Nob Injured

I have to seguay here, unfortunately, to the event of the weekend, when Nob was thrown from the horse and injured his leg. I've referred several times to our problems with our horse Rollin' Rodney in terms of spooking under tack. This has been fairly constant ranging from the innocuous where there horse warily espies some imagined danger ahead but that's the end of it--Nob calls that "looking"--to various antics and panic jumping about. A typical event was such as two weeks ago with Nob routinely galloping along our tree line and when he approached the barn area the horse suddenly without explanation jumped about three feet in the air. Nob jumped off and said that he'd been able to handle the relatively minor-- instead of cataclysmic-- events to date, but "it's coming".

Thereafter we'd kind of, sort of thought the horse was under control as evidenced by the video below showing Heat #1 of a gallop last week. Nob had been mentally rehearsing his bail out action for the expected "big event". In the video, with every front lead hoof strike, Nob would anticipated a possible duck out or worse. The plan is to stay in contact with the barrel of the horse from knee to calf so that the rider is carried with the horse in any change of direction.

The best laid plans of mice and men, as the say, gone agley. Saturday near the end of a very nice workout Nob was happily trotting the horse along albeit in the opposite direction--we we're lengthening volume and wanting to get the horse used to going that direction--when the predicted major incident happened.

The horse was, as is his wont, trotting with his head up in the air. I've noted the difficulty our horse has breathing at the trot. This alone makes him a problematic. You can see this "sky watching" at the trot at the end of the video. Just before the horse hits the trees the head goes up. He breathes normally at the gallop btw.

So, tell us what happened, Mr. Nob. Nob said this one occurred so suddenly that he's unable to break it down step by step. They were in a trot, rider in normal three point stance. Nob had been wary due to the change of direction of this trot, but had trotted about 100 yards and almost reached the turn around point. He had stopped worrying when the event occurred.

The horse in an instant--"instantaneously" as Nob described it--saw something out to the right, dropped his front end propping his front legs straight out in front of him and then exploded to his left at about 90 degrees. Nob lost his knee-calf contact when the horse dropped.

Nob said that all he knew was that one moment he had a horse under him and the next he was suspended in mid air without any horse there. Luckily apparently having lost his left stirrup, Nob bailed out twisting himself counter clock wise which would cause his right leg to exit the right stirrup. Due to the horse's "drop" the distance to the ground was short. Nob was unable to get his hands down to break his fall as he had mentally rehearsed.

Nevertheless Nob said it was a clean and harmless fall, and he was proud of the safe manner in which he'd executed it. Our faithful horse, after jumping out to the left immediately realized there was nothing there to get him, and just stood there 20 yards away from where our rider lay. Then the horse walked right over to Nob. Big Rod is a good fellow if we could get around the problem of spooking.

Nob injured the tendon on the inside of his left thigh. Apparently that leg was jerked sharply with the initial duck out. Nob said the injury will heal quickly. But Sunday he was unable to walk. By Mon. morning he was able to shuffle along, and thought he could get back on in a couple of days.

How far are we going with this horse? I'll avoid overreacting at this point because we have just gotten into our galloping due to weather. But, the incident Saturday was a serious incident. I have never seen a horse that just ducks out without any warning as sharply to the left as this horse has been doing. The maneuver is beyond rider control and thus concerning. We'll see how it goes.

Training: Sat: 2 miles mostly gallop with 4 x 1f spurts probably to about 14.5 sec/f.

Sun. Off. Rider injured.