My father always taught me that patience is a virtue, and I never completely understood the meaning until I started training horses in January of 2012 at Next Level HorsemanshipTM. I have been attempting to learn all of Suzanne’s training techniques and strategies in preparation for the Extreme Mustang Makeover Competition. I had 90 days to train and gentle a wild mustang and it has been an educational and joyful journey. My greatest struggle was finding the patience to stay at the learning pace of my Mustang, Denali. 
I’ll never forget the first time I saw Denali at the mustang pick-up site in Lorton, Virginia. I fell in love with him then and there and have continued to love him through thick and thin. Day one started in the round pen, moving his feet, establishing direction and essentially my relationship with him. I discovered on Day 4 that Denali was a passive aggressive horse when he charged me because he didn’t want to move his feet. He got into the habit of challenging things he did not want to do, such as cantering, so Suzanne rode another horse in the round pen to move Denali around. He was just too dangerous to train on the ground. I was frustrated because I just wanted him to understand how much I loved him and that I wasn’t really a threat. It took weeks for Denali to get out of his aggressive stage, and even now it still shows sometimes.
Day 39 was Denali’s first ride under saddle, but it felt like Day 100. There is so much work that has to be put in before getting on a horse for the first time. Patience is so important in this step because it could essentially determine if the horse will buck or not while riding. Denali isn’t sensitive to very many things, so I had no problems introducing him to the saddle for the first time. I hobbled him so he couldn’t go too far just to be safe. The next step was lunging him with the saddle on, which he also did very well with. I then added a long cotton rope that dragged behind him so he could get use to the feel of that on his legs, and I tied saddle bags filled with sand so he could feel some weight bumping on him while he ran. Getting up in the saddle was a whole different process. I spent countless times stepping up in the stirrup with one foot and stepping down to let him feel my weight and get used to balancing himself with me on him. When I finally got to sit in the saddle for the first time, he was hobbled. I practiced several mounts and dismounts. A few days later I put the bosal on him and started flexing him and yielding his hind quarters with the hobbles still on. He finally graduated from it all, and because I took that extra time to solidify his ground work with the saddle on, he didn’t buck on his first ride. To me, that was a great success and proved to me that it was time well spent waiting to get in that saddle.
Training under saddle was all a blur to me because I was working on different things all the time. Suzanne rode the first couple days to make sure he wasn’t going to be aggressive. We had no idea what to expect from him. She started with flexing him and teaching him to one rein stop. Then, we put the snaffle bit in him for the first time on Day 50, which took about 20 minutes to get in. I worked on “follow the feel” with him, which means when I pick up left, he goes left. He really struggled with where to go when I wasn’t pulling in a direction. He didn’t understand the concept of move straight forward. Then, on day 66 I went out on trail with him and he kept blowing through my reins when I asked him to back down a gait. He was so full of energy and ready to run. Then, when I asked him to canter straight through a field, he veered off to the right and started running downhill. I started slipping off and then he threw a happy buck and the next thing I knew, I was on the ground in extreme pain. I had badly bruised my knees and leg bones. I had to take three weeks off to recover, so Suzanne and Anna helped to keep his training going. When I got back, he was in the process of learning how to neck rein, depart on the right lead, and not blow through the reins in the canter. I am so impressed by how far he has come in such a short time and so proud of him. I knew he could do it! It just took patience.
Today, there is less than a week before the competition, and I am confident that Denali is ready to show off his moves. He walks, trots, caters, backs up, pivots on the haunches, side passes and so much more. Starting out in May, I never expected this journey to be so hard and enduring, and yet so enjoyable at the same time. The bond that I have built with this horse is so strong and hard to describe in words. He has taught me so much in 90 days, especially patience, and changed me as a person. My life would not be the same without him. Hopefully I will bring him home with me after the competition!
~Sarah Dengler, NLHTM Intern, 2012
