Horsing around
Welcome to Pony Club.
The first rule about Pony Club is you almost never hear anybody talk about Pony Club.
The second rule about Pony Club is you can wear scrunchies to keep your hair neat – but only if you also pick up some dirt smears, some grass stains, some sweat. And the occasional gun. Pony Club is not for sissies.
Kids as young as 7 and their parents in Pony Club gathered at a farm west of Seven Mile on Sunday to complete the four-event tetrathlon (“tetra” is Greek for “four”) with horse jumping, target shooting with pellet guns and a footrace. The swim was Saturday night.
The tetrathlon is similar to the modern pentathlon, an Olympic event that has its roots in preparing military couriers to be able to ride, swim, run and shoot.
Pony Club had the feel of a secret society – but only because English-saddle equestrian events tend not to draw huge crowds around here. The kids and even the neat double line of horse trailers in a pasture seemed dwarfed by the sprawl of Windsock Farm. If you don’t count parents and volunteers, Sunday’s event drew more red-tailed hawks – surfing the brisk winds overhead in groups of two and three – than spectators.
Colin Beeler, an 11-year-old who attends Spokane’s St. Aloysius School, couldn’t escape Pony Club since both his parents are riders.
“It can get a little intense when you are in the show ring. But it’s about having fun,” Beeler said.
Kaitlyn Keating, 11, of Spokane, had just finished a 1-kilometer run, the final event in her first tetrathlon.
“I lost the feeling in my legs,” she exclaimed. The footrace gave her empathy for her 17-year-old thoroughbred, Bliss, she said. After all, Bliss has to run with someone on his back.
Bliss can get a little sassy – or, as Keating said, “He gets a little spicy” – and at more than 15 hands high, he towers over his rider and probably is 10 times her weight. But when he sasses – on Sunday, Keating said, Bliss twice came up to jumps and refused to go over – the wiry rider with her hair in a braid shows who’s boss.
“You’ve got to keep a leg on him and keep pushing him. He thinks he’s king of the mountain,” Keating said.
But when they do jump – and they tend to clear barriers of 2 feet, 3 inches (as riders and horses become more skilled, they can jump obstacles up to 4 feet high) – Keating said, the feeling is nothing short of blissful.
“It’s the closest I get to flying,” she said.
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being a real screamer, “when she’s going really fast, it’s a 9 to a 10,” Kaelan Fore, a 10-year-old from Wenatchee, said about jumping with his horse, Tigerlily. And, Fore said, “you learn to keep your heels down” so you don’t get launched upon landing.
Taylor Channing, a Spokane 12-year-old who rides every day as part of her home-school curriculum, was riding in only her second tetrathlon, but her scores Sunday qualified her to attend the national meet in July in Kentucky.
“I like working as a team with a horse,” she said.
Pony Club, it’s a hit.