Max on Parade!

Today Max and I completed our first parade together in Burbank! After many doubts and some serious misgivings, I decided to take the plunge and enter Max and I in a parade with the group I normally drill with on the weekends, The Warhorse and Militaria Foundation and I suppose this was inevitable... :-)

I've been working for about four years training Max and getting him ready to travel to various events and do interesting things. After getting off to a bad start back in 2004 with a bad trailering situation, I've been struggling to get him up to ready to deal with all manner of events and to overcome the obstacle of not having a truck or trailer (while I have a ways to go on this, things appear to finally be loosening up and it looks like I'll taking him to a few places in the next month).

The parade was a small one but a good introduction. Although the parade was supposed to begin around 11 am, I was up at 5 am and at the stables by 6 am. I had to be sure all the necessary saddle and tack was loaded up the night before because I had to leave my van at my friend's house and walk over to the stables, get Max, and walk him back to my friend's house (it's easier to do this than have my friend drive over and the distance is pretty short. After loading up my saddle, tack, uniform and miscellaneous equipment, we finally left at about 7:45 and headed out to Burbank.

After some twists and turns, we finally found our starting point and proceeded to groom and saddle our horses. I'd been steadily grooming Max all week, as best as I could and didn't allow him to roll in the arena at all so things weren't too bad. I'd even combed out his main and tail (Cowboy Magic makes things a lot easier!). Naturally Max was a bit nervious and curious about all the new sights and sounds but he handled it well and was more interested in eating his hay.

Finally, we went off to be judged and Max pretty much cooperated here although he tried to back out of line (got to work on that more!). We managed to remain stationary and complete the judging process and then had to wait another 30 minutes or so to actually begin the parade.

After waiting for what seemed an eternity, we finally kicked off and began to move...sort of...in a herkey jerky way. What a pain. We did various parade manuevers to occupy the horses but it was still challenging to keep Max focused on the job at hand- I had to be alert yet relaxed and handle things as best as I could without making an issue of anything. A couple of times Max tried to squeeze out of line but I managed to get him back in again without any fireworks.

We finally started moving at a fairly normal pace and Max began to relax a bit although he seemed to be in a hurry to get through with the whole thing. He also kept tucking his head and pulling against the bit so I had to stuggle to keep him loose on the bit without deranging my seat. I managed to handle that but it wasn't fun...

As we got towards the end of the parade, Max seemed to get better and was focusing better on my aids rather than the envirnoment around him. I also noticed that hit helped that he was with horses he normally works with and that they tend to feed off each other. One of the hardest things for me is to focus on getting my aids working and actually riding rather than reacting to Max's reactions- in short, getting ahead of him and thinking for two. The toughest time for me is when I first get on the horse- eventually my brain comes "online" and I'll start working him as I always do but I need to develop a quicker reaction. All dealable.

Overall, it was a good performance and there's a few things I need to work on and tighten up but nothing major. I think things will get better and There were a few issues but nothing major and most of it had to do with other parade participants rather than the public in general (the miniature horses pulling carts didn't help, especially when they ran them directly at us as we were moving towards the finish area. It was pretty interesting and our group won a first place for the military category. I'll have some pictures soon.