Mental/Horses

My Q had been why and how lazy Rod transformed suddenly to enthusiasm and storming through his w/os. For Rodney- easy answer. First some consideration of mental side of performance.

Attitude, confidence, concentration, mental response to competitive ebb and flow--some of the brain operations of the "athlete". Never having directly studied exercise psychology, and therefore far from the expert, I'll have to rely on personal experience and some guess work in the discussion.

First, differentiate horses from humans. Our equine friends luckily are competitive and display many of the other mental performance factors of humans. Rodney e.g. last evening showed a bad mood. He was just less than happy either during the w/o and even in the post w/o bath the ears we're pinned back.

In addition to human mental qualities as they affect athletic performance, with our good horses we also have what with many of them is an even bigger factor which involves strictly the animal thing of convincing the beasts to do what we want them to do. So with race horses the mental includes by my reckoning:

1. normal variables of sports psychology, and
2. animal training

And, with the "animal training" component we sort it down further by noting training problems specific to the race horse. Egs: getting 'em in the gate, getting 'em to volunteer to go fast when asked, or a problem I've had with some as a shipper--just getting them to go onto the race track without massive acting up.

Some thoughts on this, next few posts.

Training:
Sat: 7/15: riderless with one 4f of decent speed. Hot and older horse refusing to pass. Rod slows himself when he's on the lead and so getting him to do anything was difficult with my leg injuries. By the time I got to the grocery store I was on the mechanized cart. Very low air pressure/high humidity hardly helped the old bones. I'd got on the older horse barely able to spread my legs wide enough. Walked him awhile without any leg control, and declined getting on the fat one. Legs a little better this morn. We'll see about tonight.