“Do you want to run?” Chrissy asked. “Sure,” I said, as her spunky little grey gelding shot off up the road. El Capitan — the lanky, gaited part-Peruvian Paso gelding I was riding — followed. As we clattered up the hard-packed dirt road, I stood in the Western stirrups and gave him his head. I was on a two-week vacation in Panama and this was my second day riding with Horseback Panama near Santa Fe, 300 kilometres west of Panama City.

Selecting athletes for any team is hard. Selecting athletes for the first Canadian team that a fledgling organization has ever sent to a World Championships is doubly difficult. However, using subjective selection criteria which results in the highest ranked rider being left off the team pretty much guarantees that sport enthusiasts will question the selection process, the organization, and whether they want to be involved in future.

Essentially, a gate is a transition from here to there. It’s a transition from one pasture to another, replicated in competition. Learning to work a gate can be part of your horse’s training transition into a more attentive, patient, and handy partner.

A hot humid day. One rider. One horse. Both are exercising at a moderate level. Who is more likely to overheat? It might surprise you to learn that your horse gets hotter much faster than you and is more susceptible to the negative effects of heat stress. Prof. Michael Lindinger, an animal and exercise physiologist at the University of Guelph, explains: “It only takes 17 minutes of moderate intensity exercise in hot, humid weather to raise a horse’s temperature to dangerous levels. That’s three to ten times faster than in humans. Horses feel the heat much worse than we do.”