By Jeff Morse

Green Meads Farm ~ Richmond. MA

www.green.meads.com

green@meads.com

If there were one piece of advice I could give to all new drivers, it would be this: driving is supposed to be comfortable. One the surface, this seems sort of obvious. In fact, it is so obvious that the real meaning of it is often overlooked.

Driving is supposed to be comfortable for the driver.

For driving as a means of transportation this would make sense. Horses don’t travel very fast in relation to the motorized transportation speeds common today. That 10 minute trip to the grocery or hardware store might have taken an hour in the horse and buggy days. Drivers and their passengers certainly made all attempts to be as comfortable as they could. Vehicle makers extended every effort design comfort into their vehicles. The comfort of their vehicles was a selling point over their competition. Following the evolution of transportation comfort from the horse to the automobile, the comfort of one automobile over another is still a major selling point.

If you are not comfortable in the driver’s seat, your horse will feel it and, in many cases, it will react in ways that, in the very least, affect his efficiency to do the job you are asking, and perhaps react even in ways that jeopardize the safety of  you, your passengers and your neighbors. Primarily I am referring to physical comfort. If you are tense or if you are trying to hold yourself in some awkward position while driving, you will not be able to take full advantage of the remarkably responsive and cooperative capacity of the horse’s mouth and brain. Your tension will interfere with the delivery of subtle yet powerful instructions from your hands thru the reins. Your horse will either object because he knows how the instructions should feel when delivered properly or the instructions will be confusing and perhaps even punishing to his mouth. If your hands are extended in front of you too far, they will become very heavy and your arms will become tired in short order while trying to hold them there. If you have stiffness in your back, your back will become a source of aggravation and not only will your horses performance begin to suffer, you will begin to find driving more of a chore and increasingly less enjoyable. Body position and the knowledge of what to do with your body while driving does not have quite as dramatic an effect on horse performance as a rider’s body position but its still crucial in terms of forming that winning relationship or union with your driving horse.

Driving is supposed to be comfortable for your horse.

If your horse is uncomfortable it is unfair to ask him to work. He can not deliver a good performance. It is important that you check your horse for pain and stiffness. One of the best times to do that is while grooming him. He will tell you if and where he is uncomfortable if you know how to listen. Pay attention to when he moves away from your curry or brush. If he curls his body away or moves parts of his body away from you as you groom him, that may not be a sign that “it’s just the way he is.” or ” He just doesn’t like stiff brushes”.  Horses LIKE to be groomed. It’s one of the ways horses give each other pleasure in the pasture. He may be telling you his muscles or joints are not feeling right. Likewise, when you put on his tack, does he move away or flinch when you approach? Does he dance around when you girth him up? Does he argue about putting the bridle on? These can be signs that he is uncomfortable. Check the fit of his tack. If you are unsure about where things really are supposed to go, ask someone to help you who knows. There is nothing like the guilt associated with having asked your horse to perform while you were oblivious to his discomfort all along.

One of the most important areas in your examination of your horse’s comfort is his mouth. With so many bits to choose from, bit fitting and selection can be a mysterious science. My best advice is to have someone who has a lot of experience with using many different bits help you find the one that is best for your horse. Bit selection is worthy of an article itself so I won’t cover it here. A clinic or lesson with a professional trainer will be well worth the money for this subject alone.

An Exercise In Comfort

Here is simple exercise that you can use for the rest of your life with both riding and driving horses. I set it up for drivers here.  I am going to assume your horse is well broke to drive and familiar with his surroundings. Drive him into a field or in a large ring and set him in a straight line at the walk. Close your eyes. You can open them at any instant and opening your eyes is one of the fastest things you can physically do! So don’t be scared. Driving with you eyes closed, begin at your feet and check yourself for tension and for comfort and make any changes that seem right. Place one foot forward and one foot back underneath you. This will give you support in any direction as you are jostled about in the vehicle and will help prevent you from getting braced or getting top heavy. Move up your body, checking for flexibility and tension, making changes as you go. Let your weight drop down around your spine onto your butt cheeks. Take some of the weight off your feet and let gravity keep you on the seat. Let the motion of the vehicle move your body. Now sit up a little taller and find your balance. Play around with leaning forward and back and from side to side until you find a balance that feels right. Pay special attention to the middle of your back. Release tension and stiffness there. Hang your elbows at your side or slightly forward of vertical. Point your thumbs up and inward slightly. This may vary depending on how you are holding the reins and that alone is worthy of a separate article. But in general, look for a position of your arms and hands that feels comfortable. Now’s the time to experiment. Open your eyes. That’s it. Now look at your horse. 9 times out of 10 he will be more relaxed, more supple and will have lowered his head and neck.

The next time you do this exercise, give a quick check of your self, then pay attention to what you can feel in your hands. Your horse uses his head and neck to help him balance as he walks. You should feel his head moving thru the rein in your hand. Let that motion move your hands and arms while at the same time maintaining a connection to your horse thru the rein. This may take a little practice. But it will plant the feel of this kind of connection in the subconscious part of your brain. This is useful because if you try to too hard to work at that connection or force it to happen, you will not be successful. And once again, when you open your eyes, you horse most likely will have changed in a very positive way.

In conclusion

After your drive pay attention to how you feel. Often in the ‘heat of the battle’, our attention is focused so intently on the horse in front of us that we fail to pay attention to some aspects of ourselves that have a powerful influence on how our horse behaves when we drive him. Are your fingers cramped, tired, stiff sore? Are your biceps tired? Is your back stiff? Do you find yourself stretching when you get down from the seat? Are your extremities cold?  (Poor blood circulation can be sign of stiffness and tension) Does your neck hurt? Next time you drive, close your eyes and you should be able to find the source of your discomfort. You should not feel stressed after driving. Quite the opposite! You should feel relaxed. Driving should be comfortable.

They didn’t tell me it was called “the Suicide Seat” until later. Eighteen Hampshire kilometers and ninety minutes later, by which time it was too late. Beforehand there were harmless seductive remarks – “We’ll organize a trip for you,” and “you can go around with Pippa.” Suicide was never discussed, although life insurance briefly was, which should have been a tip in itself.

The previous morning I had arrived at the driving trials, little suspecting that within 24 hours I would be in them. But on a sunny afternoon when I might have been comfort-eating on a sofa with my eyes fixed on the televised Epsom Derby, I was perched instead on an open four-wheeled carriage in the woods of Farleigh Wallop, with my eyes fixed on eight enormous, grey buttocks.

The preparations were conducted with the mixture of gravity and gathering tension that is common to all genuinely competitive sports.

Poised in a seat beside and above me, driving doyen Pippa Bassett was gathering what looked like a dozen reins into one gloved hand just a few inches from my right cheek. She looked both cool and revved-up and I had decided I trusted her completely.

“Watch out in case I whack you in the eye with the whip,” she said.

The Lippazzaners pricked their long ears and flexed gently within their bodice of harness. Like spiders in a bath, my hands scuttled in vain around the carriage interior. I needed a safety belt or a handle, but would have settled for a crucifix, having discovered a sudden and powerful desire to hold something – anything – very tightly indeed.

“Alright?” inquired Pippa.

“I’m fine,” I tried to reply, but it came out as “mangs-fangs” because my teeth were holding each other so tightly. A pleasant middle-aged woman sitting by the starting line began a countdown – “Thirty seconds – fifteen seconds…” and a squirt of adrenalin – I think it was adrenalin – rushed through my lower regions. The woman opened an oddly peaceful smile and pronounced “Go!”

Starlings bolted from the trees as the team clopped into motion and Pippa struck out for the gentle slopes of Hampshire. My head began nodding as the unique sonic barrage of a horse-drawn vehicle crossing rough terrain rose like a storm around us. It is the noise of a giant centipede jogging down a gangplank with a ton of stolen cutlery. The dance of the carriage is as violent as its song, for the suspension appears to contain an imp whose pleasure is to whack your coccyx with a paddle at random intervals. Perhaps, I thought, these slopes are not so gentle after all. After five minutes of punching my chin with my knees, a voice behind my right ear observed that the course was actually “a little bit bumpy.” The source of this understatement was Trisha, one of two grooms who were travelling standing on the ‘back-step’ of the carriage – a zone which the manufacturers have thoughtfully equipped with all manner of attractive hand-holds, incidentally.

We plunged into a rutted trail that burrowed into the woods. As the carriage accelerated round a downhill corner I attempted to magnetite my bum to the seat using nothing but the power of human will. The attempt failed, but inertia succeeded as we cornered in the opposite direction and I thumped back into place like a sack of spuds.

“I’m just going to grab you while we hit this dip,” said a voice in my right ear, and Trisha – who is a trained nurse – took a temporary fistful of my jumper in what she might call the lumbar region. I thought about removing my belt and asking her to tie me to the frame, but a mental image of my trousers falling around my ankles prompted a re-think. And I was starting to enjoy myself. There is a hypnotic quality in the experience of a fast-rolling carriage, and a gradual increase in the psychological momentum as the marathon course unfolds.

“You end up in these amazing places you’d otherwise never even get to see,” observed Pippa, and a glance in any direction underlined her point.

Paused while the vet checked the horses’ pulse-rates, I found no desire to get off the carriage. In fact, I was quietly impatient to get rolling again. The second phase had a dream-like quality about it, and I realized that by some peculiar chemistry of friction and motion, all of the horses and humans involved had arrived at a collective state of near-total absorption. Suddenly the trip seemed more like a mission than a sporting enterprise, as if the journey itself was the whole point of the exercise.

Then we charged into the first of the seven obstacles and things got a little crazy. The clock was ticking in all our heads and as Pippa flung us back and forth between the gates I found myself willing the horses forward – probably the most meaningful contribution I could make, as my twelve stones of dead weight is not exactly an asset for someone trying to save time. I loved the obstacles. Pippa and co. really attacked them, and now the team nature of the game was thrown into sharp focus, with shouts and instructions going back and forth. As if racing four horses through mini-mazes of solid wooden beams wasn’t enough to occupy me, I was also operating a tape recorder and shooting pictures. Around the fourth or fifth obstacle – I lost count – the brilliant idea occurred to me that one of these busy hands could be usefully employed with the important business of hanging on. A second later we whacked the corner of a gate and lo and behold it was only my fingers that kept me on board.

And still the obstacles kept coming, and the world was now a high-speed kaleidoscope of slopes and hills and corners, with a soundtrack of rattling and Pippa’s voice yelling commands. At one point I heard the crowd cheering and the amplified voice of some cheerful commentator quipping merrily about some geezer from Horse & Hound magazine and realized he meant me. “How’s it going Ian?” echoed across the course, and I flashed him a thumbs up, which is quite an achievement at thirty miles an hour with a Dictaphone in one hand and a camera in the other. Wondering if I had gone completely mad, I found myself staring into the eyes of twenty teddy bears and a creature named Lamb Chop and wasn’t that the bug-eyed face of Bertie Bassett leering like a goblin as we barreled through the last obstacle? I suspect the course builder is a Stephen King fan, because that collection was the stuff of which nightmares are made.

And eventually – too soon for me, although probably not for Pippa or the horses – the carriage stopped, although my head was still rolling hours later. The stillness and silence seemed bizarre. I undid my chin strap and removed a small piece of tree from my hat. Everyone was grinning and chatting as we trundled back to the box. I wanted to deliver an eloquent speech of thanks but I actually mumbled something incoherent because most of my brains were still the wrong way up in my skull. I wandered aimlessly around for a while replaying the marathon in my head and humming like a demented bee. I phoned a few people and gibbered like an ape about driving trials until they told me to shut up. I realized I was into something that most people don’t ever get to do, and it’s not easy to explain the nature of the thrill. Inevitably I trolled back towards the people who do know, and returned to the horsebox.

In no time at all I accepted an invitation to help the Bassett crew with a scientific experiment involving large quantities of fortified liquid, and thence to the Barn and the hog-roast. As is traditional in the profession of journalism, I ate and drank enough to bloat a large shark, but none of it had much effect. I was mentally stuck in gear, still replaying the marathon, still hearing the hooves.

“When does it wear off?” I asked Pippa. “It doesn’t” she replied.