so much time and energy getting these horses fit if he was now telling us that our goal came with a trade off? He preferred to think of himself as a voice of reason, a fact he reminded us about as our now fit and hyper steeds channeled their honed athleticism into unruly behaviors.

I have spent the last three years writing, publishing, and promoting my book Equine Fitness. The book and the entire concept of fitness figures prominently in my life. It represents the center of my belief system, which is that every equine athlete needs to be physically prepared for any job we ask of him. Many training ruts that I witness are due to the horse not being strong enough, coordinated, or physically capable to perform what his rider wants. I've had the pleasure of watching numerous riders finally reach their goals just by addressing their horses' fitness needs. Likewise, I have seen riders improve their OWN abilities by getting themselves stronger and stretchier in the right spots.

This all explains why my training and lessons focus a fair amount on this topic. And why I spent so much time writing a book on it. In sum, fitness will make your horse better. The fine print to this proclamation is that it will also prove my father's mantra.

Luckily, most riders have such busy lives with work, families, and modern day obligations that their time limits restrict them from getting to the level of their horse's wow-I-feel-really-great-and-turbo-charged. Many horses hover just below that level of totally fit (and more difficult to manage). But for the riders who do find the time to apply my book, I think I need to write a follow-up title What To Do With Your Now-Fit Horse.

These steeds, now bristling with strength and vitality have extra juice in their step, more sass and spunk to their nature. Good strong blood pumps through their well-toned and supple muscles. Primed to tackle hard exercise without fatigue, they throw themselves eagerly into workouts.
These are all euphemisms of course for the fact that they can be a total pain in the butt. Suddenly, they have morphed from docile pasture potato into the equine equivalent of your triathlete friend who annoys you for lack of being able to sit still.

Many of my students have helped their horses transform from lumpy to lean, from easily fatigued to stamina overdrive. I've applauded their efforts, cheer leading them through productive workouts and making them vow ongoing consistency. And, yes, part of my responsibility is to dissolve the occasional exasperation that arises as their steed expresses punky tendencies due to newly found fitness.

"No, no, it's good!" I reason as their faces pucker up in annoyance. "He feels great; that's wonderful!" And these horses DO feel great, really great. The downside of this, obviously, is that the better they feel the more exercise they need. Which requires an availability of time that anyone with a life doesn't possess. Plus, many fit horses can turn into...well, butt heads to be around. Therefore, no matter the merits for horse and human, fitness becomes a hard sell.

This became especially true on Tuesday as I watched Sparta-- a charming Thoroughbred cross gelding-- interrupt his leg-yield for a projectile movements best described as spronking. All of the sudden, he tucked his butt underneath and bounced through the air three times like a Jack Russel Terrier and then settled back down to work. The disturbance happened so quickly that his owner remained perfectly in balance and immediately carried on with her leg-yield. I had to suppress a chortle seeing the twinkle in Sparta's eye. Just a few months before, his owner had to spur and beg him through his workouts. Now, in the height of summer with a full tank of exercise and fitness, he felt so good about his work that he was offering up a little extra spunk.

"No, no, that was good!" I told the rider, lest she become agitated.

We carried on with the lesson, making it only a few more minutes before Sparta bounced himself sideways across the arena like a boy on a trampoline. This time, his rider dropped one rein, quickly reeled it back in, yanked him back out to the rail and got on with business. His antics were losing charm, though. She rolled her eyes and sighed heavily, bordering on annoyance. Being the gentleman that he is, Sparta quit doing maneuvers that involved hopping and springing. Instead, he channeled his energy into speed. Lots of it. He started trotting a little faster at first. Then, by the third corner, he gained considerably more speed and raced down the long side of the arena. By the next turn, he was moving so fast that his rider could not get her seat and stood up in the stirrups, balancing over top of him as if standing on a surf board in choppy water. Sparta kept zipping around the arena like he was trying to set a personal speed-trotting record. His rider bobbled around trying to getting his attention to slow down, now visibly ticked off that our lesson was heading in such a disastrous direction. Sparta snorted through his nose, pricked his ears forward. He lifted his back and swung his legs with a range of movement rarely seen from him. In fact, he looked like a world class dressage Warmblood for a moment. Any onlooker could tell that his body felt good and he was pretty excited to be out for a workout. None of this changed the fact that his owner was more annoyed with him by the second, though. Unable to slow him down and still bobbling around in the saddle, she started admonishing him. She told him to knock this off. She told him what a butt head he was being.

One more time, I stepped in. "No, no-- it's good. He feels great!" I reminded her.

Well, if this was his version of feeling great, she said, then she preferred him feeling crummy. After yanking at the reins and getting him to slow down and then finally to stop, she admitted that the power of his gaits did feel incredible. And he was clearly strong and performing better than ever. But why did that all have to come at the cost of him being a butt head?, she wanted to know.

There is no good answer for this, nothing that will fully satisfy an annoyed rider. I paused and cleared my throat. I acted as if I were channeling wisdom from dressage masters centuries earlier. "Well..." I started out. "A fit horse is a mixed blessing."

Who You Callin' Fit?

Just as I contemplated a donut-sized roll of fat over the horse's loins, I listened to his rider tell me how "fit" he was. Never mind that the horse had worked up a sweat walking 100 meters from the barn to the arena and his nostrils expanded for more oxygen at the effort of putting one foot in front of the other. No matter, she told me, this guy was plenty fit.


Mmm-hm.


Well, what about the fat roll over his loins? And around his withers? Or the lack of muscling anywhere on his body? I inquired.


That was no big deal, she replied. Rest assured that under all that chub existed a well-toned animal. Having just published a book about equine fitness, I wanted to educate her about the fallacy in her thinking but I knew from previous experience that there's no talking someone out of her fitness opinions even if I'm an expert on the topic. And where fitness is concerned, there's no shortage of strange beliefs. Such as equating chub with tone. In these conversations, I've uncovered two truths about Americans. First, we keep low standards for what constitutes fitness. Thus, being just one step ahead of total fatness gets counted as fit. Second, we hold our animals to completely different standards.





Let's take a look at these, starting with the first of what I call the American Fitness Truths. I blame the exercise gadgets and workout video craze of the 1980s and 90s, but somewhere along the way, folks started believing that a few minutes of respiration elevation in their week would get them fit. Just move yourself around for a four or five minutes every day and, voila, you had successfully combated being unfit. I've even seen magazine articles promising results from "The Four Minute Workout," which leads us Americans to form beliefs that fitness just aint that hard to come by. This has created a highly diluted definition of the term, to say the least. By this line of thinking, it seems that a vigorous shampooing in your morning shower counts at the day's workout. And for some people, I'm afraid it does.





How a four-minute session of jiggling around can be seen as a legitimate form of fitness is beyond me. But we Americans do like things to happen quickly, so the notion of truncated workouts delight us to no end. Why sweat and hyperventilate for an hour if you only need to walk briskly to and from your mailbox to get fit? The problem, as with many things, is that these opinions never get tested. Many of my students will tell me that they are quite fit, yet if I ask how they know this to be true, they lack substantiation. Have they recently trained for and competed in a an event like a 5k run?, I'll ask. Or how about a multi-day bicycle trip? Or a yoga retreat? Nope. Nada. None of the above. They just assume that since they are not completely blubbery then they must be fit, right? They never test the assumption. It would be like me thinking I'm a total brainiac but never succumbing to an intelligence test or producing any work that demonstrates mental capability.


I'm a fan of standards and validation, but I find myself frequently without company on this point. When people tell me they are fit, I'm curious how they know this. What's the standard for validating the claim? If a mechanic tells me the brakes on my car work, I want to be sure he knows it, not just has an opinion about it. The same applies to fitness. If we Americans want to call ourselves fit just because we get up and walk around during commercial breaks on television, this is perfectly fine so long as we can provide proof for our so-called claims. So, be forewarned. Should you find yourself taking a lesson from me in the near future, be ready to provide supporting evidence for any fitness claims. The fact that you are one step ahead of your neighborhood Fat Guy doesn't count.





Now let's move on to the second American Fitness Truth. This goes something along these lines: we ourselves will consistently balk at an afternoon filled with heart-pounding exercise (such as climbing a mountain) because it's just plain unpleasant, but we will not hesitate a second to impose the same task on our animal friends. We hold them to a different expectation, as if their four-leggedness makes them machine-like. We ignore that they have muscles and hearts that get just as weak and flimsy as our own. In this blindsided state, we allow them to stand around idly in a pasture for months and then one day (when they are very unfit), saddle them up and ride them into a sweaty lather while assuming it's no big deal.



I asked a gal yesterday who was mounted atop a huffing-puffing four-legged creature if she herself had ever run a half marathon. She looked at me like I'd suggested she tattoo a rainbow across her nose. And then she spurred her overworked mount for more giddyup. But how fair could that be?, I pointed out to her. How could she expect her jiggly equine friend to work his butt off for an hour or more when she was so unwilling to impose the same suffering on herself? The answer that folks always give me is that "horses are just different than us, that's how it's fair. " Call me a simpleton, but I'm confused about how differently ANY creature could respond to aerobic activity. Are these folks indicating that if I had four legs and a tail, I could just go out and run a marathon tomorrow without any training? Does a horse's heart pump differently? In the absence of muscles, does he have the ability to flex his fat ripples? Does he remain in good shape while leading a sedentary life just because he's a horse?

No, dear reader, of course not. Let me be the needle in the proverbial balloon: horses are no different than us. Their capacity for aerobic fitness is no greater or less than ours. The primary difference between man and beast is not the size of our hearts but our brains. We humans possess the larger grey matter and therefore the ability to subject pudgy steeds to our whims.

Let's stop kidding ourselves. While they may not be seated on the couch with a can of beer, our horses are NOT standing around at the ready for a mega dose of respiratory suffering. Most of us have a horse that's only one step ahead of the Neighborhood Fat Horse, a situation that might be different if we had more time. But since making a commitment to our own fitness and carving out our daily four minute workouts, our schedules have gotten tight.