Ridecamp: Re: [RC] [RC] Born to Trot?

The walking horse I used to ride, aka the Hell Bitch, had an honest to goodness
6 mph walk - more like a march. This was a plain old walk, not a "flatwalk"
or a running walk just a head down long walk.  After dark on 100's it was
a great gait to have.  You could just truck along the overhang was too bad
to go much faster and still make up time. 

I did a CTR on her one time and had a bet that I could finish on time without
doing anything but a walk.Well I was allowed to trot the first 5 miles until
the excitment of the start wore off.  It was a 30 and the window was 5:00
to 5:30 - with a 20 minute stop. We made it!  I sure miss that walk.

Truman

Heidi Smith wrote:
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> Truman, this is SOOOO true.  One of the most exhilerating rides of my life
> was doing the final leg of the Santiam Cascade 100 (12 miles that goes up
> over a big mountain, up a little mountain trail, with kind of a jeep road
> down the other side, and then a USFS road on into camp) in the dark in 2:05
> and never breaking out of a walk.  My old stallion Abu Ben Surrabu (aka
> "Junior") has a 5.5 mph walk (actual, clockable) that I call "march mode"
> and he just swings along with this big huge overreach.  You can improve on
> such a walk with training, but the ability is born in them.  I get
> goosebumps when I see young broodmares hiking around out here in the pasture
> with an 8"-12" overreach, just "plodding" along to the water trough or to
> another patch of grass.  And the canter likewise has to have the reach and
> the smoothness--one can't teach that.
>
> But in my experience that "big trot" is both metabolically and physi
> cally
> hard on a horse (back to the HR discussion about this--Howard and others, if
> your horse's HR isn't going up in the faster phases of the trot, then he
> just doesn't have this gear--it's like revving an engine up into the red
> zone instead of shifting gears, and that's how it gets on the HRM, too) and
> has very little application to our sport anyway.  I agree with Tamara that
> an 8mph working trot is great.  Yep, I've ridden horses that can "clock" at
> a 15 mph trot--and we used to laugh about horses that had to canter to keep
> up.  But I also noticed that the horses that break (even though they may be
> able to DO the "big trot") and go into a nice easy canter tend to go farther
> and last longer...
>
> But back to that walk--it's sure fun to be able to outdistance your
> competition in the dark, knowing that they are trotting trying to catch
> up...  :-)  (And Tamara, having vetted a great many 100's, I can tell you
> that your 2-3 mph walk is 
> pretty typical, as that's the average most horses
> make in the dark when they are walking, and when we're waiting, waiting,
> waiting for them in camp....)
>
> Heidi
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