Turns

In the last boxing/fence article, I wrote about the importance of leaving the corner well and rating the cow down the fence. These two components can make or break your run. If you leave late and have to catch up, you’ll be going too fast when you turn your cow, which can cause you to be less than accurate, and your ability to control the cow will suffer. And, if you get going too quickly, you’ll turn your cow before the middle marker.

Assuming that you left well, and you have rated your cow down the fence, now it’s time to sneak past it. I emphasize the word “sneak” because you want to overtake the cow and cruise by it, going only a little faster than it’s running. This way, your horse will be focused on the cow, and able to turn right with it. He will be able to be very accurate and control the cow through the turn.

In order to credit your turns, the horse must engage its hindquarters while stopping and turning the cow. This enables the horse to maintain control both in the turn, as well as upon exiting it. If your horse doesn’t engage its hindquarters, but instead turns like a Coke bottle spins, it will feel like you’re riding a buffalo. If your horse drops its shoulder before engaging its hindquarters, it will feel like you stepped off a stair in the dark, that you didn’t know was there. Both are hard to ride and even harder to control the cow when exiting the turn.

So, as you sneak by, you’re watching the cow like a hawk. You have him in your crosshairs. Try to slow time down, and focus, so you can see the imperceptible drop of the cow’s head or the blink/roll of its eye. This is the cow “setting up”. Real cowy horses can see this, as can real cowy riders. That’s when you sit deep, think core, drawback on your reins to initiate the stop, while pulling the cow side reins a bit more. This ensures your horse gets on his hocks and goes all the way through the turn nose first. That way he won’t get hung up on the fence. You want to be very accurate, read the cow all the way through the turn, and exit right with it, in control.

Then, with it either on the fence, or requiring you to shape it back to the fence, you set up your next turn, and cruise by, never taking your eye off the cow’s head.

What if things didn’t exactly go as planned? If you made your first turn, and the cow came off the wall for any number of reasons, you might opt to make the “California Loop”. To do this, assuming you’re on the left wall, you would need to loop your cow around counterclockwise, and then head back down the fence to get your right turn. This would set you up to be on the fence most of the way down the arena, giving you a better shot at a good turn. If the cow came off the fence and you had to loop, the question is, “did you lose control/working advantage, so the cow came off the fence?” If you did, there will be a 1 point penalty. If not, then there shouldn’t be. If you opted not to do the loop, you would head back towards the out gate, and try to shape the cow back to the fence, in hopes of having it on the fence before you ran out of the arena. It is a higher degree of difficulty to do that, so if you pull it off, you should get more credit for it.

Let’s say you executed a good left and right turn, it’s safest to take a third turn before circling. This will ensure the best placement in the arena to circle and decreases the possibility of getting outrun when you start to circle.

For the next fence article, I’ll go over circling. Hope this gave you some good ideas! Below is one of NRCHA’s great non pros, Shannon McCarty!

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