I really had no idea that there was a big, fat delay in me when I went to ride “Niji” forward. I did, however, recognize a drag in him.

The second week of the Floyd, Virginia, Bible/horsemanship clinic with Harry Whitney was under way, and Niji was my main mount that week, partly because the gelding remained a real challenge for me in many ways. This chronic drag in him was one of them.

On Tuesday, the second full day of the clinic, I was in the round pen riding Niji. I was playing with riding him forward, and I mentioned to Harry the gelding’s lack of willingness to go.

“Well, there’s a delay in you,” he responded, matter of factly.

I cogitated on that for a moment, but I must admit I had a really hard time seeing it. I wondered, how could I be late in asking for forward, if I’m sitting up there asking and waiting on Niji to go?

I knew enough about Harry to know that if he said there was a delay in me, that there surely was one. But that didn’t mean I could see it. No doubt Harry could tell I was surprised at his remark, and that I was struggling to grab an understanding of how it could be.

“Get ready,” he said, “and when you want to go forward, do something drastic right then and go to the trot.”

I sat there translating his words into visual frames in my head. I studied those, doing my best to string them together like a movie to see if I could predict just where this was heading.

“Get the end of your split rein ready in your hand and when you ask for forward, whack yourself in the chaps,” he said. “And get big enough to get a trot. But be ready and slap at the exact moment you ask for go.”

I considered Harry’s suggestions and knew that the chap slap wasn’t to drive or frighten the horse so that he fled forward. It was rather to help me immediately get big enough to break loose Niji’s thought of not going when I asked him to go.

“Getting bigger” is a concept I explore in depth in my books, as it’s all relative to what your horse needs. In Niji’s case, I needed to ask for the trot with enough commitment and energy that Niji would forget about the reasons not to think forward and go. Plenty of drag was already established in him from my previous puny attempts, so I needed to break that pattern.

I prepared myself. With the end of a split rein readied in my right hand and the reins crossed atop Niji’s neck in my left, I sorted out in my mind how it should go. I gave it a try.

The result was a discombobulated mess.

I lifted my left hand a touch and asked the gelding to trot off, but I got way too wild with my legs and body trying hard to “up” the energy of my request, and I flopped around all over the place.

Then, to top it off, my chap slap wasn’t anywhere close to the point where I began to flounder around asking for forward. I must have been four seconds late – that’s like an hour and a half in horse time!

The first attempt was so comical I just stopped everything, leaned forward in the saddle and hugged Niji around the neck. Sure, it sounds easy enough – just a big request for forward and a chap slap at the same time, right?

Even though this first attempt proved to be a rather dramatic failure, it was simultaneously a triumph. The success was that I actually saw the delay in me that Harry had mentioned.

I felt I was up against an incredible dullness in my mental/physical coordination. There was a chasm between my thought (accompanied by a half-hearted attempt) to suggest that Niji go and my own actions to seriously get myself and Niji going. This realization came as a flash when I made the first honest attempt at Harry’s plan and failed utterly. It was as if the arm attempting to slap that chap with the rein was in thick mud and I couldn’t synchronize my appendage to my brain.

I set myself up again and gave it another go.

The timing was a little better this time, but it felt like an incredible effort was required of me to get the chap slap anywhere near the moment when I would attempt to ask Niji forward. It is hard to explain this conundrum I found myself in. It wasn’t physical. It was rather like Harry said, a delay in me, a sort of unconscious unwillingness that blocked me from asking and expecting the gelding to GO!

I thought all along I was asking Niji to get the lead out of his hind parts and go right now. The problem was that my “right now” wasn’t really right now at all.

“It’s like you’re waiting on him to go,” Harry said to me as we discussed the situation, “and then you’ll catch up and go with him instead of you going first. You’re just sitting there like you’re in your easy chair waiting to see what’s going to take place and then go with it – and that puts delay in it. You’re just behind the action. You’ve got to make a believer out of him that you’re serious, and then you’ve got to be going.”

Reflecting on this situation makes me realize now that, these days, I’m also experiencing the opposite side of this type of experience. Sometimes, I’m seeing problem spots between people and their horses. Then it’s me looking for a way to help people see how they are missing something that works against the horse shaping up.

For example, I constantly coach people to avoid walking backward when asking a horse to circle around them on a lead rope. I had this problem at first, too, but now I can see that particular situation a mile away. Again, it goes back to that saying of Harry’s so often quoted in my books, “Until you see it, you can’t see it, and then when you see it, you wonder how you never saw that before!”

So, back in the round pen, I concentrated extra hard and got a few decent consecutive forward ask/chap slaps accomplished. When my timing and intensity improved, Niji obliged with a newfound willingness to go forward with gusto, immediately. Then Harry said, “Now put the tail of the rein down and just ask him to go forward.”

I did.

I nearly tumbled backward out of the saddle, so unprepared was I for this new first gear he had. I busted out laughing (along with everyone else) at my own surprise at just how ready and willing Niji was to go. I’d traded in a Chevette for a Corvette!

The thing that really struck me at that moment was how my poor timing and lack of initial intensity had produced a real mental change in Niji that caused the drag in him. I’d been the problem here.

The fact that I was so unprepared for Niji to really go freely forward after a little work must have meant that at some level I didn’t believe the gelding would be any different than before if I asked with less intensity. The pattern was so established in me (and thus between us) that when it did change, I was simply unprepared for it. I was so accustomed to the drag and my pedaling along to get him forward that it just wasn’t part of my reality, even though it was what I sought.

Harry’s coaching helped me get a real mental change in Niji; he was now really thinking forward. Once thinking forward was on the list of options, all I had to do was ask him to go, and there he went! When he wasn’t really thinking forward, I could have asked him to move out all day long, and it wasn’t going to get rid of that drag.

This is a lesson that has stuck with me. I now also recognize such delays in other areas of my horse work. If I can be consistent with what I ask a horse, whatever it may be, it’s a disservice to the horse if I don’t get him through to a mental change at the start. That puts a distance between us and keeps the horse from feeling the best he can about me.

I’m also now better able to see delays in the horse work of other folks I work with. Having Harry state what was obvious to him made a huge impact on me.