Reflections on Riding and Jumping by William Steinkraus

Author:William Steinkraus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trafalgar Square Books
Published: 1997-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Turns

Jumper courses consist of single fences and combinations of multiple fences jumped in a certain sequence, which constitutes the line or track of the course. Almost every jumper course incorporates at least two changes of direction, although hunter courses may be more straightforward. In the most difficult jumper courses, staying on a good line can be just as difficult as jumping the fences. The system described above should give the novice jumper a very good start in jumping single fences and every kind of combination, so it only remains to teach it about longer distances and difficult lines.

This can be started most easily by trotting and then cantering over rails on the ground arranged into simple courses. Most of the problems that may ensue when dealing with real fences at higher speeds will already reveal themselves here, where they can be dealt with in their simplest form.

The first real course for a green horse might be four three-foot-six-inch fences around the perimeter of the ring, perhaps with an oxer as the second fence and a little in-and-out as the fourth. You can very soon add a fence in the middle of the ring, or a diagonal line, so that the course can be readily reversed and jumped in either direction. (For that matter, most fences should be built so that they can be jumped both ways.) The distances between the two fences on each side should be very easy ones, using multiples of ten feet to adjust for the low fences and lower speed you’ll prefer at the beginning, similar to the courses the horse will encounter during its show debut as a first-year green hunter.

Even an older horse that is doing its gymnastic work proficiently can benefit from cantering over more difficult lines using rails on the ground. I’ve never gone along with the idea that each horse has only so many jumps in it; but I do worry about boring them and see no point in jumping them needlessly. Practicing distance and turning problems and difficult lines over rails on the ground provides three-quarters of the benefit of using real fences, without depleting the horse’s energy. You can therefore do them more often, which is an added advantage. This sort of work is thus an ideal complement to schooling over real courses.

Schooling over huge fences is unnecessary even for older horses. De Nemethy liked to point out to us that the great German teams of the 1930s rarely schooled over anything bigger than four feet six inches, and this was our practice at the USET Training Center in Gladstone, too. We’d try to jump little (four feet to four feet six inches) courses very accurately and perfectly, and we’d jump bigger fences only as a final school to “raise the horse’s sights” before a show. Very occasionally, we’d keep building up the last fence of a gymnastic combination until it was of very respectable size, simply to test and develop the horse’s scope and confidence. With this preparation, the bigger fences at the shows somehow took care of themselves.

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