Saber Practice

Photo by Ty Holland

Somehow, tonight, we managed to dodge the thunderstorms and get in a little practice. I set up a small saber course with a series of challenging targets. Everyone did pretty well. The horses were much calmer than they were last week and no one got dumped or hurt. We had a combination of targets on the ground and at shoulder height mixed in between and included with various jumps. The guys learned to keep their horses at a slow canter and even dropped down to a trot when necessary. One of the target series involved an offside high target followed by a ground target, then a jump, then a ring target at shoulder height. We encourage using the correct saber stroke so that the blade was always moving away from the horse. This complicated the targeting problem but the point is to make the practice more challenging than the event.

I rode Apache through the course only twice. He gets very agitated in these events and gets progressively worse the more I ride him. His first run is usually his best. I normally will trot him through the course without saber drawn to get him used to it and then, after a couple runs at a trot and gallop, I'll draw the saber and go to work. The problem with this method is that by the time I get to the serious run, Apache is already outside his own skin. Tonight I didn't bother with a warm up run, I just took him through at a canter with saber drawn. He did well but by the end of the course was getting agitated. I dismounted to calm him down and then gave it another try. He started out bad, so I circled around and made him start over. We went through it okay but by the end he was really getting excited. So, I called it a night before he got worse. I tied him up and I could see the relief on his face when he realized he was done. I want to teach him that if he does it right the first time, he doesn't have to do it again. I will try this strategy again on Thursday and see how it goes.