Well, Storm got to go on another ride yesterday. We went to Arcata Forest for a few hours with this nice woman I sometimes ride with. It was good on many levels. She is a begginer rider and her horse sometimes just does whatever he wants (like cantering off up a hill while we trot, or going off trail, or up Storm's butt :) ) and this gives Storm a good feel of the "random horse behavior" that will happen at endurance rides. Like horses passing and leaving him, running into him (no matter HOW many ribbons you put in a horse's tail, someone ALWAYS ignores them and will invade your space), acting up, etc. So he needs to learn to be ok with it. He pretty much was good with everything except the other horse taking off without him. We actually got a few mini-meltdowns. This is actually a GOOD thing, because I need to know a) what he does in a meltdown and b) if I can control him when he does. And I don't want to find those out at an endurance ride, in the middle of nowhere, when I get bucked off and a loose stallion goes flying down the trail to who knows where :) So the answers to those are a) throws his head around, pulls on the reins and tries to take off, and hunches up a little, but no buck or rear. So b) yes, with a one rein stop and facing back opposite of the leaving horse, he is easy to break out of his little tantrum. GREAT! So I think even if he has little tantrums, it won't be a big deal. Esp as the more experience he gets, the less likely we'll even HAVE tantrums.
Also good about this ride, since she is not a very experienced rider, we were just going for a "fun" ride and I could set the pace. This meant I could finally get a good idea of his gaits. He does a nice little runwalk at about 5-7mph, then a really cute rack at about 7-11mph...after that he breaks into a step pace. I am hoping as he gets stronger, that rack can speed up a little more. He also does a nice canter and a weird (ok, I am not a western pleasure rider, so to me it feels weird and like the horse is dead LAME, LOL) 4 beat lope too. Then a good, fun hand gallop too. Very good! So far he has never once offered to trot or foxtrot, so I think he is fairly laterally wired.
I also really worked him a bit and made him run up some of our good hills and then check his heart rate and breathing. He still has to build a lot of lung capacity, but though his HR needs a little work, it was a lot lower after each run, than I was expecting. That's a GREAT thing too! And he seemed to recover fairly well. So with lots of conditioning, I think we really do have a good endurance horse in the making :)
Tomorrow, if it is not pouring rain (showers are listed), I will take him out to Clam Beach and see how he does there...if I get lucky, I might be able to rope a friend into videoing his gaits for me and taking pics :)