four, no five
There seems to be such a following now of procrastinators reading this blog that I’ve realized I should probably try using it for educational purposes and seeing if I can’t teach my audience a few new tricks. Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t going to turn into a textbook. I’d be the first person to stop reading it if I thought I had to actually remember something. But since you’re obviously reading this because you’re trying to avoid doing something else, now you can say you learned some new words. It’s a little bit like claiming that TV is educational.
By now, you know a little bit (or a lot) about hockey. What I forgot to mention a few days ago, due to the Sharks melee, is that Saturday I scored my first game goal! Granted, it was with Shrek goaltending, but a goal is a goal, and my women’s league team captain even remembered to pick up the game puck for me at the end. So it’s in my car now, replacing the other puck that mysteriously disappeared during the cross-country move.
I thought I’d take a little diversion and tell you a story about my other sport, the one I’ve actually been involved in for fifteen years and because of this familiarity don’t seem to mention much. My favorite Sharks fan has actually gotten me back in the saddle, and I’m reinventing my riding again after a year of being far away and nearly forgetting the smell of a horse’s summer coat and the step of a canter stride beneath me. It’s invigorating and depressing at the same time, as anyone realizes who has returned, after a long while, to a sport they once excelled at. Your mind knows what to do but your body doesn’t seem to quite remember how.
I have a funny story to tell you but you’d have to understand some horse jargon. So here’s my attempt at explaining it (you’d think I’d be good at this after teaching lessons for four years, but we’ll see). As with any sport, riding gets very technical very fast, and anyone who thinks we’re just kicking a bunch of old nags around a ring are in for a big surprise. I went out to the barn Monday night to school a horse (and myself) over fences. “School” is just an equestrian term for train. When we jump horses over fences, the fences are typically arranged in a pattern called a course. The course consists of a path you have to follow, and you must jump the fences in the proper order. Some fences are “singles,” that is, they stand alone in some part of the ring, and some fences are part of a “line.” A line is typically two fences in a row that you must jump in succession. (A line with more than two fences is a combination, but you don’t need to know that for the purposes of this story).
The distance between the first and second fences in a line is measured in “strides.” Well, it’s actually measured in meters, but when riders and trainers talk about a line of fences, they are interested in how many strides are between the fences. A stride is one canter step for a horse. The canter is a three beat gait at which a horse travels (the other two standard gaits are walk and trot). Obviously, horses can have different size strides, as a big horse will typically have a longer stride than a small horse. It’s similar to a tall person with a long stride and a short person with a small stride. This little bit of trivia becomes key in the embarrassment to follow.
So I start my course on my friend’s little bay horse, Penny. We jump into the line closest to the barn (the “near” line), and ride down very sloppily, forced to add in an extra half stride at the base of the second fence. This is known as a “chip,” and is a pretty bad jumping error, not to mention it can get you killed over big fences. I do this a few more times and can’t seem to figure out why the distance isn’t working. My trainer remarks on it, and for some reason, I think I hear her say that this line is a “four stride.” What she has actually said is that this is a four stride for a really big horse, and a five stride for a regular horse, but I conveniently misheard this.
Well if it’s a four stride then we’re really going to have to book it down the line, I think as I pick up a canter and come around the turn for another try at it. I smacked Penny with the crop as I approached the first fence, hoping to wake him up enough to land strongly in the middle of the line. Upon landing, I spurred him forward, trying to ask him to open his stride rather than just run down the line like a maniac. Four strides later he takes off for the second fence, just as I had asked, except that he was pretty far away from the ideal take off point. In jumping, this is called “going long.”
Horse people have a lot of understated terms that mask the severity of the actual situation. The situation in horse terms, as I described above, would be “You didn’t package him up around the turn, he got too strung out and went long.” The situation, in normal people terms, and to the horror of the amazed spectators, would be “You were running like a bat outta hell and the horse took off a mile away from the fence and yet still saved your clueless ass.”
When I landed from the second fence after this spectacle, my trainer was holding her head in apparent pain, Penny’s owner had her mouth open in disbelief, and a third bystander was yelling “That’s incredible!” Incredible that Penny made it in four strides or incredible that I was still alive, I wasn’t sure. “That’s a five stride, not a four!” my trainer finally managed to say.
“OH!” I said, “Well that explains why it wasn’t working the first ten times!” I want to say that even chimpanzees learn faster than that, but that would be to say that a chimpanzee could get Penny to go around the ring, and we know for certain that would never happen. So while I’m more effective than a chimpanzee, I apparently can’t count to five, even with my fingers. Let’s just hope Penny doesn’t hold a grudge. Thank goodness my horses have always been more forgiving than my men.
