Legato - From wild horse to personal hero in 35 days

In 2015, my now-husband, Dan, convinced me we were ready to compete in our first Extreme Mustang Makeover. If you are not familiar with this, it is a wild horse training competition where you pick up a wild, untouched, BLM mustang and have approximately 100 days to gentle and train it. These horse and rider teams compete in classes such as handling and conditioning, maneuvers, and trail to highlight the train-ability and willingness of the horses. Finally, the horses are auctioned off to adopters. In our case, the competition was held during the annual Reno Rodeo.

We were lucky enough that both Dan and I were selected to compete after sending in our applications which meant we were bringing home 2 mustangs! The horses for these competitions are randomly assigned to each trainer to keep it fair and we had no idea what we were getting until just before they were loaded onto the trailer. I ended up with a lanky little solid black gelding, just under 15 hands tall and 5 years old, and so nervous. Dan's tiny bay gelding seemed much braver at first so I was pretty apprehensive ab