OklahomaHorses Magazine March 2022

March/April 2022 • OklahomaHorses 19 A lmost all ranch or rodeo kids have been privy to cross-training, likely be- fore they ever realized it. That was the case for CD and Alexa Major Wilcox, who both practiced the concept as they dove headfirst into rodeo when growing up. Ranch Kids “The rancher’s mentality is that your horse can do any job,” said Ms. Wilcox, who grew up in Colorado and occasionally helped on her family’s 80,000-acre ranch in New Mexico. “As a kid, your parents don’t want to buy a horse for every event, so the ranch horse had to do everything.” Learning to ride whatever horse showed up that day was one of the pivotal lessons she learned from that upbringing. Her days at the gymkhana gave way to 4-H and FFA horse shows and junior high and high school rodeo. “Everything was cross-trained growing up because we didn’t know any different. It was, ‘Get it done with one horse or don’t do it’ at all,” she said. And get it done with one she certainly did. One of the most expensive horses her family ever bought was her high school barrel-racing horse. She took cross-training to the show pen with that gelding. “It was actually pretty comical because here I was on this nice barrel horse making him do really small, slow circles in the mid- dle of the arena on a reining pattern,” Ms. Wilcox explained. “We ended up winning ‘super horse,’ which is like the all-around award, that year.” Draft or Bust Cross-training was a natural piece of CD Wilcox’s early days also, but growing up in Virginia meant it was different than most. For multiple generations, the Wilcox family competed with draft horses in pulling.