your breastplate through the bit rings to your hands. In either case, you can create an experience that will encourage your horse to give to the bit. I have always been very careful when I have my students use this piece of equipment. There are plenty of trainers that consider draw reins and German martingales a crutch but I have horse/rider pairs that simply would never have been successful without them, the same way you need to use a leash or choke chain on some dogs before they heel perfectly without one. The martingale does many things when used effectively: your horse understands he can flex, and at the same time, by doing so, builds the muscles that support correct flexion; the rider can sit correctly without being pulled forward, and builds the muscles to support correct posture. Both learn what it feels like to work in a correct frame. Under my direct supervision, students and horses using German martingales always do better for the specific problems that need to be addressed. Then you go forward without it, as indicated. As it so happened, Bene won me a great German martingale set as First prize at a show. I still have it and still use it all these years later, but I got the most use out of it with him!
I finally got to a 3-Day Event! In 1976, the Bicentennial year, we went to San Diego Country Estates, to an event sponsored by the SDCE Stables and spent the night in our van, with Bene tied outside the horse trailer. Another learning experience. Listening to your horse munching on hay, then pawing for what he can’t reach, and slamming the (now) empty water bucket against the side of one’s van, all night, is not conducive to a winning endeavor. I made it through the dressage test passably, but the cross country was an eye opener. I was tired and I couldn’t understand why all these people were wandering around the place. After all, we had a map of the jump course. I was used to the show ring, where you memorize the course (naturally), watch other people go round, and then do it. I had the order of the jumps on cross country down pat, because they give you a picture/map. But, I figured, if these people were walking out there in the great big field, maybe I better, too. I had planned on just watching two or three goes to see how it was done. The jumps I could see looked like a lot of fun. That’s when I heard about Roads and Tracks (simply a timed distance to warm up for the cross-country phase), which were still done in those days, even at Training level. I realized that, obviously, if I were riding in one timed part, I could hardly be watching other people. So, I followed the people around who were walking from jump to jump. I realized this was a good thing, because some of the jumps were in pretty wild places, like the crotch of a tree and a very wide ditch that you evidently had to sort of slide down, jump at a certain point, climb out of, and continue on. By the time I figured out that my Roads and Tracks time was getting pretty close, I barely had time to tack up, get to the starting box and begin that phase. The trot time during Roads and Tracks gave me plenty of time to wish I had read about and learned a whole lot more about this sport. Remember, I hadn’t had 3-Day lessons.
Pretty quickly after Roads and Tracks, I was in the start box for the CrossCountry phase. To say we were bold is an understatement. I still have the picture one of my students had done on a silk screened T-shirt of us doing this very big water jump where you jumped hay bales in front of rails into a pond. My original business cards were a silhouette of Bene and me at that water jump. The slide-y ditch was cake: we jumped it from lip-to-lip—l didn’t want to lose time doing that sliding and climbing. Unfortunately, we were eliminated because I forgot a jump. I zoomed right by the one after the tree crotch because I didn’t mark it on the map, nor did I walk the course more than once or repeat the course orally to someone reading the map--all things I require my students to do. Of course, I was perfect in stadium jumping--they let eliminated people go last if there is time enough, and there was.
Nonetheless, I had found my thing. I had something to specialize in. I knew what I had to do to improve, and to teach this sport. Also, 3-Day incorporated all the disciplines of horsemanship--I could teach students for years before I ran out of ideas! Bene took me to Pebble Beach, to Field Hunter Trials, to tons of shows. We learned together and worked hard for what we needed to know, at a pace we could handle.
Bene was never quick, but his strength carried the day. I had him for about 10 years. He was my first true equine love. I had two other horses before him, but in both cases, though I cared a lot for them, there were circumstances that made it clear they would not be horses that would end their lives with me. Bene did. He was never more than a passable school horse. He simply took too much leg, too much push, and way too much strength to control, for the average rider. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body, but I was the only rider who ever got any kind of controllable forward motion out of him. At the same event as our first, in San Diego, but five or six years later, we were on course going over a zigzag rail fence at the top of a knoll, the lowest thing on course, and Bene hit it, solidly, with his front feet--thwack! He had always done better over the high fences he respected. He didn’t so much as trip, and his feet stayed under him, we even finished the stadium handily, and placed second or third. He came up lame a few days later, with no swelling in the leg, so I took him to be x-rayed.
Neither the vet nor I could believe he had not been a lot more lame a lot sooner. His “mule” hoofs, plenty big, but long and narrow as opposed to being roundish, had contracted heels that, in turn, had put pressure on other internal hoof structures enough that the blow at the cross-country fence had caused fissures that were not going to heal. His hoof structures were in pieces. He really was getting lamer by the day. I was ill. I left him there. My vet has back pens where you can go when you need to leave a horse. Writing this brings back the memory as if it were yesterday. We had lost Hashy not many months before, even had her replacement, but Bene was my first real competition horse.
I had countless first places, I had proved all those people who called him coarse and unrefined wrong. In fact, today, they call them Warm bloods. When I got tired of telling people he was a Quarter Horse/draft cross, I just said Irish Draft and got oohs and ahhs. What Bene taught me was that you can go really far using what you were born with when you couple it with what you are good at and don’t let things spook you. I led him back and thanked him for his strength and willingness, his fortitude, and for the confidence he gave me as rider. We learned so much together, mainly because we both had so much to learn. He was strong enough and thick enough that I couldn’t ruin him, really. He just sort of plunged on through, and I was quite good enough to hang on. We were lucky to have each other. My heart was heavy indeed as I left him, but I also knew those crummy feet were a death sentence. He was contentedly munching hay when I gave him his last kiss and hug.
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