Do Not Adjust Your Monitor

This actually happened:

That be me on Gene.  I told Anne-Marie there had to be photographic proof or it never happened.

I have ridden this horse probably less than 10 times since we bought him in 2006.  I have also never ridden him outside of the ring.  That... is not the ring.  I don't ride anything but Peanut, normally, but it was an odd little day.

At the above moment, captured for posterity, it is dawning on me that the spook I just rode had done very, very bad things to me.  He had suddenly flung his front end 90 degrees as he pivoted off his rears.  While I had no issues at all staying in the saddle, I did get flung down on his neck and here, a couple of minutes later, my car accident injuries were waking up.

Interestingly, the only complaint I had after the spook was with my finger that had jammed against his neck.  It really did take a minute for everything else to bloom.

Maybe 10 minutes or so after this, when I realized that every stride of his sent a jolt up my spine, into my right shoulder, and down my tingling right arm, I decided to get off and walk.  The agony was not worth the ride.

After an "emergency" visit to the massage therapist that night, I am feeling pretty fine now, about 48 hours later.

Anyhow, this is how such a thing happened:

I was planning to ride Peanut, but for some reason that felt wrong to me.  As I was walking around the trails, waiting for Anne-Marie, it hit me that I should ride Gene.  That was the right thing to do.  It would be for the best.  There was no debating it - it seemed like the universe had decreed it to be so.  I was helpless.

So, yeah.  I don't know anything about riding him.  I couldn't stop the beastie!  Every time I braked he would just throw his head around and I felt my seat cues were dying due to the real, honest-to-goodness tree in the saddle.  At first, my best bet for a stop was to put him over grass and give him his head.  Yes, I felt like a triumphant equestrian.

Finally, I thought of his Western training.  Well, I never had any of dat dere stuff, but I tried to mimic what a Western whoa looks like.  I'll be damned if it didn't work, but it didn't feel solid.  Well, that was a start.

I was out with Mona and Anne-Marie, and led.  On the leader trail we came across two bikes laid down beside the trail.  OH NO.  Gene spun and tried to bolt, but luckily we had a Friesian roadblock.  I turned him around and tried again, and he shot off backwards off the side of the trail.

Sigh.

If this was Peanut I'd tell him to touch the damn thing, he would, would realize it wasn't going to eat him, and would go on with life.  I had no idea of how to deal with Gene.  So, I ended up putting him behind Mona.  She walked by them fine and he walked by like they weren't even there.

Sigh.

That wasn't the spook that did me in.  That came later when a biker came up behind us, much to Gene's surprise.

I survived everything that he threw at me, and dismounted because I wanted to.  However, I learned how much I understand Peanut, how he understands me, and how I'm not as helpless on him as I have thought.  I know what to do with him to deal with most situations, which is a big thing to me and I didn't understand that before.

Also, I learned that Gene has a sport suspension.  Peanut has a luxury ride.  This is only at a walk, mind you.  There was a lot of shimmy-shake happening in Gene's posterior as well.

Later that day, they had a trim.

Peanut's enormous, golden, itchy ass broke two rails at once on the fence while Gene was being trimmed.

Naturally, he broke the shortest rails around, and there were no replacements to be had.  But, I got to hobble about trying to find replacements and putting things back as well as I could.

Gene, for his part, didn't even flinch as the boards broke with an explosive crack almost directly behind him.  I later realized that the knot from the center of one of the two boards had landed between Gene's rear feet.

Good boy.