The Stall Street Journal

Merry Christmas, Tree

2011-12-23T14:34:00.000-08:00

My favorite Christmas tree remains the one that got away.

All these years later, I long for its perfect shape and just-right pine needle scent. Just like the bad boy in high school whose handsome looks and charm were bolstered by the fact that he never became my boyfriend, this particular Christmas tree was one of life's flirty objects that resisted ownership. And, oh, how it broke my heart that winter, my 11-year old self bawling with a conviction reserved for devastating events. How it broke my heart that, even though the tree had been chosen and cut by us and therefore should have been erected in the Ballou home, it never got close to our living room. How it broke my heart the way it splintered and snapped into clumps of green across the half mile from the woods' edge to our barn.

In spite of what seemed like the truncation of a merry holiday season to this 11-year old standing mid-shin in a snowbank, the event did imprint me with a critical lesson. That lesson, gentle reader, was the spooky nature of horses.

In a Ballou tradition involving snowshoes, chainsaws, and a dose of parental bickering, my parents trekked with us into the woods behind our house every year around December 5. A few hours of squabbling later, we reached agreement about which tree to saw down and bring home. We all regarded this selection process seriously, given that it kicked off a season of no-holds-barred merriment and magic in our home.

To get four opinionated people to agree on the best elements of a tree is no quick task. My Dad always wanted to tallest one in the forest, never mind that it wouldn't fit inside the house. My brother wanted trees densely packed with enough branches and needles to hold up our impressive collection of ornaments. My mother, on the other hand, insisted on aesthetic balance and overall visual harmony. For her, the tree needed to be shaped exactly conical with a consistent number of branches (but not too many!) on all sides. Not too bushy, not too lean.

I, meanwhile, preferred the forest's sparse, short, and sickly looking trees probably because I felt sorry for them and wanted to bestow them with some lively joy and happiness that the rest of us felt during Christmas. Selecting a tree required compromise on every one's behalf, but mostly my father's. We never cut down a tree that was satisfactory in height for him. Even if the living room ceiling could have accommodated a 15-footer, the logistics of hauling such a behemoth home on snowshoes with two small kids in tow proved too much.

That particular year, though, my father brainstormed a new plan. Heck, we train horses for a living, he said to my mom. Why not get THEM to do the work? Why not drive Sunny, our best horse, up to the wood's edge with a sleigh and then leave him tied at the fence until we get the tree? Then, we could secure our tree in the sleigh and let Sunny do the hard work of hauling it home. Sunny had done a number of July 4 parades and competitions that involved all kinds of noise, standing around, etc., so he was the best choice for the tree harvest.

It all began quite well. We left Sunny tied to a fence post while we waded deeper into the woods through knee-high snow drifts hunting down our tree. Right on cue, the bickering started. My brother insisted we cut down one of the first trees we came to. I argued that we should wait for a more worthy one, a tree that required more hunting and effort. Then, we remembered Sunny. With a strong steed to carry home our tree this year, we all decided in a moment of selfless Christmas spirit that we should allow Dad to select the tree since his choice got voted down in past years. To this news, my chainsaw-toting father cheered up like a young boy.

Within moments, he found a healthy monster of a yule tree, a 16-foot wonder with an impressive number of branches. We Ballous stood in the cold snow beholding his tree. We each pictured how, once decorated and lit, its deep green needles and symmetry would be the envy of every party-goer at our annual holiday celebration. This was the kind of tree reserved for town squares and magazine covers. Our pride turned into giddiness as Dad fired up the chainsaw. My brother and I begged Mom to decorate it immediately when we got home. Mom, meanwhile, was too speechless by the tree's beauty to reply.

In radical departure from previous years' bickering, we all sang Christmas songs on the way back to Sunny. Dad dragged the tree with a rope harness while my brother and I trudged ahead breaking trail. We walked side by side stamping our feet hard into the snow to clear a path for the tree, so it could slide along smoothly without snagging branches or losing precious needles. It grew cold in the woods as dusk approached, but our reverence for The World's Most Perfect Tree slowed our efforts to a fine-tuned precision. When the trail cornered right or left, all four of us lifted and swung the tree around it methodically, as though this member of the forest just became our family heirloom.

Back at Sunny, we tied the tree into our Cutter sleigh, which had a flat section behind much like a pickup truck. We each secured a designated section of tree in place-- again, taking painstaking effort to preserve needles-- and then unbuckled our snowshoes and put those in the sleigh, too. My Dad checked Sunny's harness connections and then began to take up his reins and climb aboard the sleigh while the rest of us waited beside him.

It was exactly at this moment that my brother, prone to hyperactivity, surged with a jolt of unbridled Christmas spunk that he apparently could not rein in. For reasons we'll never fathom nor forgive, he bolted across the field springing through the snow like a Broadway dancer, yelping something about cookies and cocoa. His mittens flung, his snowsuit flapped, his voice echoed off the frozen tree trunks.

And Sunny freaked out.

This cookie-seeking, snow-bounding bundle of colors terrified him. Before my Dad could throw himself up into the sleigh, Sunny bolted away with our sleigh and tree attached behind him. He ran like a horse tasting freedom for the first time. He ran with no intention of stopping. Our antique sleigh bounced and jumped and split apart. Its curved runners broke into pieces, causing the sleigh to collapse onto its belly and drag across the snow until it, too, split apart one board at a time. I remember its decorative paint flaking off in peels as each board hurled through the air and settled in the snow. By now, our tree looked like green confetti. Its few remaining branches dragged behind Sunny until, arriving back at the barn, they looked like pulp. What we once envisioned as a festive promenade from woods to barn with a magnificent tree in tow now became a half -mile smear of evergreen detritus and antique sleigh splinters.

Sunny returned to the barn unscathed and we found him standing quietly in his stall munching hay, a few tattered pieces of harness hanging from his sides. Somberly, we removed the tack that his runaway had not and brushed him down. I wiped off the bit while Dad picked snow out his hooves. Nobody mentioned the tree. By now, my brother caught up to us. As disappointed as the rest of us, he asked a very legit question, the type of inquiry that repeats again and again for horsemen.

"Hey Dad," he began, "I thought you said Sunny was our BEST horse. If he's the best one, how come he freaked out?" His eyes twinkled a little as he asked, clearly finding humor in the irony that a non-verbal small-brained animal just decimated the well-laid plan of four human beings in the blink of an eye.

And therein lies the question many of us ponder in regards to our steeds. My brother's eyes grew bigger.

"What would the WORST one have done?"

An Outfit Defines the Person

2011-10-10T07:58:00.000-07:00

Recall the last time you saw a smartly dressed man or woman gracing down the sidewalk in fabrics so finely made, they caused you a double-take. Chances are good that within your double-take, in that calculation and appreciation for such exceptional threads, you formed an idea about the person behind those clothes. With the outfit as your leaping off point, you arrived at a description of its wearer.

Just as my fellow Philosophy students and I did in ontology class, you briefly pondered what made that person who he or she was and arrived at a rough sketch. I'll argue here that one's style of dress plays a heavy role in determining that. Start with me as an example. Sometimes my idea of dressing up means pulling on a clean baseball hat. If my socks match and my pants don't show visible stains, I'm ready for a night on the town.

This fashion, or noted lack thereof, goes with my personality. I'm the type who focuses on the practical necessities in life, leaving any luxurious pining to be the fluff that I might occasionally daydream about on airplanes while flipping through magazines. I dwell in the realm of simple and basic. It never occurs to me to tailor a T-shirt for a better fit or that a hair barrette might actually MATCH my outfit. Maybe this will change, but for now it's who I am. Meanwhile, I often give lots of thought to why other people dress the way they do.

An outfit I have often pondered is the Western riding outfit. Assuming I would never in my English riding career wear such a thing unless for a Halloween party, I have frequently stared at cowgirls in their fringe-laden, blingy get-ups and wondered how practical any of that could be.

Then, I decided to enter a Western Dressage show and found myself needing to don just such an outfit. That is where the transformation began, where this new outfit began to define a new me.

First off, getting dresses required two helpers. Probably not since Fourth grade had someone else helped me put on pants, but I found the chaps too tricky to master myself. All that dangling fringe kept catching in the zipper. So, finally I let two bystanders help cram me into my clothes. One zipped the chaps on while the other shoved me underneath a cowboy hat. With a long-sleeved sparkly shirt and a pair of jangly spurs, I was ready for the arena... and very hot.

By Sacramento, CA standards it was an average summer day-- nearing 100 degrees. Inside that Western gear felt like an incubator. I peered from under the hat's enormous brim-- no easy task- and walked slowly over to where my horse stood wilting in the heat. Sleeved in glittery Lycra, my arms began to sweat. Meandering to the warm-up pen, I started to understand why Western riders often seem to be moving so slowly compared to us English folks. Normally, I would have launched into an array of high-energy warm-ups moves with my steed. Instead, we slowly limbered up and found our groove. Melting under my big stiff hat, it occurred to me why Western riders never seemed as frenetically paced as us.

Not only do they need to conserve energy lest they suffer heat exhaustion, but after investing so much time shimmying into an outfit that includes both fringe and sparkle, why not enjoy it? At shows, we English riders change back into street clothes as soon as our class finishes. We hurry out of the jackets and collars and tall boots that make most of us look like newspaper boys from the 1800's. Now that I was wearing this Lady Gaga-style Western outfit, I felt no urge to hurry back and take it off, despite sweating at a rate that guaranteed dehydration.

Long puzzling concepts began to make sense, namely the reason that things happen slowly in the Western world, and I'm not not talking about the riding. For one thing, the dialect has always struck me as exaggeratedly unrushed. Western folks use the same time to deliver their mono-syllabic equivalents of our English multi-word phrases. For instance, Western show announcers take the same time to drawl through "pen" as it takes a dressage steward to blurt out "show arena." The same amount of time for one syllable versus four. We English trainers hurry through telling our students to "apply your inside leg" in the same time a Western coach relaxes through suggesting a student "bump" her horse.

Without realizing it, by wiggling into this borrowed costume, I was sampling a world that long intrigued me. My steed and I moved at a markedly slower pace than normal. And maybe because of that, or because of the blissed out costumed feel-good of his rider, my horse offered up more relaxation and submission than he often does. Our movements were quiet and graceful. We went smoothly through our paces with our fringe and bling catching the attention, I hoped, of anyone watching. I pondered the unhurried conversations I've overheard among cowboys, their "we've-got-all-the-time-in-the-world" interactions with their horses. For this brief moment, I got a taste of that. And I'll admit that, in my snug sparkly shirt and eggplant colored chaps, I felt pretty darn cool. For one wonderful hour, I was my own John Wayne style hero-- full of smooth moves, good swagger, and long pauses.

That is what initiated this reflection about a person's fashion defining her to some extent. It might be hyperbolic to say that an outfit can change a person, but it sure helps create a mindset. In my case, it helped me leap across the Great Divide of equestrian sports: English vs. Western. Had I always viewed that other discipline while clad in my tight breeches and polo shirt, I would have continued to see it as, well, a bit funny. By adopting the look and feel of it for a day, though, I experienced it genuinely. Having done so, I experienced that I long suspected: that we each have tons to learn from each other if we can be open-minded.

It's not that I want to close the chasm between us so that we share one world. Rather, I actually like the separation because it allows riders to fit in wherever they feel most comfortable. I would just like us all to be open and accepting of each other in different disciplines. Plus, I want the opportunity to cross-dress my way through each one. Er, I mean cross-train.

Seeing is Believing

2011-08-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

Right there in yoga class, my mind and body formed a conspiracy against me. For thirty seconds, I held plank pose in what felt like a perfect imitation of a yoga master. I felt the straight line of my back and long neck, the open spread of my chest and shoulders, palms pressing firmly into the ground yet not straining. It all felt correct and effortless, maybe even graceful.

Then I glanced to the right at a mirror next to me. Whoa, was that hunched up, straining figure ME? My rounded back looked like a turtle shell; my shoulders slumped and chest collapsed. That girl in the mirror couldn't possibly be me. Where was the grace, the long straight spine? That girl looked like Quasimodo crawling up the steps at Notre Dame.

I turned away so I could focus on feeling my body again. Wiggling a little here and there, I fixed the problems and knew that surely now I was close to perfection. For validation, I turned again to the mirror. WHAT?! Nothing changed from before. A lip-biting, sloppy hunchback gazed back at me.

Obviously, my body was betraying me. How could something feel so different from the way it was actually happening? Initially, I thought this trickery might be karmic payback for the lessons I've taught in which I end up being the equivalent of the yoga mirror for students. A common exchange goes like this:

Student: But my leg IS back.

Me: No, it's not. It really is not.

Student: It MUST be. It feels so far back.

Me: No. It's not even close.

These exchanges, while indeed necessary for a student's learning, leave me feeling like a buzz-kill. I end up being a messenger of negativity at the moment someone thinks she is doing really well. Everything feels great, her body is giving feedback that she's succeeding, and then I come along and tell her that her body is lying.

Too often, I deliver these bubble-bursting tidbits into the gaze of a wide-eyed student, whose blank expression says "but...but... how can that possibly be?" Their innocent stare wonders for a moment if perhaps I am lying. Maybe I just want to deflate their egos and make them work harder. Or I'm just a mean person. Let me assure you, devoted students, that I had similar thoughts about the cruel mirror in yoga class. Was this some kind of prank?, I pondered. Did the mirror need cleaning? Or maybe it was foggy.

No. It was the age-old curse of being human. I call this flawed human reality the curse of being deceived by our bodies. Thus, the events we are certain we've created have not actually happened. So, even though my spine feels long and straight, it is not that way at all. It is, more accurately, slumped, hunched, compressed.

Dispelling my belief that this disparity was due to karmic payback, I read the scientific explanation behind it last week. As it turns out, human brains are wired for eternal frustration, at least in the case of learning motor skills. The region of our brains that know how to perform a physical task differs from the region that signals neurons to create movements for tasks. The part of your brain that tells you how to perform sitting trot, for example, is different than the part that triggers impulses to get the job done. You can tell yourself to stretch thighs down and back, keep your eyes up, elbows at your side, and so on. But this does not, unfortunately, translate to the right results.

This mis-wiring of brain and body certainly monkey wrenches our attempts to learn technical sports like horseback riding, where so much depends on the feedback of body sensations. It's just plain unfair, in fact. On my bike ride home from yoga class, I contemplated this. I wondered what good could possibly exist in this way that our brains work (or don't work) with our bodies. It definitely impedes our learning process. And it can wreak havoc on our notion of progress, not to mention the demoralizing of our egos.

Then, I remembered watching a video clip from a recent schooling session with a young horse. The schooling session had felt okay but not great, so I got home expecting I already knew what was on the video my student shot. However, her video clip revealed a much better session. My horse LOOKED a lot better than he FELT. I watched the television pleasantly surprised. As footage reeled, my smile grew. A genuine contentment claimed me. Instantly, I was thoroughly satisfied with the horse's schooling, even though moments before watching this footage I felt nagging discontent.

Moments like these, I realized, make the mis-wiring of our brains and bodies not only tolerable but preferable. Like an unexpected gift, these moments tell us that we're doing a whole lot better than we thought we were. They change our reality from usual self-bashing "This is not going well, I should quit while I'm ahead" to a self-congratulating "Hey, look at me, I'm pretty awesome!"

What's better than that? I argue that few things come close in terms of delivering happiness. The sudden surprising evidence that, no, you are not doing a terrible job but are in fact excelling, deserves our appreciation. So, to the Gods of evolution, I would like to say thank you. Thanks for our flawed human creation, for our strangely functioning brains. Thank you for bodies that defy our commands and for brains that can't tell when they do. But most of all, thanks for when this works in our favor and leaves us feeling awesome.

A Mixed Blessing

2011-08-02T07:59:00.000-07:00

Life is nothing if not seasoned with ironies and, while I try to see it otherwise, this reality often brings colossal disruption to my days. Fortunately, on lighter-hearted days it delivers a humbling chuckle to a task I previously might have thought I had the answers to. At that moment, some unexpected twist brings its irony to the storyline.
Lately, these moments have proven the certainty of a mantra my father used to chant when I was growing up. "A fit horse is a mixed blessing," he said at the beginning of competition season every year. He liked to remind us of this at the height of our intensive conditioning period during which my family spent what seemed like every waking minute either exercising our horses or researching and planning how to get them even fitter. Then right in the middle of all this focused relentless effort, my father would utter his mantra.

At the time, it felt like he was being a curmudgeon. Why would we invest so much time and energy getting these horses fit if he was now telling us that our goal came with a trade off? He preferred to think of himself as a voice of reason, a fact he reminded us about as our now fit and hyper steeds channeled their honed athleticism into unruly behaviors.

I have spent the last three years writing, publishing, and promoting my book Equine Fitness. The book and the entire concept of fitness figures prominently in my life. It represents the center of my belief system, which is that every equine athlete needs to be physically prepared for any job we ask of him. Many training ruts that I witness are due to the horse not being strong enough, coordinated, or physically capable to perform what his rider wants. I've had the pleasure of watching numerous riders finally reach their goals just by addressing their horses' fitness needs. Likewise, I have seen riders improve their OWN abilities by getting themselves stronger and stretchier in the right spots.

This all explains why my training and lessons focus a fair amount on this topic. And why I spent so much time writing a book on it. In sum, fitness will make your horse better. The fine print to this proclamation is that it will also prove my father's mantra.

Luckily, most riders have such busy lives with work, families, and modern day obligations that their time limits restrict them from getting to the level of their horse's wow-I-feel-really-great-and-turbo-charged. Many horses hover just below that level of totally fit (and more difficult to manage). But for the riders who do find the time to apply my book, I think I need to write a follow-up title What To Do With Your Now-Fit Horse.

These steeds, now bristling with strength and vitality have extra juice in their step, more sass and spunk to their nature. Good strong blood pumps through their well-toned and supple muscles. Primed to tackle hard exercise without fatigue, they throw themselves eagerly into workouts.
These are all euphemisms of course for the fact that they can be a total pain in the butt. Suddenly, they have morphed from docile pasture potato into the equine equivalent of your triathlete friend who annoys you for lack of being able to sit still.

Many of my students have helped their horses transform from lumpy to lean, from easily fatigued to stamina overdrive. I've applauded their efforts, cheer leading them through productive workouts and making them vow ongoing consistency. And, yes, part of my responsibility is to dissolve the occasional exasperation that arises as their steed expresses punky tendencies due to newly found fitness.

"No, no, it's good!" I reason as their faces pucker up in annoyance. "He feels great; that's wonderful!" And these horses DO feel great, really great. The downside of this, obviously, is that the better they feel the more exercise they need. Which requires an availability of time that anyone with a life doesn't possess. Plus, many fit horses can turn into...well, butt heads to be around. Therefore, no matter the merits for horse and human, fitness becomes a hard sell.

This became especially true on Tuesday as I watched Sparta-- a charming Thoroughbred cross gelding-- interrupt his leg-yield for a projectile movements best described as spronking. All of the sudden, he tucked his butt underneath and bounced through the air three times like a Jack Russel Terrier and then settled back down to work. The disturbance happened so quickly that his owner remained perfectly in balance and immediately carried on with her leg-yield. I had to suppress a chortle seeing the twinkle in Sparta's eye. Just a few months before, his owner had to spur and beg him through his workouts. Now, in the height of summer with a full tank of exercise and fitness, he felt so good about his work that he was offering up a little extra spunk.

"No, no, that was good!" I told the rider, lest she become agitated.

We carried on with the lesson, making it only a few more minutes before Sparta bounced himself sideways across the arena like a boy on a trampoline. This time, his rider dropped one rein, quickly reeled it back in, yanked him back out to the rail and got on with business. His antics were losing charm, though. She rolled her eyes and sighed heavily, bordering on annoyance. Being the gentleman that he is, Sparta quit doing maneuvers that involved hopping and springing. Instead, he channeled his energy into speed. Lots of it. He started trotting a little faster at first. Then, by the third corner, he gained considerably more speed and raced down the long side of the arena. By the next turn, he was moving so fast that his rider could not get her seat and stood up in the stirrups, balancing over top of him as if standing on a surf board in choppy water. Sparta kept zipping around the arena like he was trying to set a personal speed-trotting record. His rider bobbled around trying to getting his attention to slow down, now visibly ticked off that our lesson was heading in such a disastrous direction. Sparta snorted through his nose, pricked his ears forward. He lifted his back and swung his legs with a range of movement rarely seen from him. In fact, he looked like a world class dressage Warmblood for a moment. Any onlooker could tell that his body felt good and he was pretty excited to be out for a workout. None of this changed the fact that his owner was more annoyed with him by the second, though. Unable to slow him down and still bobbling around in the saddle, she started admonishing him. She told him to knock this off. She told him what a butt head he was being.

One more time, I stepped in. "No, no-- it's good. He feels great!" I reminded her.

Well, if this was his version of feeling great, she said, then she preferred him feeling crummy. After yanking at the reins and getting him to slow down and then finally to stop, she admitted that the power of his gaits did feel incredible. And he was clearly strong and performing better than ever. But why did that all have to come at the cost of him being a butt head?, she wanted to know.

There is no good answer for this, nothing that will fully satisfy an annoyed rider. I paused and cleared my throat. I acted as if I were channeling wisdom from dressage masters centuries earlier. "Well..." I started out. "A fit horse is a mixed blessing."

Dressage Queen Goes Rogue

2011-06-22T10:22:00.001-07:00

Preparations for the Ride & Tie World Championships began the week before with weighty deliberations. The primary agenda item? Which knee-high socks to wear to prevent chafing in the saddle. The neon green ones with bright red mushrooms embroidered on them? Or our tried and true rainbow striped ones from our only previous Ride & Tie event? The decision had nothing to do with how we would complete the race and everything to do with how good we looked in the photos.

In the end, we settled on a pair of neon striped leg warmers, which would not only photograph well but would allow us to wear regular running socks with our sneakers. Voila! A perfect pairing of vanity and function. On a short practice ride before race day, our mount Courage proved himself to be fresh, fit, and ready to tackle a tough course. My partner, Siobhan, proved herself ready to ride like the wind, quite an improvement from her floppy intro into riding one year ago. On a 3-mile downhill single track, I yelled ahead to rein them both in. Tomorrow was race day, after all, and we had no business tearing like hellions on a practice run. Spouting advice like the consummate dressage trainer I am, I lectured Siobhan to take it easy with Courage, keep his heart rate low, feel for any unevenness in his stride, and all sorts of other details.

By 7:30am on race morning, I had consumed enough coffee to forget about the pain in my lower back from sleeping in a tent. I was focused on one thing: having a controlled start with Courage and keeping my team at a sensible, reasonable pace. It was already a stretch for this Dressage Queen's comfort zone to be suiting up in a riding outfit comprised of Lycra tights and striped leg warmers, never mind the fact that our "warm-up" included a river crossing and narrow trail through some brambles. We strapped on our helmets and headed to the starting line-- an unmowed meadow at the bottom of a fire road that headed straight uphill. Being the more experienced rider on our team, I would ride Courage for the start; Siobhan would start on foot. We anticipated that Courage might get a little wild, as is normally the case at a starting line of an endurance event. My strategy for these kinds of situations is not so much about what I intend to do but more about avoiding what EVERYONE ELSE is doing. The leaping grey Arabian to my right, for example? I already have an exit strategy, should he head this direction. Same thing goes for the rearing bay and the frantically prancing brown one, too. As the officials count down to start time, my primary goal becomes survival. If I can survive this meadow scene, the race might actually be fun. I give Siobhan a meek wave on the hillside above. Someone shouts "GO!" and we're off. Courage is perfectly composed under me, listening, obedient, eager.

Right as we are clambering up out of the meadow, flanked by snorting, crazed horses, I feel something unexpected happen inside. Suddenly, I feel like a teenager again, full of spunk and speed and who-cares-if-my-horse-is-on-the-bit. After lecturing my partner yesterday about pacing and our necessity for a cautious start, I am leaning forward like a jockey, pushing my heels into Courage's sides. He moves out faster and we are now chasing the front runners up the fire road. I give him another squeeze and he offers more speed. Now, we're flying fast enough to make a thundering sound. And I am surprisingly in heaven. My form stinks, Courage is definitely not on the bit, and we are careening around turns like a barrel racer.

For the next three hours, I never resemble a dressage rider. I am the horse-obsessed teen with two gears: fast and faster. I am the grinning, flopping girl somewhere unrecognizably between posting trot and two-point position. Courage's spirit never lags, nor do his gentlemanly qualities. He is a racing machine. Siobhan and I trade places, running and riding. Inspired by Courage, we both try to run like the track stars we never were but might still become. We streak through the vet check with ease and then begin the steep second loop of the 22-mile course.

I let Courage walk parts of the hill as he huffs and puffs and climbs his way to the ridge top of Humboldt Redwoods State Park, a place so high and remote that your only company is the whooshing sound of wind through the trees and a lone bobcat. Standing in the stirrups, I grab a handful of mane to lean my weight forward off Courage's back. Eventually, the trail opens into a field spotted with white wildflowers. Across a narrow valley to our left, three hillsides fold into each other thick with Redwoods.

This is sublime, I think. Late morning sun warms my face, drying my salty forehead.

Courage gives his head a shake, his signal that it's time to pick up the pace again. We speed down a single track that curls back and forth like a ribbon through a thick forest. Courage leans into the turns like a motorcycle racer cornering at the track. We dart left-right-straight, left-right-straight. I was 10 years old the last time I let a horse lean into turns like this, before learning about bend and balance, inside leg and outside rein, poll flexion and all that fancy stuff I have honed for the past 20 years. Briefly, I consider asking Courage for more balance and less speed on these turns. But the thought disappears as quickly as it arose.

Gone is my inner dressage rider. Gone is the woman who trains horses for a living. In her place is a trail-loving rag doll in the saddle. A girl whose cheeks are cramping from smiling so much. A rider with neon rainbow leggings and running shoes.

I give Courage's neck an affectionate rub as he negotiates tree roots and hops over a ditch. I love this horse. But not for the reasons I typically would-- that he has a smooth sitting trot, that he shows aptitude for collection and flying changes, or that lateral work comes easily to him. No, I actually love this horse because he's none of that. He's all trail horse and that's it. He's a trail-winding, hill-climbing, river-crossing, hoof-thundering trail horse that reminds me how exhilarating it feels to ride a horse like him. Courage reminds me about a different kind of harmony than what we arena riders seek. For one, he reminds me not to take myself so seriously or obsess over details.

Siobhan, Courage, and I speed to the finish line in 2 hours and 50 minutes, hooves and neon stripes flying. All of us feel strong and giddy, like we could have kept our pace all day through those Redwoods. Hopefully, we will have the chance to some day. For now, I've pulled on my breeches and boots again to resume life as a dressage trainer, albeit a much looser and smiley cheeked one. My horses here at the training center undoubtedly appreciate Courage's affect. Sometimes we need these little reminders, whether they be a silly horse show, a trail ride, a group outing, to refresh why we love this life with horses so firmly, so unshakably.

Joyfully on the Forehand

2011-06-01T17:08:00.001-07:00

Being a dressage rider means possessing a few rare talents, not the least of which is a fine-tuned feel of the horse and the ability to subtly manipulate his body. The bummer is that once you hone these talents, it becomes nearly impossible to ride with wild abandon as we did as kids. Gone are the loose and sloppy romps through the countryside or the bareback yee-haw arena rides. Until very recently, I believed one could be both refined AND a little unbridled. But I had to admit last week that that might be only an ideology.

You see, back in my youth I was a fairly decorated competitive trail rider. I logged tremendous mileage every week and was darn good at it, evidenced by a pile of trophies now collecting dust in a box. All these years later, I assumed those skills-- and mindset-- remained intact. Once a trail rider, always a trail rider. Right?

Zipping along single track trails in the Santa Cruz mountains last week, I had to admit that's not so. Underneath me, a sturdy bay Arabian aptly named Courage trotted along the twisting trail, never losing his footing even when the path grew so narrow I thought for sure I would lose both kneecaps to the Redwoods on either side. Courage hopped over tree roots, rated himself on the descents, plunged powerfully on the climbs. He never spooked or balked or even thought about those things. Honestly, everything about him was perfect. Except for his rider. Like a stereotypical quasi-neurotic dressage rider, I couldn't just enjoy the ride, never mind that we traipsed beside a gurgling creek on a trail dappled with light beaming through majestic Redwood trees on a warm sunny afternoon.

No, my mind calculated how much Courage weighted his forehand and how hollow his back became on the descents. I obsessed about how he bulged his right shoulder out in the turns and how he ignored my half-halts, albeit politely. Then, I fretted about my position after clambering down a series of short drop offs that rattled me around in the saddle. As the miles snuck past, I became certain that Courage had never been on the bit in his entire life. Like any good trainer, I started listing the exercises that might help Courage lift and swing through his back more. I scouted some flat ground where I could teach him leg-yields to supple his rigid topline.

In the middle of this anal processing, I reminded myself to chill out. Let this horse do what he's good at, I reminded myself. Let him be the trail horse that he is.

You might ask what I was doing flying down the trail on a horse I didn't know in the first place. That is a great question. Through an interesting course of events, my girlfriend and I are entered in the upcoming Ride & Tie World Championships. A quick disclaimer: don't be fooled by the "World Championships" moniker-- there is no qualification process for this event. We have done a grand total of one other Ride & Tie before. At first blush, the sport seemed like a perfect fit for me. It combines two of my passions-- riding and running. At our first and only event, however, it became clear before the race started that my comfort zone had been exceeded. First of all, horses were snorting and rearing all around me. Next, I abandoned any good dressage form for what I call the "survival seat," adopting a gripping-for-life hold on the reins as I curled forward into a fetal position. Lastly, I knew I would have to dismount my horse in order to start running before I could get him to relax and stretch on to the bit. This just plain bugged me.

For the initiated, let me give a quick explanation of the sport. For Ride & Tie, teams of one horse and two runners race a course in leapfrog fashion. Rider A starts on the horse, for example, and rides for a mile or so before jumping off and tying the horse to a tree, then takes off running on foot. Meanwhile, Rider B, who started the race on foot runs until she spots her horse tied to a tree. She then mounts up, zips past rider A, proceeds another 1/4 mile or so up the trail and jumps off to tie the horse to a tree. The first team of two humans and one horse to cross the finish line wins.

If it sounds insane, that's because it is. According to legend, the oddball sport got its start as a mode of transportation. In 18th century England, writer Henry Fielding documented a trip made by two impoverished men forced to share a horse on a 120 mile trip to London. In the 19th century, riding and tying also became a form of travel in the American West. Over the years, several different people told me I would like the sport, assuming it would sort of allow me to get my running workout while simultaneously riding a horse. What they-- and I-- failed to realize is that my definition of "riding a horse" has been altered by being a dressage trainer. For me nowadays, riding means putting a horse in the right balance, yielding his body this way and that, having him stretch on to the bit. It doesn't generally include jostling in the saddle like a rag doll as my horse slides over wet tree roots.

Now, don't get me wrong. I totally love Ride & Tie so far. I'm merely conceding that it's not what I expected. Or, more accurately, that my anally retentive, micromanaging, uber-dressage style of riding was not expected. I am the weak link here, not the horse or the zany sport of running and riding. We entered the Championships obviously not based on our qualification to be there but because this phenomenal horse Courage was offered to us and the race is in a beautiful place on the coast that I've never been to. It all seemed too good to pass up.

Several factors will need to sway in our favor for us to do well. My teammate-- a novice rider-- is polishing up her horsemanship skills. Courage is logging four conditioning rides a week. And I, meanwhile, am working at squelching the obsession about whether my horse is on the forehand. To prep for the race, I am unearthing my inner yee-haw, my repressed talent to giddy up. I am re-acquainting with some long-lost wild abandon. In three weeks from now, let's hope Courage is barreling down the trail on the forehand... at the front of the pack. Stay tuned.

Artificial Aids

2011-04-15T07:32:00.000-07:00

With deep empathy, I watched a student of mine in last weekend's clinic trying to learn how to properly cue her horse to perform a collected trot. She struggled with the dozens of subtleties for mastering advanced dressage movements: how much "go!" versus how much "whoa" to ask for; how lightly versus how strongly to use the reins; how to use her body like a contortionist.

Doing my best to minimize confusion, I gave her very clear instructions one at a time. But even the clearest instructions often won't help. In fact, I wondered if maybe we shouldn't bother with this any further. You see, the cruel reality is that no matter how skilled a rider becomes in administering these complex aids, there will always be something outside her realm-- perhaps a deer bounding out of the trees or a dog bolting from its hiding place of tall grass-- that will produce a better collected trot. Then, the single thing she will need to do is hang on to the reins in terror. Without needing to give any cues whatsoever, she will enjoy a few moments of brilliant collected trot and fancy prancing, exactly the stuff she struggles to create on her own.

These savory riding moments, while indeed scary and unpleasant, are what I like to call the Artificial Aids. If you can get past the upsetting fact that you have lost control of your horse--and that a tumble from the saddle might be imminent-- these moments can teach you what the magic of dressage should feel like. In one pure condensed instant, you will feel the incredible ways in which a horse can use his body. And you won't expend one drop of effort to accomplish it. His neck will arch proudly, his back muscles will swell under you, his body will tone itself like a fighter, and he will bound across the arena with brawn and grace.

I became acquainted with the Artificial Aids early in my riding career. To be specific, I was a crying, petrified 9-year old the first time I felt a truly collected trot. And I never wanted to feel it again. Never mind that my mother had been trying to teach me about half-halts and collection for months to no avail. Mounted on my mother's F.E.I. Warmblood, I found myself in an airborne gait, due to a herd of deer that sprang from the woods on a fresh spring morning. We lurched and catapulted across the field, my spine whipping back and forth like a branch in wind. I held my breath and hoped for it to be over soon, whatever is WAS that we were doing. Through the wind rushing pat my ear, I heard my mother gushing praise. "Yes, that's great!" she called out. "That's an excellent collected trot, keep at it!"

How could anything be good about this?

I write with certainty that most of you know what I am referring to. Most students have experienced an unsolicited piaffe or passage due to a loose dog, a rattling El Camino, a horse running in a nearby field, or other prompts from nature. Unfortunately, most students fixate on the scary unpleasantness of these situations. But when I am working with riders like my student last week, I encourage them to embrace the next airborne spook with an open mind and a butt glued in the saddle. Try to let its affect counter-balance the hours of struggling to execute a proper half-halt that might finally tuck your horse's hindquarters under him and ride this one for free!

My former competitive trail mare, Charlotte, gave me a lot of chances to practice this idea. Given that she logged so many training miles, Charlotte rarely spent the energy to give things a second look, much less spook at them. Hereford cows were the exception. All other kinds of cows were fine, but for some reason Herefords sent the mare into a state of electricity. One moment we would be trotting rhythmically down a gravel road and the next we looked like an audition for the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion performers. Charlotte and I covered hundreds and hundreds of miles together both training and competing in distance events, and eventually I knew every hillside in Vermont or New Hampshire occupied by a Hereford. By that time, I quit leaning forward into a fetal position while clamping on to the reins and yelling at her to stop acting like a bonehead. Instead, I sat down in the saddle, lifted my chin, and rode the finest collected trot that mare could do. My mother, meanwhile, beamed with pride beside us on her unflappable Morgan as if to say "See? Do you finally feel what I've been trying to teach you?"

As I write this, signs of spring surround me: birds sing in the trees overhead, frisky barn cats roll around in the driveway, Harley motorcycle riders rev past the barn in shirt sleeves. These are all preludes to the great activity of warm evenings ahead-- bolting dogs, quail scuffling in shrubs, jumping deer. Consider this your warning to be ready. Sit down, look up, and take the next chance to stop cussing and start riding some unearned prancing!

Adda Girl!

2011-03-31T06:28:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I ran my first marathon and discovered not only the world's purest form of pain but also the motivation behind many human efforts, horseback riding included. Somewhere near mile 19, around the time my thigh muscles felt like they had been ripped into by gun bullets, I began to ask myself what the heck I was doing. The next 7 miles gave me plenty of time to grapple with this question. My pace continued to slow until it took the form of an unsteady swagger as I contemplated what on earth I was doing in an event where the only certain outcomes were agony, nausea, and bleeding toenails. Interestingly, I never once thought of quitting, even when it became clear that my legs would probably be permanently damaged from then on.

I'm no stranger to finding gratification from events that other folks put on their "has no appeal whatsoever" lists. I recently had a great time overnight camping in a snow bank, for example. And I like physical activity at frequencies beyond other peoples' tolerance, much less enjoyment. Yet, even for me, running a marathon lacked any sense of thrill or joy. I was too busy experiencing a sort of pain I never imagined. As I said, though, I never thought about quitting. Why? Because I was driven by that common motivation behind many of our human efforts. Which motivation is that, you ask? It's the one most of us are cautious to admit to ourselves. Whether or not we say it out loud, most of us want to be our own personal heroes. Think about this. What greater sense of satisfaction, of wholeness, is there than rocking your own world for a moment? Imagine being equal parts amazed and empowered by something you just did. Don't we all want a taste of that?

I believe we do. This is the reason I was able to hobble my way to the marathon finish line. I HAD to know what it felt like to stand there with cramping legs, thoroughly exhausted, and say "Holy cow! Did I really just do that?!?" Without shame, I will admit to you, gentle reader, that I did briefly feel like the hero of my own world. I, Jec A. Ballou, just ran 26.2 miles on my own two feet! As a finisher's medal was placed around my neck, I felt completely head-to-toe inspired by my own efforts. The feeling passed quickly as I wondered if I might throw up, pass out, or fall over. But for the few seconds it existed, it was nothing short of sublime.

The motivation to ride horses stems from the same heroism. Especially in light of the sacrifices most of us make in order to get to the barn every day, riding has always had a mysterious-- almost addictive-- draw. Until now, that mysterious pull remained unnamed. But I think I've demystified it lately. Often, the feeling of riding a horse is just plain awesome, particularly when you and your steed just tackled something thrilling or awe-inspiring, whether that's crossing a rushing river or executing an elegant walk-trot transition. There have been multiple times, perhaps after a heady gallop or a powerful piaffe, that I have sat atop my horse totally speechless. I find myself grinning from cheek to cheek, savoring the inspiration of the moment. There we are-- happy horsewoman and happy horse-- basking in a triumphant moment. I dare say this is as good as being your own hero. After all, there's not much more exciting than experiencing a powerful yet graceful performance with a 1,000 pound wild animal whose motives in that moment are to do anything you wish. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't mean to deny a major principle of riding here. To be good riders, we can't stand around stroking our egos all the time. In fact, much like martial arts training, riding mandates that we let go of our egos and not devote a lot of time to telling ourselves how cool we are. And it IS important not to dwell on this, but I think it's safe to admit what we all feel inside on some occasions when mounted on horseback. Heck, sometimes we just feel darn proud. Even when our butts are sore or our legs are chafed, we feel a sense of unrivaled accomplishment. This feeling brings us out to the stables the following day and the next day and the day after that. So, go on, take a moment to recall a time on horseback when you felt like your own hero. Admit it, relish it. Trust that this feeling will pull you through the next time you're struggling with your horse or a riding concept or life in general. Look for the next time you can be your own hero.

Cool Kids

2011-03-03T07:06:00.000-08:00

Nothing rivals the irony of recognizing that you have become the type of person you once poked fun at. Or even the type of person whose mental faculties you liked to question. I experienced such a realization last week. It seems that, over the last several years, I morphed into the type of urban weirdo who now finds dirty barn chores to be novel and fun. Enjoyable, even.

You see, I've known many such city dwellers in my life and they always struck me as really messed up in the head. Only a person entirely deficient of suitable hobbies and pleasures would find satisfaction in shoveling manure or slogging around feed buckets, right? Surely, only someone who spent her life inside brick walls all day could be enticed by the appeal of manual labor in frosty, frigid Mother Nature.

As teenagers, my brother and I were blessed to have a number of these souls as friends. These were the "townies" whose parents were doctors and mailmen and office workers. Lucky for us, they considered driving into the country to visit us to be a worthwhile adventure. We were lucky because our strong-bodied pals also thought the farm tasks that we loathed were good fun. They actually liked stacking rows of hay and scrubbing water troughs as much as playing dodge ball or swimming in the pond. This stupefied my brother and I. We were dumbfounded by our townies' eagerness to blister their hands and strain their backs. We wondered what possible appeal they could find from getting covered in dirt and hay chaff.

We, on the other hand, envied their clean suburban lifestyles and happily would have traded places with them in their homes where "chores" consisted in setting down the the T.V. remote for a second to carry a bag of trash to the curbside once a week. No pushing wheelbarrows, no mending broken fence boards, no pruning fruit orchards. Now, that sounded appealing.

Regardless of how odd we found their entertainment choices, these labor-loving friends of ours gave us a lot of respite through the years. They helped out during haying season, lessening our work load. They pitched in during biannual sawdust delivery and storage. They came to our aid every summer for berry picking and garden mulching. And, no, we did not pay them for any of this. They did it purely because they enjoyed stepping away from their tidy, organized suburban lifestyles for an afternoon and getting the smell of the farm on them.

How odd, we pondered. How very, very odd. We surmised that deriving enjoyment from manual labor must be a mindset particular to urbanites and therefore something we would never comprehend.

Then I grew up and moved to urban areas. So far in my adult years, I have dwelt in cities, large towns, and densely packed suburbs. Progressively, without my realization, a weakening has occurred in my disdain for labor and barn chores. In becoming a townie myself, I involuntarily entered that realm of skewed thinking that once struck me as almost deranged. It must be something in municipal drinking water supplies. There is no other way for me to understand the fact that, about five years ago, I began slowing down when driving past agricultural fields. I noticed myself staring at crops with a desire to stop my car, wanting to trudge out into the soil to pull weeds and strain my back a little. I sensed a longing for nettle rashes on my hands and permanent dirty half moons under my fingernails. Shaking such nonsense out of my head, I pushed the accelerator and got back to my day.

But the next thing I knew, I noticed myself staying longer at the barn, long past my daily training duties being completed. I stayed to rake out dirt mounds in the corner of the arena and to scrub water buckets. I lingered around to dust cobwebs out of the grain room after boarders' were done for the day. Driving home afterwards, I started to notice myself existing in a blissed state. I whistled to myself or stared out at the dusk skyline with a dopey half-smile. It was undeniable: manual labor, especially the dirty kind, had filled me with contentment.

In other words, I had become one of THEM.

A short while ago, I caught myself right in the act. I drove out to the barn on a sunny Sunday afternoon with the intent to school my mare for a good long time. We were polishing up the counter canter and starting to work on some half-pass. I wanted to give her a good workout that built on the momentum from our previous one. Or so I thought. I ended up riding her for a short 35-minutes and then letting her loose to walk the property and nibble fresh spring grass. I, meanwhile, picked up a pitchfork and began mucking her stall-- a task that I PAY to have done for me as part of my hefty board fees here in coastal California. There was positively no reason or need for me to be mucking her stall. This donned on me as I tossed manure into the wheelbarrow. Feeling silly, I noticed my deeply contented state of mind in that moment. I started to wonder if the whole point of me coming to the barn had actually been to muck around in the dirt a bit, rather than to ride my horse as I thought. I couldn't deny it any longer: I was ENJOYING this dirty labor.

Right then and there, I conceded my membership amongst the urban townies, whose mental wiring I had pitied for so many years. Happily, with dirt under my fingernails, I've joined the ranks of the mis-wired!

Are They Kidding?

2011-01-16T20:23:00.000-08:00

A funny thing just happened. On a routine trip to the market, I noticed a small laminated sign hanging discreetly next to the chewing gum and chocolate bars above the conveyor belt at the checkout register. It was so small and partially hidden that it seemed like whoever put it there might have been embarrassed about it. And with good reason. The sign said: Thank you for unloading your grocery basket yourself. You are saving our cashiers from repetitive motion injuries.

Say what? I drove all the way home wondering whether I'd really seen the sign or just imagined it. Maybe I am ignorant of statistics pertaining to workplace injuries, but I guess I assumed grocery store cashiers were on the lower end of the risk spectrum. Were there really that many injuries from repetitively unloading bunches of carrots and soup cans? Was the task of scanning bar codes on juice bottles now seen as code orange? I concluded that if folks were getting hurt unloading small items from grocery baskets there was truly no safe place to work anymore in today's world.

Now, don't misunderstand me. I didn't mind unloading the basket myself. In fact, it gave me something productive to do instead of reading trashy tabloid magazines while standing in line. What I minded was that somebody was looking out for these guys, these alleged injury-prone cashiers. I was just plain envious. Here was a real-world example of an employer taking action to prevent a breakdown in the workplace. Granted it wasn't in the high-risk places I would have envisioned like mining operations, or skyscraper construction projects, but here it was nonetheless. Somebody looking out for the poor soul who shows up at work every day just trying to make a living.

Of course my envy stemmed from the fact that it would be a big fat joke if I tried to apply the same idea to my own place of work. Yet, if workers are now entitled to save themselves from repetitive motion injuries, we horse trainers should be first in line. For a second, I imagined making a sign similar to the one at the store today. It would say: Thank you for riding your skittish, ill-tempered, bucking horse yourself. It saves this horse trainer from yet another trip to the chiropractor. Or how about: Thank you for understanding that this trainer will not be attempting complicated maneuvers with your fussy, fidgety mare that is in a raging heat.

Obviously, these signs would be pointless in my world. After all, it's part of my job description to ride the bone rattlers and spine thrashers as they show up at my training barn. Actually, more to the point, it's my job to turn them into something BESIDES bone rattlers and spine thrashers. Many days, my torqued and twisted joints would happily trade places with the inflammation caused by chucking soup cans through the checkout line at the organic market.

When I was a kid, I watched my parents' colleagues (also horse trainers) hobble around like Quasimodo. They walked with spines bent like coastal cypress trees, hitching along with a gait that resembled a limping jog. I remember thinking how ungraceful they looked when not mounted on a horse. It was as though, as soon as their feet hit the ground, they turned into stiff, geriatric shadows of themselves. I naively assumed that, perhaps due to poor genetics, the warranties had run out on their bodies. It never occurred to me that they had been battered this way by doing the work they loved so much. Pretty quickly, though, I figured it out.

A chiropractor told me at 25 that my spine resembled a 75-year-old's. When asked what I could do to change that, he suggested I avoid "any repetitive jarring" to my back. I repressed a chortle and hobbled my septuagenarian spine out of his office. Since then, I've taken up yoga and other antidotes to my daily dose of battering as a horse trainer. Yoga can only do so much, though. I will admit that I was highly tempted to drive over to that organic market and apply for a job in that haven of protection for workers' knees and elbows and spines. For a second, it didn't matter that I know nothing about organic produce and bar codes. Or even how to tender change. What mattered was that every day I could go to a workplace where we stood on gel mats and treated our bodies like temples, telling customers "Sorry, I'm not going to lift those packets of Ramen noodles for you; I am protecting my tendons today."

Just as I turned my car around to go apply for a job, though, I came to my senses. Indeed, my ailing joints and complaining back do menace me sometimes. But, despite that, they're a badge of what I've accomplished. And many times that is no small feat. Many times when my body whimpers at me, it's from the effort of helping an unbalanced horse find her way gracefully into a canter depart. Or riding an antsy, fidgety Thoroughbred through to total relaxation. It's from helping these horses become more solid and confident, stronger and happier. The enormous satisfaction that comes with this overrides the bodily aches and pains. In fact, when my back twinges these days, I can smile gratefully knowing that it's due to the work of creating strong equine backs that DO NOT twinge. It's my gift to them. So when I, unlike my injury-free organic supermarket counterparts, am old and twisted like a hunchback, I hope they return the gift by carrying me softly astride no matter how poor my posture, how crooked my spine.

By then, I'll have my own sign hanging discreetly some place that reads: Thank you for overlooking the accumulation of repetitive motion injuries of this trainer.

Do Not Go Gentle Into that Dark Dawn

2011-01-03T07:41:00.000-08:00

My personality doesn't come by desperation naturally. But stick around the horse world long enough and it's inevitable. Something about being in an equation that involves getting up before the sun, large unpredictable animals, cold weather (which is also often damp, icy, or muddy), and the fact that you got to bed too darn late last night leads us to form attachments to comforts that can pull us through. For most of us, that's a steamy cup of coffee with enough caffeine to help us see our situation a little brighter.

Without this piece of happiness in our hands, we are left to dwell on other details like the fact that our feet are freezing or that everyone else you know is still tucked in bed right now while you're ankle deep in mud. A hot cup of joe goes so far in changing one's perspective that I've wondered if it might be one of the cornerstones that makes being an equestrian possible.

Lest we sound like addicts, let me clarify that the coffee habit isn't initially about caffeine. It has more to do with providing us with a distraction to an otherwise grim morning. Clutching a hot beverage in our frozen claw-like hands allows us to think about something else, something warm and pleasant. To borrow from Freudian lingo, it is a transitional object to a better portion of our day. Without it, we would be faced with our own current reality, which would leave us just plain grumpy.

In my mid-twenties, I worked for a trainer in Hawaii who owned a sprawling hillside ranch on the northern tip of the big Island. I was responsible for feeding the horses every morning at 6am. In Hawaii, this is not as simple as walking out to a barn and tossing hay through stall doors. The horses lived together in herds of 10 or 12 in vast pastures, some nearly a quarter mile away. Feeding them required me to drive the tractor all over the countryside, depositing little piles of oats and forage as I went. It also meant being in the middle of excited horses and hooves kicking up in the pitch dark. It meant driving around in the darkness trying to find and open the wire gates that connected one pasture to the next. This generally resulted in grabbing an errant strand of electrical fencing and receiving a bone-sizzling zap that caused my insides to burn. Needless to say, morning feeding was my least favorite part of day. In fact, I looked upon it with such dread that it weighed on me as I drifted to sleep at night.

When I first went to Hawaii, I wasn't much of a coffee drinker. My experience with it included a few sugary concoctions from Starbucks on hot summer days during college graduation week. But on the Hawaii ranch, everyone carried insulated purple mugs of caffeine for the first two hours of each day. The fat purple mugs were as much a part of our equipment as our boots and gloves and utility knives. At first, I found the sight of a half dozen people marching around with their insulated mugs held out in front of them a little silly. After a couple weeks of those dark morning shifts, though, and I was a willing member of their tribe.

That warm concoction changed the grimness of a herd of mares charging at me and the annoyance of grinding the tractor gears to set it on a bucking lurch straight towards a tree. By the time I was half-way through that purple mug, I stopped complaining and feeling sorry for myself. I quit asking why in the heck I'd come to a remote island to be up before the sun every morning, and instead I watched a pocket of orange and pink swell open on the horizon line as the day started. The beauty of that island sunrise made me stop the tractor and stare. In the new light, I noticed the spiky Rose Apple flowers glinting and smelled the perfume of magenta Plumeria. On clear mornings, I could see across the water from our top pasture all the way to Maui's spiny mountains. Suddenly, life never seemed so good, bucking tractors included. Within minutes, I would pick fragrant guava, bananas, and papaya fresh from the trees and count myself among the luckiest people on the planet.

Since those blessed mornings on the island, coffee has been my loyal companion in this horse-obsessed life. Even without fresh papaya and tropical flowers, it helps tease out the joy in that potentially gloomy pre-dawn terrain. This has never been clearer than last week.

It was one of those moments that causes you to stop and ask a question like "is this really what my life has become" that has no answer. These wake-ups tend to come at times you need them least, when you cannot recall what series of actions and decisions landed you at this particular juncture. For me, I had a startling sense that someone's life had hijacked me. I witnessed a dishevelled version of me staring back from the dark 7-11 store window. Sunrise remained two hours away and the weather at this unsavory hour had combined too many elements: fog, rain, cold, and now my growing misery. In a few hours, I would mount a nervous, snorting horse and join dozens of other folks with similarly poor judgement in a competition. I needed coffee. Desperately.

The image of me reflected in the window fell just short of 7-11's primarily homeless clientele. I wore not one but two lumpy barn jackets with emergency supplies stuffed in the pockets-- gloves, snacks, rags, random tools. My unwashed hair frizzed out beneath an unattractive but warm wool cap. My make-up- free face wore a dazed expression that begged others to not speak to me. Once upon a long time ago, I might have been embarrassed to be seen in public like this. But that was before I had a coffee habit. Nowadays, enough time in the horse world has taught me that it matters not how disastrous I might look or feel. What matters more is how soon I can get my hands on coffee and how hot it is.

Everything else will fall into place. My snorting horse will seem less deranged to me. The number of times I bang my head on the tack room door will annoy me less. This life will seem a little saner. With any luck, I just might answer that question: "so THIS is what my life has become?"

Are you Going to Answer That?

2010-12-19T08:27:00.000-08:00

Strangely enough, my love-to-hate relationship with mobile phones began to taper off last week right as a student of mine reached into her pocket, mid-lesson, to retrieve a text message. Right then, my loathsome feelings for these gadgets lessened. Give me a moment to explain this lack of logic.

A few years ago when mobile phones got so prevalent that everyone, including 12-year-olds, began carrying them I found myself constantly battling students' attention spans. Or lack of attention spans, I should say. It was already hard enough for students to make themselves quiet and still in the saddle, well before they had ringing, buzzing, beeping devices attached to them. Suddenly, as an instructor I had to manage not only human minds with attention deficits but also incoming emails, flirty texts, phone calls, and Facebook updates. My only hope was to call in the Dalai Lama for help or to just do the best I could.

Calling upon every thread of limited experiences with zen, I taught valiantly and sharply while limiting my annoyance levels with students' phones. I competed bravely with them, though I can't say I triumphed. In terms of keeping some one's interest, drilling her through a thigh-burning session of sitting trot just doesn't rival a Grateful Dead ring tone erupting in her pocket. Or her next move in a lively iPhone Scrabble game. Nonetheless, I kept barking instructions, repeating them so rhythmically that at time it sounded like I had a stuttering disorder.

For the past 10 years, I made an annual pilgrimage to Portugal to ride and train under the tutelage of Georges Malleroni at Escola de Equitacao in the small village of Alcainca. Initially, these trips felt like traveling backwards in time to a place where chickens roamed freely in the streets and women still washed clothes in communal stone tubs together. The streets were cobbled, the residents poor. There was absolutely no entertainment except the warm sunshine, morning walks, and listening to the village church bell chiming. I loved it. Then along came Portugal's participation in the European Union. Things changed quickly. Most notably, folks started talking faster and carrying mobile phones.

For my trainer Georges, the phone became as much a part of his outfit as his boots and gloves. During lessons, he spent as much time talking into the device as he did addressing us. Which is how and when my conflict with mobile phones first began and flourished. It's not that I minded how George would unholster his cell phone in the middle of me asking him a question or while simultaneously wrangling a young stallion, or that I cared about not having his undivided attention. The problem lied more in the fact that George did expect our undivided attention, which in lessons proved to be a cruel test of our stamina.

Most often during lessons, Georges' phone rang right as we began to school the canter (clarification: this was a group of stallions cantering together in varying degrees of obedience). After revolving around Georges for several circles in a highly collected canter and wondering why he hadn't given me a morsel of instruction in the last 5 minutes, I would glance down to discover that he was on the phone, either selling a horse to someone or booking a breeding. Or just shooting the breeze. This slight movement of turning my head caused my highly trained schoolmaster to begin making flying changes in rapid succession. We were no longer just cantering, which had become exhausting enough itself. Now, we were bunny hopping from one lead to the next. Off guard and out of balance, I tried transitioning to a trot, but my cue was lost in translation. We were bouncing up and down like a corn kernel in hot oil.

I looked over at Georges again. He was still staring at the ground waving his hand around to illustrate a point to his phone receiver. This time, my head turn sent my horse into a half-pass, careening straight towards our distracted instructor. Desperate to avoid crashing into him, I pulled on the outside rein. To my horse, this meant he should tuck his haunches under him and execute a pirouette. So, now we were spinning round and round like a clock hand. By now, exhaustion began to claim me and I gave up trying to steer my mount or to change gears or do anything besides feel sorry for myself. I started to accept the fact that, 20 minutes from now, I might still be cantering or spinning or lead-swapping around the arena with no control. In the middle of my hoping I would survive this relentless cantering without crumpling into an exhausted heap, my horse did an excellent thing. He decided to stop. Suddenly, we were standing still in a welcome cessation of exercise. I thanked him lavishly and then began mopping the sweat from my face.

This brief peace was soon interrupted, though.

"Jec- no, no, no!" my suddenly attentive instructor bellowed. "I did not wish for you to stop the canter. Begin again!" George sounded displeased with me, as if I were not taking our lesson seriously. To be honest, I had temporarily forgotten I was even having a lesson. Knowing my jelly-like legs would not last much longer, I hesitated to launch back into the canter. First, I checked Georges' hands to be sure he had re-holstered the phone; I had his attention again. My horse picked up the canter and glided smoothly across the arena. It felt like he and I were both leveraged by our instructor's rapt focus. We cantered flawlessly, executing the patterns Georges called out. Then, just as I expected him to praise us for such good work, I heard the dreaded ringing of his phone.

No, please! Please don't answer that. P-l-e-a-s-e do not answer.

"Bondia," I heard Georges greet his phone. Darn it, I'd lost him again. He diced and dealt, eyes fixed on the ground in front of him, negotiating the sale of one of his youngsters. I knew there was no hope this phone call might end soon. Exhausted, I gave up trying to ride well and focused instead on just staying on the horse. I let the horse go wherever he wanted, however he wanted. My disdain for cell phones grew to new heights.

Over the last several years since those endless sweaty lessons with Georges, I have watched peoples' attention spans grow shorter and shorter. Nowadays, with text messaging and instant media, our communication with each other has dwarfed into minimal touches on a phone face, the non-verbal equivalent of grunting at each other. It is rapid and efficient, ending nearly as soon as it begins. So, when my student reached in her pocket last week, the hairs on my neck did not stand up as they used to, because I knew she would dab a fingertip to her iPhone as quickly as an eye blink and then carry on with our lesson. Years ago, that fingertip touch would have been a full-fledged 5-minute phone call. I thought longingly for Portugal. I thought of Georges punching an occasional key on his dial pad instead of waving his hands and staring at the ground for endless stretches of time while we suffered. Ah, God bless the evolution of those wretched little devices!

Who Said Anything About Equitation?

2010-11-29T20:17:00.000-08:00

Hobbling around today, I couldn't tell which hurt more-- my thigh muscles or my ego. Bolts of pain stabbed at my knees and calves, causing ordinary tasks to seem impossibly arduous. Getting out of my car hurt. Walking to the bathroom took forever. Tying my shoes almost made me cry. But the worst part wasn't just all this agony shooting throughout my lower body. It was the fact that I'd been made this sore by riding a horse, the same activity I do all day every day of the year. I'm a professional, for God's sake. Riding horses is the last thing that should debilitate me. Then why, you might ask, was I in such sad shape?

It's a simple explanation. You see, all of my daily riding is executed with strict adherence to classical equitation and good posture on horseback and all the instruction that has been drilled into me over the last three decades of riding. But that's not the type of riding I undertook on Saturday, which explains the crippled state I'm in right now. On Saturday, I spent 5 hours in what might best be described as a Survival Seat. This is a riding posture not described in instruction manuals or lessons. It's the shape and form that your body adopts when mounted atop a hot-headed snorting Arabian bombing down the trail at speeds that make you whimper. This style of riding is neither pretty nor classically correct. But it does generally keep you alive, so its existence has merit among equestrians.

In the world of endurance riding, every rider at some point finds herself in this seat. Some ride this way for only a few minutes while their horses act like skittish lunatics or when the trail terrain gets harrowing. Others find it necessary to use the Survival Seat the whole time they are on the horse. It depends on the steadiness of your mount, his spookiness, and whether he moves under you like a supple athlete or like a bone-rattling jackhammer.

Saturday, I found myself on the latter. "Gordy" is an off-the-racetrack Arabian whose primary gear is GO! He charges down the trail in a trot so fast and bumpy that the rider can no longer post or remain in sync with his gait. There's nothing to sync up to. Gordy is trying to go faster, faster, faster yanking at the reins. In order to keep from being pulled over, the rider-- who has given up on posting and is standing in the stirrups hovering above the saddle-- has to brace her back and clench her stomach muscles. Even a moderately fit person like myself soon fatigues in this posture. As Gordy streaked down the trail, simultaneously spooking at shadows and darting left to right, I dug my knees into the saddle flap in order to keep my butt in a hovering position over the saddle. In no time, I got a mid-back spasm. It felt like someone had jabbed a hot poker into my spine. To alleviate my ailing back, I squeezed harder with my thighs. This seemed to stabilize me decently enough for now. Gordy continued to bolt down the narrow trails like an equine rocket ship. Around tight corners, I folded over his neck to avoid getting face-slapped by manzanita branches. This maneuver required me to push harder into my stirrups, despite the balls of my feet already being numb.

By the time my right knee cricked, I was desperately starting to wonder when Gordy might ever tire out and want to slow down to a reasonable pace. Surely, he should start easing off the speed by the 18-mile mark and drop into a more rideable gait-- maybe even one that I could sit normally and quit gripping with my back and knees. But, interestingly, endurance horses don't seem to tire out when you want them to. Here I was falling apart but Gordy was fresh as a chilly morning. It occurred to me that fatigue was a long way from claiming my mount. The bone-rattling pace would continue until I lost the will to hold myself upright anymore.

Trying to ease my spinal discomfort, I now held the reins together in one hand while gripping my saddle pommel with the other. Leaning forward onto the pommel like this made my look like a hunchback, but I tried to ignore how unpolished I probably appeared. Soon enough, though, the sun peeked out overhead and threw shadowy reflections of us beside the trail. With sinking heart, I witnessed the lumpy hunched over image of me flopping atop my sleek and perky mount. In the last two hours, all traces of the elegant dressage position I had struggled for years to develop had disappeared. Gone was the honed posture, the educated seat. My reflection portrayed me as a flailing, unskilled, speed demon. A speed demon whose back muscles happened to be cramping badly in that moment.

My friend and colleague rode up beside me as the trail widened to a jeep road. He glanced over briefly. "Everything okay? You feeling alright?" he asked. I nodded in my best attempt at bluffing yes-everything-is-perfectly-fine. I didn't want him- or anyone- assuming that I, a potentially sissy dressage rider, couldn't handle the rigor of endurance riding. "Because I've never seen you look worse on a horse," he added, just in case I mistakenly thought I was acing English equitation in that moment.

Embarrassed, I made one last effort to push my heels down and sit up straight. My inflamed joints prohibited it. I remained stuck in my hunchback position. For the next five miles, I fixated on my dreary situation-- my screaming body and jackhammered spine, my wounded pride, the fact that this ride seemed like it might never end.

Then I recalled the real goal of riding and horsemanship which is to be in harmony with one's horse. Style aside, we equestrians aim to achieve a harmonious union with our steeds. My old trainers used to teach me that true perfection was when horse and rider moved as one, with each of their intentions and efforts aligned as one. Seen from that angle, therefore, Gordy and I were darn near perfect. With me hunched over his neck, grabbing his mane for stability, we were as close to being one as horse and rider could be. Together we formed a ragged portrait of less-than-stylish rider with less-than-controlled steed. And there was no question that our intentions aligned with each other's. From that point forward, we both wanted to get across the finish line as quickly as possible. Myself, I couldn't wait to get there so I could spill out of the saddle and vow never to do another endurance ride in my lifetime. Gordy, on the other hand, just wanted to run fast until the trail ran out.

It felt close enough to harmony for me. In fact, a warm spiral of pride filled me. Hunched over in the Survival Seat on my snorting Arabian, I had achieved perfect horsemanship I told myself. I rubbed my knuckles into Gordy's crest and urged him faster. Run, boy, run! I streaked past my colleague, flopping even worse than when he saw me before. We splattered mud up behind us and slid over wet rocks. We charged against the wind in our faces and pounded down hills until... there it was, the blessed finish line! I sat up the best I could and smiled like a kid at Christmas. I put both hands on the reins and thanked every deity that came to mind. The finish line! We made it! Now, how was that for equitation?

Getting Too Comfortable

2010-11-16T07:23:00.000-08:00

My left hand stirred a bucket of soupy bran mash while also using the wooden spoon to swat at the growing population of barn flies. My right hand, meanwhile, grabbed my tuna sandwich from where it rested on a nearby filth-covered bucket. Ignoring the knowledge that mice frequently trotted across my lunch's perch with their dirty feet, I blew off a cobweb and munched away. Then, in the middle of this unsanitary lunch situation, I paused to admit what an unfortunately familiar scene this had become.

Having meals at the barn means stealing bites of who-knows-what from your coat pockets between lessons or sharing snacks with the resident dog, cat, or goat. It involves grimy hands, mouthfuls of horse hair, and standing up. You are always standing on your feet. And you often use only one hand because the other is occupied with separate tasks.

As unglamorous as this might sound to folks who work in clean office buildings with designated rooms for enjoying lunch, it's just part of life at the barn. Soon, it feels normal to be half-slurping, half-spilling a cup of soup as you walk to the arena. Eating is an area of life that we horse fanatics have adapted to fit into our barn routines. It's one of the events that start to feel completely normal in this fly-ridden, hay-strewn place. In time, other things start to feel normal, too.

In my case, that means bringing to the barn services for which that I once drove into town. Consider my former trips to the Farmer's Market, for instance. In order to procure fresh local produce, I used to visit one of our community's abundant outdoor markets weekly. Given that they were in populated areas, this meant that I needed to make myself presentable to the general public. I had to shower, brush the hay out of my hair, and wear real clothes like the other folks (read as: no jodhpurs or chaps, no manure-covered boots). A trip to the Farmer's Market, therefore, required a few hours of time away from the barn, a senseless concept.

Nowadays, though, a dear student of mine with acreage and farming skill brings me a basket of produce from her land each week. Last week, my bounty included beefsteak tomatoes, fresh mint sprigs, and several pounds of Pippin apples. In the past, she has brought free-range eggs, preserved pear slices, and lettuce greens. Every week when she comes for her lesson, she presents me with a box or bag or basket of organic and succulent harvest. It's like a Farmer's Market that comes to the barn. Not only am I deeply grateful for the produce but I am also thankful for eliminating one of the needs to leave the barn.

Most recently, I have also begun receiving chiropractic treatments in the barn aisle. Dr. Michael Agrella, a long-time human chiropractor had completed licensing and begun treating some of my training horses. He got miraculous results with a couple of them; the horses appeared noticeably more comfortable. If his work was good enough for them, it was good enough for me, I reasoned. From then on, we maximized the doc's barn visits by first treating horses and then laying me face-down on his traveling cot. At the end of the day, the steeds and their trainer all felt mighty fine. And I eliminated one more need to leave the barn.

At first, my students and colleagues viewed this as very odd behavior. How legit could it be to have your spine jerked around on a makeshift cot in the barn? they wondered. Sure, at first I missed the adornments that get one to relax in a practitioner's office-- the gurgling zen fountains, the soothing flute music, the gaudy but nonetheless mesmerizing paintings on the wall. In the barn aisle, I had none of that. I relaxed to the sound of horses kicking their stall doors, dogs barking, water buckets filling. But, maybe pathetically, I can't think of a more relaxing setting. These are, after all, the soothing sounds that surround us every day at the barn and part of the scene that we love to occupy to escape the rest of the world. Dr. Agrella adjusts me in my jodhpurs, chaps, and boots. Except for my birthday suit, I can't think of anything more comfortable and natural for me to wear.

As he snaps my neck back into alignment, we discuss horse training issues and crazy clients. A wheelbarrow swerves around us, driven by the young lady who cleans stalls. I lay contentedly looking up at a blue cloudless sky listening to one of my horses slurp at his bran mash. A fellow trainer walks past and casts us a puzzled glance, probably wondering if this large man pushing his knee into my chest is a qualified bodyworker or a disgruntled client.

Immediately after Dr. Agrella finishes, I slip back into my barn jacket, hand him a check, and climb on a horse. No need to drive across town. No sitting in traffic. And this is exactly my point. You see, lots of people think we horse folks are an unkempt bunch. Our appearance lacks the polish of manicures, styled hair, facials. So, others assume that we don't care about any of that; we neglect it all in favor of looking untidy. Let me set the record straight. It is definitely NOT the case that we do not care. It is more the case that all that primping stuff requires A LOT of time away from the barn. Which explains why most of us have trimmed it from our lives. However, if we were able to get manicures and facials at the barn we would be just as polished- if not more- than the rest of our communities. The issue is not whether or not we care or have enough money or find the time. The issue is whether or not we need to leave the barn.

We might all help each other out by brainstorming what services could be adapted to happen at the barn. I'd like you all to ponder this on your next lunch break, or more accurately the next time you're looting crumbs from your pocket to cram in your mouth.

Did you mean that Literally?

2010-10-27T07:45:00.000-07:00

Some day, neuroscientists will discover that cultivating affection for animals causes us to speak in euphemisms. As soon as the heart warms, brain function changes somewhere in the speech and communication center. Thereafter, we speak about the object of our affection with adjectives that employ liberties with the truth.

This is similar to when we refer to the behaviors and habits of our human loved ones as "quirky" instead of what they really are, which is annoying or offensive. Or when we call someone who lies compulsively "a great story teller." I believe this comes from wanting to prop up our own egos. You see, imagining that the pain-in-the-butt habits of those we cherish are more unique and special than other people's pain-in-the-butt characteristics allows us to maintain faith in ourselves. Surely, it would not look favorable for us to foster love for ordinary annoyance. No, we prefer to believe that we love exceptional, unparalleled, or even brilliant annoyance.

When you work with animals for a living, as I do, it is necessary to develop competence for reading between these lines. One must become versed in the adaptive qualities of language. Thus, a "very intelligent" horse is translated as one that is clever and quick, overly sensitive and likely to hurt his rider unless she maintains a zen-like mind state combined with the body control of a martial arts master. Whenever a colleague of mine describes a horse by pausing mid-sentence before settling on the word "intelligent," I recognize that he or she is speaking in code. What she actually means is that I should not allow any of my students to purchase the horse because it is volatile and reactive. When one trainer says to another that the horse is "intelligent" it means to be on guard because nothing about this animal is straightforward. Some might be tempted to call it difficult or intractable. But once affection is cultivated, those terms no longer apply. Then, one must use a different language because cultivating love for an animal considered hopelessly not trainable is pretty lame. This is where the flexibility of language helps.

The same goes for saying an animal has "a good work ethic." This generally does not mean what a layperson would expect, which would be that the horse maintains a keen focus on his work without complaint or refusal. Instead, it means that no amount of exercise or rigorous mental/physical activity will tire the beast out. He will zoom around the arena at maximum energy output without any cue from the rider. He will go like this for hours. And, impressively, he becomes more hyper the longer he goes. His system appears immune to fatigue. This kind of horse with "a good work ethic" has a difficult time with anything that requires relaxation or calm focus and prefers raw speed or riding patterns at race tempo.

On the other side of the spectrum are the "very friendly" horses. This is the group disinterested in work. These horses like to lounge around and are so cute doing so that they have become fairly spoiled. A "very friendly" horse crowds your space and bites at your pockets looking for treats. Sometimes, in his pushiness, he will ram you with his head and shove you off balance. Although in the language of euphemisms, this shove would be called a 'nuzzle.' Your bruised sternum is the evidence of how 'friendly' this guy is.

I figure it's just a matter of time before we horse folks write ourselves a new dictionary. It shall be called the Oxford English Pet Ownership Dictionary and will contain no adjectives with deprecating meanings. It will give the owner of any animal possessing ornery and potentially dislikeable traits an array of descriptors to reinvent the pet. Angry and aggressive now becomes rowdy and spunky. Dim-witted becomes sweet or obedient. Disagreeable gets translated to independent, intelligent. And the next time, someone with a lot less affection for your animal expresses annoyance towards him, you can thank goodness for this dictionary. And thank goodness for the English language in general, especially its convenient malleability. It sure makes loving an occasional nuisance a lot easier.

Whose Health is This, Anyway?

2010-10-20T07:27:00.000-07:00

My students will tell you I am an incurable skeptic when it comes to nutritional supplements and miracle health products. I scoff at costly ingestions promising to improve your horse's vitality or give him younger joints. My rationale goes like this: supplement manufacturers are just in the business of making money, not helping horses. There is no hard science or drug regulations behind these products and most don't accomplish half of what they claim.

Generally, my students turn a deaf ear to my sound advice, though, and buy all kinds of powders and potions for their steeds. They pretend not to see my eye- rolling and head waggling. At the end of the day, my students are happy with their efforts and that's what counts, not my stern attempt to educate them about nutrition.

Nowadays, any time I begin to tell someone not to buy an unnecessary supplement, I recall an equine nutrition lecture I attended a few years ago. In it, I listened to a veterinarian dispel the benefits of hot bran mashes, which sounded like blasphemy to the audience. Mashes have been touted by equestrians through history as the means to and maintenance of horse health. If one's horse suffered anything from lameness to colic to itchy skin, one gave him a bran mash. By the time he took his first bite, it was believed he was well on his way to wellness.

So, what were we to do with this vet's news?

He went on to explain that it was impossible to heat up a bran mash-- or anything, for that matter-- to a point that would increase a horse's core temperature. It was scientifically untrue that a mash warmed him from head to hoof. Thus, he advised us, we could go on feeding mashes if we liked, but just understand that no benefits would be reaped. A disgruntled audience member raised her hand.

"I would like to disagree," said the local barn owner. "Maybe you should consider that feeding my horse a bran mash makes ME feel good. And isn't that a benefit?"

She spoke wisely. Maybe measurable health improvements are of secondary importance. Perhaps what really counts is that WE feel better when we apply a certain salve or supplement. Or bran mash.

For years, I prided myself for not falling into this trap. One can spend a lot of money on equine supplements and gadgets. All those companies making powders for this and that didn't prey on my checkbook. The rubber balls promising to bring one's horse hours of enjoyable activity in his paddock? Forget it. The $10 peppermint flavored bit wipes? Nope. The granules of vitamins to make his hooves stronger? No thanks.

Then, something strange happened last week. A weakness cracked my normally curmudgeonly ways. It happened on a trip to the local feed and tack store for necessary supplies like fly spray, lead ropes, and leather cleaner. I execute this routine monthly, visiting the same shelves for the same products every time. I bypass the large displays of hokey gadgets and gizmos for horses-- neon stall toys, gourmet heart-shaped treats, garish fly masks with sparkly crystals. As I zoom past on my way to the fly spray shelf, I wonder what fools actually buy this stuff?

On my way to the fly spray shelf this time, I stopped for reasons unknown in the section of the store filled with kitschy things and examined a table display for a new product promising health and vigor for one's horse. Here, where I normally would have rolled my eyes and kept walking past, I grabbed a glossy brochure about Red Rock Mineral Supplement. The display looked to me exactly like a bin filled with chunks of stone blasted from a roadway construction project. For $15, a person could buy one of these rocks and take it home to his or her horse. I stood there reading about the "special" mineral qualities of these very normal looking rocks, the "healing properties," and their "highly balanced electrolyte" composition. It all sounded good.

I grabbed one of the rocks and turned the dusty chunk over in my hands. At first, my inner skeptic wondered what clever cow farmer had harrowed these up while clearing a field and then decided to monetize them on us loose-wallet horse folks. But my newly weak mind countered, no, surely these rocks--while appearing nothing but ordinary pasture rocks-- must have come from a special place and have special properties and be really...well, special. I pictured my horse becoming glossier from head to tail and then turning into a super athlete after such an infusion of minerals and vitamins. Suddenly, I couldn't picture her life without this rock in it. How had she made it this far in good health without it?

I hurried to the checkout counter with my pile of barn essentials and the rock. At first, the cashier looked at the rock like something I carried in from the parking lot. He glanced at it quizzically a few times while tallying my other purchases. Then an expression of recognition pulled at the corners of his eyes and mouth. He stifled a smirk as he asked "So, you're going to try one of our new mineral blocks, eh?" The way he said it made me feel like the first statistic in a store wide betting pool. I imagined he and his colleagues laughing at the display box of rocks when it arrived, slapping each other on the back, chortling about the kind of fool who would buy one.

There I was, the first fool. I clung to the promises in the glossy brochure, though, as I drove straight to the barn. Part of me assumed my horse Harmony would greet me like a kid at Halloween, prancing eagerly on her side of the stall door wondering what I had in my hands for her. She would likely chomp down on the block or lick it insatiably, I told myself. And then, pausing, she might glance up at me as if to say how did you know this is what I needed?

Of course none of this happened. Harmony took no notice of the rock as I put it in her stall. She didn't even sniff it. After five minutes, I went back into her stall and led her over to it. I rubbed the rock with my fingers and then held them to her lips so she could lick off the mineral goodness. She ignored me. Oh well, I told myself, maybe it's just the wrong time of day. Later on, she might experience a mineral deficiency and be grateful for her new rock. I couldn't deny that a few big lick marks on that rock the following day would satisfy me immensely.

Instead, I arrived at her stall and saw one corner of the rock buried in shavings. The other end was under a pile of poop. Rather than admit that the rock was a silly purchase, I maintained hope that magical properties lurked in it. Sure, those properties might be buried under manure right now. But they were there, right? Outside, I hosed it off and scrubbed it clean, then patted it dry and put it directly in Harmony's grain bucket to entice her.

The following day she found a way to tip her bucket and dump the rock. She then pushed it to the corner of her stall and urinated on it. Crestfallen, I began to realize this not-so-magical mineral supplement was nothing but a waste of $15, just like my normal curmudgeonly self would have known. I gave Harmony one full week with her rock and she never licked it once. Eventually I removed it from her stall and tossed it out, feeling low in spirits. Granted, most of what I felt was sorry for myself. I had to concede that all along, I hoped for the enjoyment of the rock not from Harmony's perspective but from my own. It would have given me a little spring in my step to see her lapping something that I--her wonderful, caring, selfless owner-- got for her.

In writing this, I hope to convince those companies that make oodles of money from equestrians buying their useless products to change the labeling on them. They can continue to promise fictitious health benefits if they wish. But they shall also add in bold print: Warning. Using this product may not lead to measurable gains in your own satisfaction and happiness. It is for horses only. For your own mental well-being and pride, you may seek therapy or other means.

Step Away from the Broom and Nobody Gets Hurt

2010-10-01T16:20:00.001-07:00

Life in the country means you are a long way down a bumpy road far away from stores where you can buy stuff. And this pretty much guarantees that you are not going to buy very many new things every year. Foolishly, one could assume that farm and ranch folks, therefore, avoid being victims of materialism. One might even assume that with their simple shopping-free lives, these folks have transcended material needs.

But, no. What happens at farms across America is a rare form of object-attachment, the likes of which I've never read in psychology books or sociology classes. In a nutshell, farm owners form strange bonds with their tools. It may derive from the fact that sometimes whole days will pass with barn chores, feeding animals, and zero human interaction. Pretty soon, the farm owner finds herself talking out loud to the pitchfork. I call this The Great Rake Affliction.

Most often, it begins benignly. Over many months of barn chores, an individual begins to favor a particular tool-- pitchfork, shovel, rake, fork. The individual convinces him or herself this loyalty is due to the tool's superior qualities like sturdiness and weight. But in reality, favoring one pitchfork over another has little to do with superiority. It's just what someone gets attached to, like a favorite pair of jeans or chipped coffee mug. As with other favorite things, uncomfortable feelings can arise should someone try to borrow the preferred tool. Eventually, the barn owner stops sharing completely-- no matter how politely someone might ask to borrow it-- and develops a habit of hiding the treasured tool even at the risk of forgetting where she stashed it.

A couple years ago, I helped a friend organize some paperwork for her divorce. An exceptionally generous and affluent woman, she was willing to let most of her beautiful ranch's property go to her husband. She made a short list of the things she felt belonged exclusively to her: Kubota tractor, two Andalusian stallions, two saddles, and the Ames True Temper steel shovel.

"Is this $20 shovel really that important?" I asked. Compared with the equipment and magnitude of expenses involved with her divorce, it seemed so trivial. She wasted no time to tell me how much she loved that shovel. Replacing it with another one just wouldn't be acceptable. In fact, if forced to choose between one of her fancy Andalusian stallions and that shovel, she said she would be hard pressed.

Huh?

"You know how it is when you have a favorite shovel," she reasoned. "I use it every morning. There's no way I'm leaving it here for other people to use. It's just a...just... it's just a really good shovel."

I let the issue go before things got any more emotional. I should have known better anyway. Not only did both my mother and father hide their favorite pitchforks in secret crannies around the farm when I was growing up but eventually they began locking them up in padlocked closets, safeguarding them even from each other.

This tool loyalty escalated over the years, building up to a high-speed chase after one of our neighbors. Much remains in my memory from that day of squealing tires, mom's use of swear words I'd never heard before, and teeth-clenched terror about her reckless driving. Above all, my 13-year old brain struggled to understand how there could possibly be so much drama over a leaf rake.

It all happened when my mom, who got a bit thirsty while raking leaves, leaned her rake against our mailbox to duck inside the house for some iced tea. As she poured herself a glass at the kitchen table, she saw through the screen door a small red truck slow down by the mailbox and then stop. A young man wearing Wranglers and a flannel shirt darted from the driver's side, tossed her rake in his pick-up, and drove away. My mother slammed down her glass and bolted down the front steps, at this point yelling as if someone had just set fire to her house. Not one to miss out on any action, I followed on her heels as she jumped into her Dodge Ram truck and floored the gas pedal. Spinning gravel and dust in every direction, she got that truck to within 100 feet of the thief in sheer seconds. He spotted us in his rear view mirror and tried to ditch us, foolishly believing he might outrun this crazy 5'2" woman behind him driving her over-sized truck at speeds well beyond her skill.

We skidded around tight corners on our narrow road, launched the front wheels airborne over potholes, racing at speeds typically reserved for law enforcement officials and Nascar drivers. My mom alternated between waving her middle finger out the window and maniacally honking the horn. Whenever she found the chance on a straightaway, she flashed her lights and stuck her head out the window to yell every manner of insult and cuss word. I clenched my jaw and dug my fingers into the seat cushion. The outside world sped by so rapidly that trees, road, sky all blurred together into a bluish gray streak. Now terrified, I wondered how long can a high speed chase for a leaf rake possibly last?

Finally, we barrelled to the three-way intersection of Route 12 and West Street and the rake thief accelerated to blast through it but then thought better and allowed his vehicle to slow down and drift to the shoulder. He exited his truck and sheepishly awaited the berating coming his way. The tall muscular young man hung his head as my mother pounced on him, reaching up to grab his lapels and assuring him eternal bad karma and damnation unless he could scrounge up a very compelling excuse for stealing her rake. The best he mustered was a whimper that he thought nobody would notice if he stole it.

Mom made a few unsavory comments about an obviously low I.Q., sub par morals, and idiotic judgment as she released him and retrieved her rake. With the prized possession, we drove slowly and quietly back home. Mom appeared almost giddy after the drama of the chase and having reclaimed her property. In fact, she was so relieved that I'm not sure it occurred to her how lucky we were to be alive. And therein lies the message of my story. Nothing comes between a farmer and his or her tools. Nothing. Consider this advance warning the next time you consider helping yourself to a seemingly innocuous shovel or pitchfork. You just might find yourself the recipient of cuss words you never imagined a farm tool could inspire.

Herd "Leadership"

2010-09-14T07:36:00.000-07:00

I was entranced in a reverent inspection of purple wildflowers on the trail towards John Muir Pass when the commotion ahead caused our hiking party to pause. Beyond us, the trail narrowed to the width of a gang plank, with a boulder-strewn cliff falling away from its right side straight down to the creek 100 feet below. A commotion in that direction meant nothing good.

This rock slope threatened hikers that one wrong step could send them tumbling head over heels in a battering descent. It was all the more reason why the mule pack train that passed us a moment earlier impressed me so much. I pondered what an unusually reliable and well-trained group of animals they had to be. Never in my wildest thoughts would I consider riding down this trail. But I just as quickly shrugged it off as my own paranoia about the hazards of riding horses anywhere outside nice enclosed arenas. You've become too much of an arena rider, I told myself. Horses have been treading through terrain like this for centuries. There's no reason to be a sissy about trail riding. And then I returned my thoughts to the wildflowers bursting in pale colors from implausible cracks in the granite.

Just as I bent over to admire a sharp-edged Star flower, the disturbance caught my attention. Having spent my entire life with horses, it was the kind of commotion one learns to identify from the faintest few seconds of sound. The kind that means nothing good. I looked up just in time to see a brown rump bucking its way down the rocky cliff side. It belonged to the seemingly charming doe-eyed mule that, until a few seconds earlier, had led the pack train I admired moments ago. The very same group of steeds that momentarily challenged my paranoia about riding outside safe enclosed arenas.

At that time, the chocolate colored steed was ridden by a young blue-eyed cowboy in fringy chaps pulling along three smaller mules loaded heavily with boxes of gear for the back country. Obviously, though, in the short time since he passed us, he decided to surrender his role as leader and opt instead for rebellious deflector. Depositing his handsome cowboy by means of one big jump and twist and breaking free of the rope that tethered him to the three charges, he romped his way down to the creek below. Then, he lowered head to knees, gave his body a mighty shake, and slid the saddle forward over his withers onto the ground. Now free of gear, cowboy, and pack train, he curtsied back one step and began nibbling nearby shrubs.

Our party bolted up the trail to see if the rider was okay, which thankfully he was. In fact, it appeared he had chosen an emergency dismount himself, rather than try to ride his broncing mule down the granite pile. This quick thinking indicated it might not be the chocolate mule's first back country rodeo routine. Dusting off his chaps, the cowboy seemed unsurprised by the antics of his pack "leader," the leader we watched break away, untack himself, and decide to chew branches instead of lead his herd. Some leader. The three other mules stood obediently on the trail, docile and unfazed. They awaited the cowboy's next command, standing at attention like well-disciplined school children.

They made me wonder why on earth the chocolate mule (who I now thought of as Bad Mule) had acquired leader status instead of one of them. Wouldn't an obedient, quiet-natured steed be better suited to lead a pack than, say, a feisty bronc that liked to run off the trail? I wanted to query the cowboy with this, suggesting he promote the sage-looking cream colored mule in the middle to leader. This one appeared unflappable and trustworthy. He seemed to understand his job, no questions asked. But I thought better of opening my mouth to offer unsolicited advice.

I recalled not only the ever-changing whims of the steeds we ride but also the number of times passers-by probably had similar questions for me when a normally stalwart mount turned loony under me in a split second. Countless numbers of young horses at their first competitions have played out scenes similar to Bad Mule's cliff side rodeo. In the blink of an eye, they've transformed from the well-trained and capable mounts I know them to be into the world's most unruly beast. And as much as I may want to pommel them in that moment, I admit that this is just how it goes with horses. No matter their level of training or experience, our steeds still have their own whits. Generally, they want to please us. Except for that unpredictable percentage of time when they seem to want to embarrass us, take us down a notch, or simply dump us in the dirt.

In the end, I kept my mouth shut as I hiked past the cowboy figuring out how to get Bad Mule up the cliff and back on the trail. I simply nodded and walked by. I knew exactly how he felt with a combination of ire and humiliation. I pretended we saw nothing.

A Room of One's Own

2010-08-30T19:21:00.000-07:00

I just returned from visiting a breeding farm a few hours north of here. After trying out a few of the breeder's horses as possible matches for students of mine, I was treated with the luxury to overnight in her darling guest cottage. As far as accommodations go, this self-contained little place was paradise. I awoke the following morning well-rested and comfortable, which isn't always the case when one stays at strangers' homes as often as I do.

Over the last few years, I have averaged five to six nights per month away from home sleeping in other people's guest rooms, couches, R.V.s, and anything else available. Such is the lifestyle of a traveling horse trainer. Succeeding at this nomadic life relies on going with the flow, to borrow from Zen adages. I've immersed myself in all kinds of family dynamics, unplanned events, and sleeping arrangements. I've shared beds with barn cats and shedding dogs, taken showers without hot water, sat uncomfortably through marital spats over dinner, stayed at homes without electricity. When relying on others' generosity and hospitality in its various forms, I've learned to let go of being persnickety.

Equestrians occupy all walks of life and financial hierarchy, a love of fine steeds being the glue that joins us all in the same social category. Staying in their homes allows me to experience the vast differences among this eclectic group, which -- as I stated above-- means I never know what I'm in for.

One time while giving a clinic in Nevada, I stayed in a home so enormous and sprawling that, after dropping my bags in a designated bedroom, I could not find my way back to the center of the house. Eventually, I discovered a hallway intercom and pressed a series of buttons until a human voice told me the directions through various hallways, chambers, and staircases down to a kitchen the size of a basketball court. It took me close to an hour to arrive there, given my need to stare shamelessly at the collections of artwork along the way. I stood in front of an original Picasso, my mouth gaping in awe, realizing I might never be in front of an original Picasso again in my life. This awe was swiftly overturned, though, by a nearby stone horse head dating to the Han Dynasty.

A few weeks later, while training in Portugal, I fantasized about that luxurious home and my bed with sheets whose thread counts I'll likely never again experience except at 5--star resorts. In a drafty three-room cottage in the Portuguese countryside, I was trying to recover from a cold shower (the home's heater fritzed a week earlier) and the damp drizzle outside by curling up on the only uncluttered surface available, a tattered love seat with a bird cage tottering on one end and an unruly cockatoo shrieking at me. Teeth chattering, I pulled my limbs into my chest and sneezed for the next few minutes. I watched the slow moving hands of a wall clock, praying I could speed them forward to morning.

Another time in New England, I awoke so fully covered in dog hair that two showers were required to make me presentable to teach that day. Then there was a morning in northern California that I awoke with a swollen tongue and spinning head after conceding to drink my hostess' homemade wine. It took me two days to recover and rivalled the time I awoke to the bad news that my hostess kept a coffee-free house. What? No coffee? It ranks as one my grumpier and least productive teaching days.

No matter the disparities in amenities, the experience of staying in my students' and colleagues' homes with them allows us to know each other on a more personal level than simply one horse woman to another. I've pitched in during family emergencies, helped catch herds of loose cattle, been present for proms and graduations and weddings. In many cases, I've become a quasi-family member who shows up every several weeks and stays for a few days. And despite the fact that my students' husbands have to suffer the fact that their homes with be filled with nothing but horse chatter for those few days, I tell myself that no easier house guest exists than me.

For the hosts with whom I stay every few weeks through the busy summer horse show and clinic months, I am easy-going, pleasant, and entertaining addition to their homes. Or at least I tell myself this to abate the real truth that I probably wore out my welcome last year. The fact is that I'm actually pretty advanced on the high maintenance scale. Take into account that I am a vegan, a health fiend, and an occasional wine snob, and you've got a pain in the butt. As much as I prefer to believe otherwise, there is nothing easy about hosting a vegan.

I've watched my hosts developing stress disorders right in front of me trying to figure out what kind of non-meat sustenance to feed someone who runs around with horses all day. Doesn't she need more protein?, they ask each other. How can she work with horses all day and not need to eat meat, even just a little? Sometimes when they get very panicky looking about their lack of animal-free products in the kitchen, I'll tell them not to worry because I generally have my own food with me. Which is a polite way of saying I have a granola bar and a seed packet in the dark recesses of my car's glove box.

Neither of these will sustain a grown adult enough to teach all day in the heat, wind, or rain. The result: a crabby, wilted instructor blathering commands of little sense by day's end. Hence, my hostess' stress-riddled interest in feeding me. I watch them pace in circles chanting "protein, protein" to themselves, making sure they'll feed me something to keep me from crashing and burning mid lesson. Meanwhile, I sit nearby sipping a fine coffee or wine, reflecting on what an easy house guest I make (if only I weren't vegan) and casting an investigative glance down the hallway for my next possible Picasso sighting. Or kindergarten finger painting.

What do You Mean By That?

2010-08-11T07:08:00.000-07:00

Back in college philosophy class, we learned about the concept of relativism which basically states that truths and values are relative to the person holding them. Nothing is absolute or universally true. But college happened a long time ago and I hadn't given much thought to philosophical truths-- relative, absolute, or otherwise-- until last weekend when receiving a real-life lesson on the fact that we all hold highly individual realities.

My problem arose from equestrians' tendencies to use different terms to describe the same situation. For instance, some folks will call a horse that bucks, bolts, and rears "very broke" while I might choose to call him "a wild beast worth avoiding." I've witnessed riders call their flighty, skittish mounts "bombproof" even while they're spooking at the same spot in the arena for the umpteenth time. I choose to call the same horse "volatile and reactive."

Long before philosophy class, my father tried to educate me about the differing interpretations in the horse world. When someone offered me a strange horse to ride as a kid, I always agreed. But then sometimes right before mounting up, I started to get nervous and entertain second thoughts. Pretty soon, I felt like riding this horse might not be so safe; maybe I should just stay on the ground. As the horse jittered and reared, I voiced my concern to my Dad. "But the owners said he was totally broke. And a really good boy." Why was I starting to doubt all that? I wondered as my nerves soared. At this point, Dad put his hand on my shoulder and explained again that everyone has their own definitions of "broke."

My refresher course on relativism came last weekend when I-- a hardcore dressage queen--was afflicted by an irrational motivation to join my colleague on a 25-mile endurance race. He had a feisty young Arabian for me to borrow and the event was happening right here on hometown trails. It sounded like a fun change from my daily life inside sterile dressage arenas. Arriving at the even, I found my steed tied to his trailer quietly munching hay. He was a handsome grey gelding with intelligent eyes and a strong body. I started to get excited about our ride, imagining the wind in my hair, the morning fog against my face, and the satisfying fatigue of horse and rider after 4+ hours in the saddle. Plus, the camaraderie of winding through the Redwoods with my buddy seemed straight out of a movie. In my eagerness, what I didn't imagine was the icy sensation of submersion in the waist-high San Lorenzo River as my horse raced down the trail without me.

Let me first acknowledge that I did receive a slight warning that my horse was "not real fond" of water crossings but should manage fine. To me, not being fond of something indicates that an animal will undertake the task presented but perhaps be a bit grumbly about it. Or maybe some resistance will surface, but everything will work out okay in the end. In hindsight, I could have researched in fuller detail what "not fond" meant for this particular horse.

Operating with the assumption that all would be fine, I crossed the start line of the race knowing that the river crossing loomed ahead at the 5-mile point. This section of the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz stretches nearly 20 feet wide and is strewn along the bottom with large rocks, making an already hair-raising crossing potentially treacherous.

Knowing my horse wouldn't be a big fan but should manage it well enough, I approached the water steadily without letting him balk and get worried. I kept my eyes up, pushed my heels down, checked my grip on the reins, and urged him on. We kept our momentum and he put one foot in the water. And then another. Admittedly, he didn't love the experience but was handling it decently enough to get us to the other side. With his next step, he dropped down from the rock we were balanced on and plunged into deeper currents where the river rose above his belly. Instantly, I was saddled to what felt like a bucking bull at the rodeo.

My horse jumped so high and so far that we plunged over the two riders in front of is and landed on the opposite bank near spectators who scattered like bowling pins. Pulsing with adrenalin, he sprung in the air again as I madly tried yanking his nose up from between his knees. This time, we jumped straight over the top of a boulder in our path, landed briefly on the other side, and then sproinged over a fallen log. By this time, we were on dry ground with the river well behind us, but my horse-- totally locked into his rodeo routine-- kept bucking and leaping down the trail.

Spectators gasped and shrieked. Race officials radioed for help. I scanned the ground for a soft place to bail off. A miracle from my guardian angel, though, kept me on that wild beast. And we skyrocketed up and down over more debris for a good number of meters more before he paused long enough that I could grab a chunk of mane, regain my stirrups, and yank him to a stop. Anyone who witnessed the spectacle agreed that the fact I stayed on defied both gravity and physics. It was sheer luck. Or so I thought. Then it occurred to me that, since my horse had not gotten rid of me, it meant I had to finish the loop ahead of us and then cross that darn river AGAIN on our way home. Shoot. By now, all that romantic hoopla about the wind in my hair, camaraderie with trail buddies, and blah blah blah drained out of me. I wanted to ride straight to the nearest sterile dressage arena and never leave.

Mustering up some reserves of courage and/or insanity, we sailed around the trail's main loop and refrained from antics that would incite further 911 calls on our behalf. But then, sure enough, there we were at the San Lorenzo River again. I knew I couldn't count on two miracles in one day, so the likelihood of my staying on my horse as he morphed into a wild water buffalo was nil. This time I decided the best option would be to get off and lead him through the water. He seemed to like the idea, standing quietly as I wade into the chilly currents up to my navel. My leather boots filled up like buckets and my wobbly legs froze to the point of not working very well. I tried staggering over the river rocks to give him an encouraging lead. But my legs moved sluggishly, too sluggishly to keep up with my horse as he reared up on his back legs and then blasted past me, jumping like a dolphin at high speed. He tore the reins from my hands and got to the trail on the other side as I was still sliding around on mossy rocks, trying to keep from being pulled under by the river. Treading water faster, I worked my way to the other side as quickly as is possible when you are fully dressed and with boots and wading through water up to your chest. By the time I got there, my horse had disappeared in the distance and I could faintly hear his lightning hooves far down the trail.

As I began huffing after him with water spilling out of my boots and cold wet clothes stuck to me, it occurred to me that I hadn't envisioned this part of the ride experience when I got the idea to participate in this event. Indeed, I imagined doing the whole ride on horseback. The romanticized daydreams I initially concocted about the ride were now lying at the river bottom. I was now engaged in an entirely different sort of morning than I expected.

And therein lies the problem-- one's expectations. Had I not expected the idea of a horse managing a water crossing "just fine" to mean we'd still be together on the other side, I wouldn't be in such shock jogging down the trail while other riders passed me on their nice quiet horses. Yes, the day could have been much less harrowing had I recalled some simple college course material. Our own truths are relative to ourselves. My own definition of my steed's behavior towards water would be: he hates it but WILL cross it, though the rider will likely not be part of the picture by then.

** POST-SCRIPT: my horse was caught by a fellow rider not too far down the trail and we managed to finish the event. And, minus the f$%^&ng river crossing, it was a rollicking good time!**

We Heart Horses

2010-06-25T08:19:00.000-07:00

Back in the 1990s, Dr. Gary Chapman wrote a book titled The 5 Love Languages that indicates people express their love in five distinct ways, depending on the individual. Some folks use words of affirmation, others do acts of service, and so on. Since then, it's become trendy to talk about languages of love, and not just in touchy feeling conversations but in everyday chatter on the sidewalk. It's almost as commonplace as talking about the weather. Several other hardcover books have since been published on this topic. Likewise, weekend couples' workshops charging hefty fees for love diagnoses are popping up around the country. Apparently, we humans are plenty eager to plunk down a big chunk of cash on products that promise to psychologically analyze how we treat people with whom we're smitten.

Folks with tangled heart strings could save themselves quite a bit of money and confusion, though, by spending time with a local horse trainer. Trust me, horse trainers have been witnessing the languages of love for centuries. We are no strangers to the expression, expectations, and reception of the nebulous subject of Love. This unfolds nowhere more consistently than in a typical day at the barn in interactions between man and horse.

As a warm-up to this conversation, let's analyze your scribe first. Most psychologists would define my affection, as demonstrated for our purposes in caring for my horses, as a masculine or male style of expression. You see, men bond by doing activities together (read as: sitting silently in a fishing boat, walking through the woods, watching a sports game), whereas women have a need for more measurable connection like eye contact, conversation, expressing their feelings. For a guy, so long as two people are in the same place doing the same activity, they're bonding, no touchy feely about it. Hence, this male version of affection sums up my approach to horses. It's just how I'm wired, I can't help it. What says you love something more than getting out and exercising together? No coddling, no feeding treats, no special grooming. Just some good silent activity.

So, now that we've begun our Horse-Trainer-Turned-Psychologist analyzing, we should acknowledge that there are a few more nuances than just masculine versus feminine languages of love. For your reference and study, I have outlined the major ones. Read closely as you will not find these in a fancy manual at your bookstore.

The Bran Mashers

This is the crowd that likes to bestow affection by adding value to their horses. They spend a hefty sum each month for fancy supplements, powders, minerals, and vitamins that they read or heard somewhere will make their steeds' lives healthier and therefore happier. You will never find them feeding plain old grain and hay, as if those things were only for underprivileged horses without access to a better lifestyle. Instead, this type of owner usually has a supply of the newest organic equine cookie brand on the market in frilly packaging that looks like it came from a bakery. They are quick to buy any edible product that promises to make their horse happier or better in some way, regardless of the science (or lack thereof) behind it.

These folks commonly spend more time mixing up their horse's mid-day meal than they do riding. They will assemble this meal each day from an array of little plastic containers filled with formulas for better hair texture, joint function, digestive processes, attitudes. You name it, these equestrians have a supplement for it.

If questioned, they will swear their horse absolutely cannot function without these supplements, suggesting that it was his good fortune to have ended up with owners like themselves. With every scoop of Grand Skin Formula and MegaFlex Supreme, they pour a little of their love into this beast. So, while the feeding/supplementing routine replaces riding time for this group, it leaves the Bran Mashers with the same satisfaction. For them, soaking a pail of beet pulp and scooping flax powder and dicing apple chunks provides the same enjoyment of horse ownership that the rest of us might get from galloping around in the sunset.

The Bathers

When I bought my first new car, I wanted to take the best possible care of it so that it would last forever. Since I knew zilch about engines, maintenance, or repairs, my desire translated into obsessively washing the car at frequent intervals. I soaped and waxed it every three days for the first summer, feeling the pride of a new mother with each buff. I applied my affection with sponges and window cleaner, and spent more time standing back admiring the spot-free vehicle gleaming in the sun than I did actually driving it. I'm not sure where I got the idea, but it seemed I now equated "taking care" of something with scrubbing, wiping, and polishing it.

A group of equestrians-- that I call The Bathers-- treat their horses the same way. A loved horse is a clean horse, in their mind, and to them, nothing says affection like a bottle of tail detangler and coat sheen.

A Bather's horse spends as much, if not more, time in the wash stall as it does in the arena. For Bathers, discovering a new grooming product at the tack shop is on par with the excitement of learning new skills in the saddle. When asked how their horse is doing or how its training is advancing, they answer with names of new shampoos and hoof polishes. To their barnmates, they giggle and share the satisfaction of their relationship with their horse like a schoolgirl with a crush, except instead of mushy anecdotes they chatter about clean rumps and silky manes. At lunch with their friends, they recount the day's whisker removal and ear trimming, adding a cute story about how their 'adorable' and 'funny' horse tried to nibble the clippers or put his lips on the hose.

After investing an hour or more of her day to the horse's bath, a Bather will spend another hour holding him outside in the sunshine to dry and then selecting a blanket from his extensive wardrobe to cover his clean body until tomorrow's grooming session. Phone calls will be held, whining children will be ignored. No matter how stressful or busy the Bather's life is on a given day, the bathing ritual goes uninterrupted. Otherwise, the Bather would be at a loss for how to speak her love and this particular horse-human relationship would stagger.

The Reciprocaters

Many folks, particularly those new to horse ownership, possess the Reciprocater style of love for their steeds. These are the poor souls that dole out affection generously with the expectation that it will come back to them in kind. They are the ones standing in the barn aisle with a dejected expression asking their horses why he just stepped on their feet or bit their arms or walked into them and pushed them aside. Why did he just do that? And what they mean, of course, is how could he have just done that after all the love and kindness they give him? How could he possibly be so ungrateful? And while they're at it, they want to know why he bucked them off yesterday or spooked and bolted after seeing that spot of nothingness in the arena?

Even though they knew better, the Reciprocaters get caught up thinking the horse deeply contemplates every action before doing it. Thus, if he loved his owner as he should, he would NOT have bucked in the arena and acted like an imbecile. Rather, he would treat his owner with the same unbridled kindness and affection that she bestows on him. Reciprocaters generally believe that new behavior problems from their steeds are the result of not enough affection, even though they may already spend half their days engaged in spoiling these beasts. Thus, as ill-mannered antics crop up, the Reciprocater heaps on even more "love" in the form of cookie treats, grooming, purchasing stall toys, using lovey dovey talk. And of course this only leads to further bad behavior from the horse, leaving a very angst ridden Reciprocater asking him just what his problem is. Doesn't he know how good he has it? Why is he acting like a spoiled brat and not showing his owner a little more gratitude?

I am able to speak authoritatively about Reciprocaters, given that I myself conducted my early equine relationships with this language of love. My childhood pony "Sheba," who many believed to be a she-devil incarnated, held very few positive feelings towards humankind. In fact, she was so ornery that she possessed few actual likable traits. I adored her. I doted on her day and night. I turned down invitations for sleepovers at friends' houses in order to spend even more time with this little black mare who always wanted to bite me on top of my head and pull out a mouthful of hair. The more she bit me, the more I fed her carrots and curried her. The more she bucked me off, the more I begged my mom for a fancier saddle for her. When she kicked the neighbor kid in the face, I made a list of excuses and reasons why his mother shouldn't be upset. I wrote in my diary about Sheba and penned school papers about her. All these years later, I can report with certainty that she never returned even a fraction of such affection to me. In fact, I'm not even sure she liked me very much. Nowadays, I'd probably recognize that and compromise for a strictly working relationship with her, settling for a decent ride on a regular basis and skipping all that affectionate stuff.

But I wouldn't choose to turn back the clock and change anything. Having recognized the different languages of love, I now know that you can't force any equestrian to conduct herself in any other way than the one that feels right to her. If that means giving a spoiled horse more carrots, then so be it. If it means bathing him to the point of getting bald patches, so it is. With all this in mind, consider sidling up and plunking yourself down on a hay bale next to a horse trainer the next time your head or heart or mate puzzles you. You will not have a need for costly books or weekend couples' seminars. Just sit there long enough and the language of the barn will inform you just as much.

Placing Blame

2010-05-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

Learning any new sport brings its own challenges, but in terms of unusually large and sometimes cruel learning curves, horseback riding takes the top spot. Not only must a new student learn to wrangle her body into never-before-experienced poise and isolation but she also needs to simultaneously wrangle the 800-pound beast under her with polish and grace. Keep in mind that at any moment, said beast is prone to his own whims, disinterest, and overall lack of enthusiasm. Or worse. This makes learning to ride-- an already formidable challenge-- far more difficult than other sports. A student learns to proceed with a noted amount of flailing, spastic gestures, and jiggly balance.

The ultimate unfairness of this learning curve surfaces when a student has the opportunity to watch a trainer ride in graceful effortless harmony. It will appear that the trainer is sitting atop the horse doing...nothing. Where is the flailing? The bungling? The pinched up, frustrated facial expressions? Of course the student acknowledges that such skilled riding style comes from years of mastery and she might one day possess it, too, but in the meantime, she allows herself some good old-fashioned envy because she knows she's a long way from riding like her trainer.

At this point, something interesting happens on the learning curve. It is something that coaches from other sports never witness. Sure, they will deal with frustrations, egos, and emotions of their students and players. But they will never encounter the creativity that riding students eventually adopt in finding explanations for why their progress is so slow. That awkward beast under them eventually becomes a really convenient excuse on days things are not going well. We have each fallen into this at some point, for instance on the day we are bouncing around attempting a decent sitting trot with our coach yelling at us when, exasperated, we announce that we would be able to manage the sitting trot just fine if only our horse would give us a smooth trot to sit. Or we'd be able to give the right cues if only he would pay attention. He's the reason for our sub-par performance, not us, we tell our coaches. In time, this line of reasoning gives riders a handy and consistent way to explain the glacial speed of their skills progressing.

And what pleases the human mind more? What satisfies us more than believing that we are hindered exclusively by factors other than ourselves? What else allows us to go around thinking we're A LOT better at something than we actually are?

I pondered all this recently while struggling through a swim lesson. As a kid, I never learned to swim and now as an adult it seemed ridiculous, so I went to a local pool and signed up with a coach. "This is going to be really fun," I told myself the first day, much like new riding students probably tell themselves driving to the barn. I shimmied into my swimsuit, jumped into the water, averted drowning and felt like I was well on my way to being a decent swimmer. In fact, I held all the same beliefs of beginning riding students: I am an athletic, capable, quick-learning woman; how hard can this be? Just moments after thinking I was well on my way to becoming a decent swimmer, I found myself unintentionally upside down and unable to get my bearings back. I tried paddling my arms, which only flipped my body around in circles like a rotisserie chicken. Through my goggles, I saw sky, bottom of the pool, sky, bottom of pool, sky....

My coach jumped in and rectified matters, allowing me to sputter chlorine out of my ears and nose. Then, immediately, I hurried to find an explanation. Surely, the episode could not be explained simply by the fact that I was a very bad swimmer. No, there needed to be another reason I was flailing in three feet of water. Could it be the pool temperature? A clothing malfunction? Interference from another swimmer? But when you're doing a sport with no equipment, no teammates, and very little clothing to malfunction, you realize quickly-- and rather disgruntled-- that there isn't anywhere to put the blame except on yourself. Ouch. Yes, the reason I tended to bob up and down like a buoy at high tide rather than execute a graceful breast stroke was the fact that I was a very bad swimmer. There was no way around this. Unlike a few moments prior, I acknowledged that cows might fly before I became a decent swimmer. "This is not going to be fun at all," I told myself on the drive home, wet hair dripping down my back. Humbled and deflated, I tried to find a silver lining in the reality that I was pathetically unskilled at this new sport I hoped would bring me a lot of happy hours.

At least it brought me in touch with the tribulations that my riding students go through. It gave me a taste of their frustrations and hopes and failures. This, I believe, helps make me an effective coach for them. Yet, in my humbled state, I couldn't help feeling that they were far better off than me. At least they had a horse to blame! They had something with which to assuage their failures, like a hearty dose of putting the blame on something else. I will assure you that this is much preferable to standing in a swimming pool realizing that there is nothing-- nothing!-- to use as an excuse for sub-par performance. So, be forewarned that the next time one of my students gets frustrated in the saddle and questions why on earth she has taken up this cruel sport, I will tell her she has no idea how good she has it.

Delusions of Grandeur

2010-04-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

When I moved to California as a young trainer, my initial concern was not how I would make a living but instead that there was something funny in the drinking water. Whatever substance or chemical it might be, it had the same effect on every novice equestrian: filling them with the belief that, with a little effort, they would end up in the Olympics.

This puzzled me because if there is anything that riding is, it's HARD. Dressage in particular seems suited for only those who enjoy constant struggle and failure, perfectionism, fleeting moments of accomplishment followed by futility and frustration. I like to think it's probably easier to become a millionaire than a decent dressage rider. A lot easier. But call it what you will, perhaps The American Dream, for scores of beginning adults take up riding every year with the naive sense that, with some effort and determination, they will reach great achievement. Little do they know that what lies ahead is a mighty ego smack down, the likes of which they've probably not yet experienced in life. In time, they will learn firsthand the cruel fact that even with a monastic level of focus and dedication, riding accomplishments like to remain elusive.

Yes, my optimistic reader, even with proper funding, reams of disposable time, access to world class instruction and horses, you will likely still be looking far off into the distance in a few years to see the pinnacle of the sport. That's just how it goes with riding. If, on the other hand, you wanted to master the Art of the Bruised Ego, you will find that achievement comes much faster. And consistently. If you relish the acquisition of skills slipping away right before you get your fingers around it, then equestrian sports are for you. Should you find something satisfying in being bruised, battered, downtrodden, or deflated, you shouldn't wait another second to begin a riding career.

In recent years, the number of newbies telling me they'll participate in future Olympics has illustrated for me just how cynical equestrian sports have made me. Granted, I consider it a healthy cynicism because it's been well honed from a lifetime of the equestrian success-deflation cycle. As a trainer, I try not to crush any one's personal American Dream with my cynicism but sometimes I try to safeguard them from that mind-boggled state that comes from riding one moment with perfect execution of skills and harmony followed within the blink of an eye by a moment where you cannot get anything right. Sometimes there are whole weeks like this. These weeks are filled with disgruntled utterances that go like this: "What the *bleep*?! I just did this (fill in the blank: 'canter depart,' 'half-pass,' 'shoulder-in'), how come I can't do it again? I just did it perfectly and now I can't do it at all...?"

So it goes for those who have signed on for The Art of the Bruised Ego, for those who take up this sport that requires probably more than one lifetime to master, although they would prefer it to take a couple months. Let me confess, admirable equestrians, that I am not immune from delusions of grandeur or my own personal American Dream. I have suffered the same follies of believing that I might accomplish overnight something that takes other mortals decades of toil. Prior to my present day cynicism, I thrived on the kind of starry eyed ambition that feeds my Olympic hopeful students. Mine wasn't for horsemanship or dressage but for something just as elusive: a zen state.

Many years ago, I decided my mind could use a good scrubbing out and thus found myself at a zen monastery with no previous training or real understanding of zen (you can draw the parallels here with the newbie dressage rider who buys a fancy horse but doesn't have a clue how to sit on it). I had read and heard that it took decades of disciplined study and practice to tap into the teachings of zen, but rather naively and probably egotistically, I thought I could abbreviate the process. In fact, I expected full spiritual enlightenment after a few weeks of sitting on the meditation cushions in this room full of bald-headed guys and gals. Let's face it, what was holding me back? I am an intelligent, motivated, goal-orientated, and capable woman. With a little focus, enlightenment would be mine. Goal accomplished. The unobtainable obtained. (You can draw more parallels here with the novice equestrian believing she'll be a contender in the next Olympic trials.)

Needless to say, my budding enlightenment received relentless blows before it ever got started. In fact, it's still waiting to start and I've been toiling for a decade. I sat on that little round cushion telling myself "this shouldn't take too long, I'm more capable than the average person, this is going to be straightforward for me..." and all kinds of other delusional things. I might as well have told myself I'd be the next princess of Morocco. Numerous teachers tried to reel in my preposterous ideas but I regarded their sage advice like fat rain clouds over my parade to enlightenment.

So it goes with The Art of the Bruised Ego. It's not that I've given up on my zen state, though. No, I'm still sitting on the little round cushion regularly, humbly acknowledging that I sure haven't abbreviated any pathway or process. By the same token, I haven't given up on one of my starry eyed students making it to the Olympics. But I would feel more optimistic about their chances, as well as my own, if the next Olympic Games added a new event called The Sport of Dashed Dreams. I already have several contenders groomed to take the podium.

Who You Callin' Fit?

2010-04-06T07:42:00.000-07:00

Just as I contemplated a donut-sized roll of fat over the horse's loins, I listened to his rider tell me how "fit" he was. Never mind that the horse had worked up a sweat walking 100 meters from the barn to the arena and his nostrils expanded for more oxygen at the effort of putting one foot in front of the other. No matter, she told me, this guy was plenty fit.

Mmm-hm.

Well, what about the fat roll over his loins? And around his withers? Or the lack of muscling anywhere on his body? I inquired.

That was no big deal, she replied. Rest assured that under all that chub existed a well-toned animal. Having just published a book about equine fitness, I wanted to educate her about the fallacy in her thinking but I knew from previous experience that there's no talking someone out of her fitness opinions even if I'm an expert on the topic. And where fitness is concerned, there's no shortage of strange beliefs. Such as equating chub with tone. In these conversations, I've uncovered two truths about Americans. First, we keep low standards for what constitutes fitness. Thus, being just one step ahead of total fatness gets counted as fit. Second, we hold our animals to completely different standards.

Let's take a look at these, starting with the first of what I call the American Fitness Truths. I blame the exercise gadgets and workout video craze of the 1980s and 90s, but somewhere along the way, folks started believing that a few minutes of respiration elevation in their week would get them fit. Just move yourself around for a four or five minutes every day and, voila, you had successfully combated being unfit. I've even seen magazine articles promising results from "The Four Minute Workout," which leads us Americans to form beliefs that fitness just aint that hard to come by. This has created a highly diluted definition of the term, to say the least. By this line of thinking, it seems that a vigorous shampooing in your morning shower counts at the day's workout. And for some people, I'm afraid it does.

How a four-minute session of jiggling around can be seen as a legitimate form of fitness is beyond me. But we Americans do like things to happen quickly, so the notion of truncated workouts delight us to no end. Why sweat and hyperventilate for an hour if you only need to walk briskly to and from your mailbox to get fit? The problem, as with many things, is that these opinions never get tested. Many of my students will tell me that they are quite fit, yet if I ask how they know this to be true, they lack substantiation. Have they recently trained for and competed in a an event like a 5k run?, I'll ask. Or how about a multi-day bicycle trip? Or a yoga retreat? Nope. Nada. None of the above. They just assume that since they are not completely blubbery then they must be fit, right? They never test the assumption. It would be like me thinking I'm a total brainiac but never succumbing to an intelligence test or producing any work that demonstrates mental capability.

I'm a fan of standards and validation, but I find myself frequently without company on this point. When people tell me they are fit, I'm curious how they know this. What's the standard for validating the claim? If a mechanic tells me the brakes on my car work, I want to be sure he knows it, not just has an opinion about it. The same applies to fitness. If we Americans want to call ourselves fit just because we get up and walk around during commercial breaks on television, this is perfectly fine so long as we can provide proof for our so-called claims. So, be forewarned. Should you find yourself taking a lesson from me in the near future, be ready to provide supporting evidence for any fitness claims. The fact that you are one step ahead of your neighborhood Fat Guy doesn't count.

Now let's move on to the second American Fitness Truth. This goes something along these lines: we ourselves will consistently balk at an afternoon filled with heart-pounding exercise (such as climbing a mountain) because it's just plain unpleasant, but we will not hesitate a second to impose the same task on our animal friends. We hold them to a different expectation, as if their four-leggedness makes them machine-like. We ignore that they have muscles and hearts that get just as weak and flimsy as our own. In this blindsided state, we allow them to stand around idly in a pasture for months and then one day (when they are very unfit), saddle them up and ride them into a sweaty lather while assuming it's no big deal.

I asked a gal yesterday who was mounted atop a huffing-puffing four-legged creature if she herself had ever run a half marathon. She looked at me like I'd suggested she tattoo a rainbow across her nose. And then she spurred her overworked mount for more giddyup. But how fair could that be?, I pointed out to her. How could she expect her jiggly equine friend to work his butt off for an hour or more when she was so unwilling to impose the same suffering on herself? The answer that folks always give me is that "horses are just different than us, that's how it's fair. " Call me a simpleton, but I'm confused about how differently ANY creature could respond to aerobic activity. Are these folks indicating that if I had four legs and a tail, I could just go out and run a marathon tomorrow without any training? Does a horse's heart pump differently? In the absence of muscles, does he have the ability to flex his fat ripples? Does he remain in good shape while leading a sedentary life just because he's a horse?

No, dear reader, of course not. Let me be the needle in the proverbial balloon: horses are no different than us. Their capacity for aerobic fitness is no greater or less than ours. The primary difference between man and beast is not the size of our hearts but our brains. We humans possess the larger grey matter and therefore the ability to subject pudgy steeds to our whims.

Let's stop kidding ourselves. While they may not be seated on the couch with a can of beer, our horses are NOT standing around at the ready for a mega dose of respiratory suffering. Most of us have a horse that's only one step ahead of the Neighborhood Fat Horse, a situation that might be different if we had more time. But since making a commitment to our own fitness and carving out our daily four minute workouts, our schedules have gotten tight.

Vacation Re-defined

2010-03-24T07:55:00.000-07:00

While they constitute a segment of the population most in need of vacations, horse people possess a gene that inhibits them from experiencing authentic leisure time. Let me explain this a bit further and perhaps you, gentle reader, can help me understand why the very thing that leads us to crave vacations (endless exhausting horse chores) causes us to miss out on the horseless luxury they offer. On one hand, we can't wait to get away from the barn for a few days of solace and on the other, we don't like being away from the barn. It's a classic Catch-22. But for the purpose of further study, I've managed to divide equestrians into three basic vacationing groups.

1.) Those who plan vacations around horse-related activities, which might include a trail riding adventure in Ireland or a trek on mules through the Grand Canyon. Numerous butt-numbing hours in the saddle and a disagreeable spouse are pillars of these vacations.

2.) Those who plan trips to touristy resort areas with the intention of snorkeling, getting spa treatments, and eating seafood nightly. Upon arrival in their hotel rooms, however, they find themselves earmarking pages in the guidebook for nearby attractions involving horses. These might include a carriage museum, a beach trail ride, or an art gallery featuring equine specific artwork. Disagreeable spouse is guaranteed.

3.) Those who do manage to get away to exotic locations and avoid the sight of horses the entire trip. However, this last group of equestrians phones home at least three times daily to check on the well-being of his or her horses, get updates, and remind the caretakers about turnout schedules and supplements. In fact, several vacation activities are abandoned in order not to interfere with the schedule for phoning home. Again, disagreeable spouse is characteristic of these vacations.

Regardless of which of the above categories an equestrian occupies, he or she returns home feeling entirely refreshed, which begs the question: how can one be refreshed towards something one never took a break from? I believe we should blame faulty psychological wiring. However, I suppose what matters is that we think we had a vacation, never minding that our traveling companions and spouses will confirm that we rarely stopped thinking about horses the whole time and maybe should have just stayed home to begin with.

I'm no stranger to these tendencies. This past week, in fact, I returned home from a pseudo-vacation in Kentucky, a state I had never previously visited. Flying there, I thumbed through the guidebooks selecting all kinds of exciting activities in the Blue Grass state like touring historic mansions, bourbon tasting, visiting a Shaker village. Yet, immediately when I arrived in Lexington, I found myself posing for photographs with bronze horse statues in the airport lobby. Almost before I knew it, my itinerary changed to entirely equine activities. I awoke the next day to visit a race track in the early morning fog, followed by a tour of a retired Thoroughbred facility, and then a jaunt through the Kentucky Horse Park. The following day included a drive through the country (complete with posing for more photos, this time with Thoroughbred foals) and a visit to a bookstore that sold coffee table horse books. My three-day vacation was equine-centric to say the least, but somehow I came back feeling rejuvenated and refreshed for my horses and students at home.

The faulty psychological wiring I mentioned above is undoubtedly genetic, getting passed from pseudo-vacationing equestrians to their offspring. I verified this at an early age while spending some time in Amsterdam with my mother. A conference for ancient Greek philosophy was the context for our trip and most of our time was spent trolling libraries, meeting rooms, and archives in studious hours. One day, fully immersed in ancient texts in a tiny bookstore on a back street, my mom jumped off her feet as if lightning struck her. The next second, she threw the rare book she'd been reading to the floor and bolted out the shop's door. Wondering if perhaps she had suffered a seizure of sorts, I calmly put down my study materials and followed her. Approaching the entrance of the store, I saw her already far down the street, running along a canal with her hair sailing behind her. Thinking by this time that the potential seizure had morphed into sheer madness, I began chasing her, abandoning our bags and coats at the shop.

I found her three city blocks later under a tree trying to catch her breath and thwart an asthma attack. After ensuring she could breathe fine, I asked her point blank if she had suddenly gone stark raving mad.

Of course not, she replied. Her dramatic departure from the bookstore could be explained by the fact that she heard hooves clip-clopping down the street and she wanted to see Amsterdam's carriage horses pulling their fancy carts along the canals filled with tourists. Hence, she ran as fast as she could in the direction of the clippity clops, but alas never caught them. At a young age and perplexed at this point, I asked why she cared so much. I mean, how exciting could it be to see horses in a foreign city when my parents made their living with horses every day at home? When she heard clip-clopping seven days a week on our farm, what could possibly be so thrilling about that noise while on vacation to cause someone to run down the street like a crazy person? The validity of my questions brought her a sheepish smile. It was a little bit crazy, she admitted. And then putting her philosophical training to use, she pondered that equestrians probably just lack the ability to be fully entrenched in other activities without at least a small part of their minds still occupied with the thought of our beloved beasts. At my age, I didn't get it. That all sounded like nonsense.

Now, a bit later in life, it's very easy to imagine myself bolting out of a shop, museum, or other establishment in a foreign city to chase down a set of clopping hooves. And no doubt the sight of a horse, which describes every other day in my life, would indeed refresh me.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

2010-02-22T07:58:00.000-08:00

Someone I hadn't met before bought my two books yesterday and when she handed me her check, she said something that made me snort with laughter.

After a reverent pause of holding the books I labored five years to write and publish in her outstretched arms, she remarked, "Wow, you must be, like, really famous."

Famous by whose calculation?, I wanted to know. First of all, unless you're Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates, writing a book doesn't instantly land you amongst the glittering rich and famous. You can count on this being especially true when you write a book for a microscopic niche industry like horses.

Sure, my books have sold far and wide within the horse world, but I'm not sure that qualifies for fame. I can tell you that Oprah has not called yet. Nor has Ellen, Letterman, or the Today Show. That's the reality of being at the pinnacle of an activity that attracts only a few other folks, gets zero media coverage, and rarely makes the conversation list at parties and dinner tables nationwide.

In terms of mass market appeal, I might as well have written The Guide for Cartographers Under 30. Even if every single U.S. equestrian bought my book, the royalties wouldn't add up to owning a fancy address here in California, that's for sure. In fact, they wouldn't even add up to buy a mobile home in a nice park. Since the release of my second book, I'm still sitting here in my cottage listening to the termites chew apart its sagging roof. I still shop at Goodwill. I still drive a second-hand economy car. In other words, being a two-time author in the equine industry hasn't changed my life or bank account one iota.

Before I sound like a curmudgeon, though, let me admit that there has been some notoriety to come my way. It may be the type you measure in your own diary rather than the New York Times, but it's a small dose of acknowledgement nonetheless. Among my friends, I'm a celebrity, bless their souls. To them, a published book is unfathomably impressive. It doesn't matter if the book contains the Great American Novel, knock-knock jokes, or your mother's recipes. A book is a book ad to friends, it makes me as credible as Gatsby or Nabokov. Frankly, my pals can't figure out why Oprah hasn't called yet. One volunteered to make sure she had my phone number. I assured him that failing to have my number wasn't the reason that Oprah hasn't planned a show for authors of horse training manuals. Unless she intended to cut her interested viewers to a teeny fraction of its current size, I doubt I'll hear from her soon. But my friends don't understand this. A book is a book, right?

Notoriety also came from my hometown where the newspaper ran a feature story about me and my books. The front page story included a flattering photograph and no shortage of words. In fact, the article sought to make me a celebrity in more ways than one. It dug up every minor accomplishment from my life to date. It mentioned poetry contests, basketball championships, bike races, college honors awards. Basically, it provided the fanfare and retrospective my friends were hoping for from Oprah.

**I should mention that my Vermont hometown has a population around 5,000 and the weekly newspaper that featured me comes in the form of six pages of pancake breakfast announcements and fundraisers for the fire station.

It might not count as actual fame, but I plan to take it wherever I can get it. The adage of being a big fish in a little pond doesn't bother me. I will take big fish status any day because, let's face it, the horse world will always be a tiny pond. Heck, I may not be able to afford a Rolls Royce just yet, but you better believe I'm laminating that front page story from the Randolph Herald and hanging it on my wall unless the termites chew it down beforehand.

Because I Said So

2010-02-03T07:51:00.001-08:00

Teaching is a funny business, especially when one endeavors to teach something as elusive as horsemanship. It's a cruel pursuit of seeing students achieve success for a few seconds and then fall apart just as quickly. I find myself too often saying "Oh! That was it-- you had it! Did you feel it?" just as the scene before me unravels and the student's face pinches up in frustration. It's akin to asking someone if she felt the urge to blink her eyes right before her eyelids moved. Of course she didn't. And if her learning is supposed to be built upon these teachable nanoseconds, you can see how it gets discouraging.

And then it's my job as instructor to channel that frustration into something productive and uplifting. Aside from the Dali Lama, I think most of us cannot achieve such a feat. Yes, any learning curve involves setbacks, but with horses the setbacks outnumber the triumphs by a large margin. Feigning a thin smile and reminding students day after day that their relentless sense of failure is actually an enriching part of the process sometimes just feels awkward to me. Some days, when trying to disseminate motivation that will help them stay the course, I feel as though I'm attempting to convince them of the values of masochistic hobbies. Maybe in reality I am. Maybe that's part of being a riding instructor.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately because the very act of learning to ride a horse contrasts the high-paced- instant- gratification-information-overload world we live in at the moment. During a time when folks can get the answer to any question or quandary or quest within seconds by looking into the palm of their hands at a cell phone, it's absurd to expect that they will savor the painstakingly slow pace of learning horsemanship. We humans are pleasure seekers. We want instant results. We want to win the lottery without putting in effort. We want robotic vacuum cleaners, pills that solve our health issues, cars driven by auto pilot. What we do NOT want are hobbies that demand excessive toil and sweat and, in return, give us a feeling of slamming our heads against a wall.

The necessity of me remaining employed begs the question: With internet and texting and space- age cell phones, why would anyone elect to take up a sport that requires hours of sitting in a saddle before they can get their legs in the right place, never mind influence the horse?

Lucky for me, though, folks still do take up horsemanship and riding, which keeps me employed. I have yet to figure out what draws them, but I've concluded there's something about all that toiling and frustration that must appeal to them. It's a rare breed, these folks. They're the ones who wake up in the morning, slip on their shoes, and then say to themselves "oh goody, maybe I'll go do something really futile today" and head off to the barn.

And generally what keeps them coming back is the fact that these hardy souls are movers and shakers in other areas of their lives. Commonly, they're CEOs and founders of ground-breaking companies, inventors, scholars. Basically, they're the type of people who can do anything really, really well. But horses present a humbling detour in their otherwise highly accomplished, talented, and successful lives. And, truthfully, I think this is what keeps them coming back to the barn every day. I believe that they are boggled, as am I even after all these years, how a seemingly simple four-legged nonverbal beast can be so, well, not simple. They say to themselves "I can run companies, save lives, build communities, raise a family,...so why the HELL can't I master this less intelligent creature?" It's that humbling question that puzzles them, which in turn causes them to enlist in the daily progress of learning to ride: two steps forward and two-and-a-half steps backwards.

I, for one, applaud the effort. Horses have been humbling me for 28 years and I have come to accept that I possess flawed psychological wiring that keeps me attracted to these beasts. But I can't wish that flaw on others, can I? This is the metaphysical question facing us riding instructors. I would prefer to believe that I could offer some solace to students in the throes of frustration and angst, to think I could say something inspiring and sensible, rather than just nodding in their direction and saying "Hey, it appears you're masochistic just like the rest of us."

For now, when students turn to me in their desperate hour to express all the woes and emotions and inadequacies that horses bring out in us, the best I can do is rely on an empty childhood maxim, as devoid of inspiration and clarity as it may be. When they are struggling to learn the elusive art of horsemanship and ask "But how can this be right?" or "why should I keep doing this?," I reply: BECAUSE I SAID SO.

What's Love Got to do with This?

2010-01-26T07:33:00.000-08:00

The topic of Love came up last week, which produced a sobering dose of self-reflection. It probably came up because it's the one thing that unites us all to the selfless and expensive concept of owning horses, an endeavor that leaves most of us asking "why do I do this?" far more often than answers that question.

It all started in the barn aisle when my student began philosophizing about the particular type of longing that afflicts her. It's the type that drags her to the barn even when she can't determine if she's having fun or not, the type that makes her feel like an addict struggling along for several weeks with frustrations and financial setbacks waiting for that next high. She stood wringing her hands and shaking her head.

"It's like chronically being in love with the bad boy in high school," she finally announced. Skeptical, I pondered her analogy, hoping of course to settle on a definition of desire that was lots more high-minded. Wasn't horsemanship, after all, a classical tradition with its roots in nobility and aristocracy? Surely, we were more sophisticated in our pursuit of it than sappy high school girls chasing after the unavailable football quarterback, no?

For my student, though, it felt like an affliction rather than affection and horses were that bad boy with low slung shoulders and a swagger, trapping her in a cycle of swooning-heartbreak-pursuit-swooning again.

Myself, I pondered a more idealistic and self-serving definition over the next days. If we were going to talk about Love, I hoped to believe that I had found the ultimately satisfying lifelong romance. Where some folks like my student might be chasing after the bad boy, I on the other hand had a passionate one-of-a-kind affair.

Right?

This begged for a description of the starting point. One cannot discuss Love without admitting where, when, and for whom the feelings first arose that made trumpets blare in one's chest and inspire lines of poetry and cause one to admit that he or she would never again be the same. Do me a favor and think about this yourself for a moment. My own pondering led me to a starkly juvenile confession: my version of Love was no more sophisticated than my student's. In fact, she now seemed like a Hollywood romance starlet while I belonged in a trashy tabloid, at best.
My first Love was a black mare named Sheba. I was six years old. I'm pretty sure my parents bought Sheba with the hopes that she might kill me or at the very least gallop into the next county and get me out of their hair.

In one word, Sheba was dreadful. She was mean, high-strung, prone to biting, and bucked off anyone who tried to ride her. I adored her. I couldn't get enough of the nasty little horse. I drew pictures for her, wrote my school reports about her, molded clay figurines of her. And of course I tried to show her off to all the neighbor kids.

I brushed and polished her smooth black coat until it shined like river silt. And then I mounted up and took off through Mr. Eddy's field which ran the length of West Street for a couple miles, allowing me to showcase my fine steed, and love of my life, at a full gallop to passers-by for as long as I could stay on. Of course, staying on Sheba was the tricky part. I generally only made it half-way down the field before Sheba dumped me right in front of my neighbor Jackie who was a fellow six-year old equestrian and rival of mine. In my many years of trying, I'm pretty sure I never succeeded in impressing Jackie with my riding nor my ruffian mount.

On one particular snowy December day, I set about my usual routine to impress Jackie with Sheba on my 300th attempt. A couple feet of snow covered Mr. Eddy's field, adding some beauty and drama to the scene, I thought, with a trill in my chest! Wait until Jackie saw us streaking through the snow at top speeds. If only I can stay on, if only I can stay on, I chanted. And then, in the demure way a high school prom queen begs her bad boy to stop ditching her and flirting with other girls, I buried my nose in Sheba's mane and asked her gently to please not throw me off. Just this once. Just today, okay? Feeling like we struck an agreement, I swung my leg over the saddle and we hit hypersonic speed within seconds. Snow flew around us and Sheba ran with every ounce of might in her body. What a feeling!, I marveled.

Jackie noticed us, too, and stopped in her driveway for a moment looking straight out at Mr. Eddy's field. Here is my chance at last, I shrieked into the storm. On this 300th attempt, Sheba then bucked and twisted so violently that I flew off the right side and caught my boot in the stirrup. She proceeded to gallop with me dangling upside down, my head and shoulders bumping along the ground, trying my best to turn away from her hooves. I tried repeatedly to break my foot loose from the stirrup but it wedged below the heel. I realized that I would either perish soon or eventually Sheba might stop running. But in either case, I would be dragged for a good long time. And I was.

Finally, Jackie- who for the record WAS very impressed by the spectacle, though not in the way I intended-- came to my rescue. She charged through the snow, jumped off a stone wall, and grabbed Sheba's reins to pull her to a stop. She said nothing, just made sure I was okay, which I more or less was except for a broken ego. I took Sheba's reins and limped alongside her up the road back to our barn reflecting on how closely I just came to breaking my neck. I expected to feel anger towards my demonic horse or feel sworn into being more cautious or maybe quitting horses altogether and finding a different interest.

But you know how it is when you're a sucker for the bad boy.

Later that night, I pulled out my quilted pink Holly Hobbie diary and wrote down the day's events. My mother still has this pathetic diary entry. It goes like this:
"Today, I rode Sheba in Mr. Eddy's field. It was snowing. She bucked me off. I was dragged. I love her."

Had I been a bit more foreseeing, I should have added "I am officially doomed for life with an incurable affliction, God save my soul."

High Maintenance

2009-12-02T08:16:00.000-08:00

Without naming any particular facility, I will say that I found myself last week staring unabashedly at what can only be described as complete and utter disrepair. And, no, I was not at the county dump or the scene of an earthquake. Quite the contrary, I was at a place where folks pay big bucks to be. Or more accurately, they pay big bucks for their horses to be there.

Call me unrealistic or snobby, but in my opinion any place that shares a sentence with 'big bucks' should be of a certain decorum. I'm not instating high standards here; I'm just looking for basic infrastructure. Read as: fence posts that stand vertically to the ground rather than bending over in insect-riddled, rotting splinters; stall walls made from legitimate building materials instead of baling twine, hoses, cardboard; gates and cross-ties that actually latch; arenas without weeds growing in them. Stuff like this. For some reason, these requirements are becoming more difficult to find.

This situation gives my mother justification to say "I told you so." You see, I spent most of my childhood enslaved in what I believed to be a cruel regime of child labor (which meant I had a few chores around our New England horse farm) and whined constantly about the endless lists of things to be repaired, fixed, maintained. My mother used to chant her mantra "upkeep, upkeep, upkeep" around our farm, reminding us that, without constant maintenance, a farm would fall into disrepair faster than anyone suspected. I originally thought she herself was being a little high maintenance, but now I have to admit that she was right.

My brother and I formed a labor party of two at Maranatha Training Stables, my parents' farm. We did everything from prune our fruit orchard to stacking firewood to painting fence boards. We spent so much time painting pasture fences, in fact, that I occasionally still see white paddock fencing stretching for miles when I close my eyes. Of all the treasures on our farm, my mother was proudest of those wooden fences. Every board, every post, and every nail was painted a perfect white. Should a board get chewed on or kicked by a horse, her labor party (the aforementioned offspring) hustled out there with replacement lumber along with a pail of paint.

I will admit that 36 acres of this fencing IS a lovely sight. But the adult in me is the one who can admit this, the adult who suffers severe nostalgia for so much pristine perfection on a horse facility. The kid in me secretly hated that fencing. It meant nothing to me but achy wrists and paint gunked under my nails and hours of boring labor. What was the point in any of it? Wouldn't twine and duct tape and cardboard suffice for fencing AND be a lot easier?

Initially, my brother and I were paid-- if you can call microscopic figures that--by the hour. We earned something like $1 per hour for painting those never-ending fences and the task consumed our entire summer breaks from school. We tried convincing ourselves it was better than working at the video store or bagging groceries at the supermarket. But it wasn't until the end of summer that we made it better by sheer childhood cleverness. One day with his hand permanently frozen in a claw-like position from grasping the brush handle, my brother realized we would be paid the same amount per hour regardless how many sections of fencing we accomplished. So, why were we working so hard?, he mused? Why not just slack off? And that, gentle reader, is how an 8-year old and a 9-year old introduced themselves to often inefficient ways of capitalism.

Being the older wiser one, he convinced me that mom would never know our productivity had dropped off and we would still collect our $1 per hour. So, when we got out to the perimeter fencing of our property, most of it out of sight from the main barn or house, we would lay down our paint brushes and go skip stones in the creek. Or build bike jumps or collect grasshoppers. Shucking off the guilt that sometimes reared its head, we told ourselves that abandoning our job was just fine because, at the end of the day, all those perfectly white fences didn't really matter. Wouldn't twine and duct tape and cardboard suffice for fencing, anyway?

One sunny afternoon in August, we hid our paint cans and crawled into the expansive raspberry patch to take naps. We were asleep for probably two hours when a shadow slanted across our blissful sunshine and stirred us awake. And in our repose, we looked up to see my mother staring down at us. Needless to write, much lecturing ensued. The lengthy and sometimes poetic scolding covered the grounds of employee ethics, general good behavior, workmanship, etc. But my mother's primary disappointment came not from her children's sneaky ethics. More hurtful to her was the fact that we abandoned her prized white fences. She reminded us in the raspberry patch of their beauty, their value, their sheer aesthetic superiority to something like twine or cardboard.

For us, that afternoon fell into the category of moments where children think their parent is greatly over-reacting. I held that belief for a number of years, bolstered by the bitterness of having to give back most of my summer wages. In fact, I think I held onto the secret animosity towards those summers of white fence painting until just last week when I stood aghast at the dilapidation around me that qualified as a bona fide boarding facility. In that moment, I finally got my answer. NO, twine and duct tape and cardboard do not suffice as fencing. A familiar ache crept into my wrists briefly as I reflected on all those acres of white wooden fences at Maranatha Training Stables. I couldn't promise I'd be a more productive employee now than I was as a mischievously napping 8-year old, but something in me felt compelled to nail up some boards and brush paint across them. My chest tensed with urgency and excitement. White fences! Wooden boards!

Don't misunderstand me, I wouldn't wish to create a ritzy place that could justify charging boarders a fortune to be there. Nah, I might even charge less than the facilities falling into disrepair. I would just want visitors to pride me every day on the aesthetic superiority of my white fences.

Free Horses and Empty Wallets

2009-11-08T11:49:00.001-08:00

$10,000 is the amount I spent last year on a free horse. And hopefully you detect the irony in that sentence. Free and $10K don't exactly belong together. But I ignored my own basic operating rules during a six month period of psychological weakness last summer and chose to wave off the age-old truth that there is no such thing as a free horse.

Let my own stupidity serve a message to readers that there really IS no such thing as free when horses are involved. Don't get me wrong-- there are plenty of horses with no purchase prices that are simply free to a good home. Purchase prices, though, pale in comparison to what folks will end up spending over a few months of basic care for a horse. Take my own scenario as an example. Rule #1 in this situation I like to call "Foolishly Believing in Free" says when something seems too good to be true, it is.

Last April, my friend and I received a call from a distressed trainer who allegedly owned a talented, beautiful, sweet-tempered Warmblood gelding that she needed to find a (free) home for because her life was in turmoil and she could no longer care for him. Reeking of suspicion, the offer to acquire her Olympic caliber mount at no cost seemed a wee too good to be true. So, we declined the offer to take him. But a few days later, we received another call from the trainer, this time from her cell phone. Apparently, she was en route to our barn already, declining to take our "no" as an answer for her super talented free Warmblood. She had him in the trailer and would be at our place in an hour.

Hmm. A free horse and free delivery? Now, things definitely smelled fishy. But my friend and I, two softies at heart, wondered what the worst possible outcome could be for this story. Plus, I've always been the hard-headed type that likes to disprove adages to which everyone else submits. Maybe I'd show the world that there is such a thing as a free horse!

Meanwhile, we brainstormed why this particular talented and beautiful horse might be free, trying to ready ourselves for his arrival in our driveway. Maybe he had a few lameness issues, which may explain his unsolicited gifting upon us. But we figured at the very least, he could be a moderately sound-- and gorgeous-- trail mount. Or perhaps he could be used as a lesson horse and actually earn us a few bucks. Or maybe, just maybe, he would indeed be everything he was promised and my friend and I now owned the horse we always dreamed about but could never afford!

The horse-- let's call him Wolfgang-- blasted out of the trailer on his hind legs and proceeded to wreak havoc on the courtyard despite his handler's yanking and pulling on the chain that encircled his head and nose. At this point, I should have demanded the horse be loaded back into the trailer and driven out of my sight and life for good. But here is where the frail shards of blind optimism surrounding receipt of something potentially awesome for free rears their hideous heads. Undeniably terrified of the rearing beast in our driveway that now strangely belonged to us, my friend and I looked at each other. And embarrassingly, I will admit that we both wore an expression that said the same thing: wow, this might be everything we've ever dreamed about... and for free!

Where we should have seen nothing but danger and rotten luck, we saw good fortune.
This is the type of delusional thinking that constitutes rule #2 in "Foolishly Believing in Free."

After tearing apart a section of fencing with his flailing front legs, nearly killing a neighbor's dog, and destroying our newly seeded lawn with nervously prancing hooves, Wolfgang was wrestled into a stall for the night. It was the last free night of our lives. From the next morning forward, we adopted a new pastime of writing checks to cover Wolfgang's expenses. In fact, we almost couldn't write checks fast enough to keep pace with his need. First, his metabolism proved impossible to satiate and we spent more money on his hay, grain, and rice bran than on our own mortgage. His ribs still stuck out at the end of our first month, prompting us to try costly detox supplements in the event he carried a parasite or other health anomaly that prevented him from putting on weight.

When the detox supplements failed, we tried a treatment of acupuncture that made the previous supplements seem reasonably priced. When acupuncture failed, we gave up and accepted that he might always be underweight. Plus, by then we had to direct our waning funds to more pressing matters, such as his training problems. Wolfgang was a gigantic animal, standing well over 17 hands with an immense neck that rose straight up to the sky. In his 10 years of life, nobody had taken the time to teach him basic manners. We found it impossible to lead him from Point A to Point B without incurring bodily harm. Not only was he gigantic and unruly, he was also spooky at just about everything. Every 30 seconds or so, he lurched in fright at something or other, snorted from his nose, and pranced himself into a sweaty mess. Rustling bushes, mundane noises, drizzly weather, crunchy leaves all became our nemesis.

After six months of buying new equipment to replace what Wolfgang broke-- halters, leadlines, feeding tubs, my toe-- we decided he needed to get some rudimentary training pronto. One morning we set about the task of loading him into our trailer and taking him for training to a cowboy a few towns over. That afternoon, we were still trying to get him in the rig. By nightfall, we gave up. Wolfgang would not step foot near the trailer. He reared, he ran backwards, he stomped his feet and threw his head. No problem, we thought, the trailer may seem confining to him. So the next day we plunked down a hefty fee to rent a spacious and airy trailer. We payed the small fortune in gas for a round trip to pick it up an hour away and then began again our challenge of getting Wolfgang to load up. We repeated this for three days before admitting we needed reinforcements. At this point, my hard-headiness around ignoring adages felt like plain old hubris.

After a bit of research, we found a Mustang wrangler who was able to tame wild horses and get them to walk comfortably into her trailer out in the Nevada desert. Aha, we thought, this was our gal! She charged-- of course-- a mighty sum of money but promised to get our deranged Warmblood into the trailer without cruelty or drugs. And sure enough she did. It took her about four hours and her whole bag of tricks for working with wild horses. Now after four and a half days of our endeavor to get Wolfgang on the trailer, my friend and I realized we had spent every last dime between us. The horse was in the trailer, but now what?

This is when a person encounters rule #3 in "Foolishly Believing in Free"--you concede to your own original ignorance. In my case, I had to admit that adages exist for a reason. And yes, dear reader, I learned first-hand that there really IS no such thing as a free horse. In fact, I would venture to say I didn't just learn this; I had it repeatedly pounded into my thick skull day after day after day. Which seems to be the only way folks learn things in the horse world.

Time-tested truths from expert sources just don't seem to be enough for us horsey folks. We like to learn things the hard way, wittling down our savings accounts until we are financially bludgeoned into admitting we should have listened to that sage advice in the first place. But nothing speaks to us and illustrates our follies like our own empty wallets. So, even though you will likely not heed my advice, I'm giving it to you anyway: When someone offers you a free horse, run the opposite direction very fast!

Could you Point me in the Direction of Civilization?

2009-09-22T08:41:00.000-07:00

We were long past that point of exhaustion when everything seems funny and yet our failure to find a store was really not funny. My groom and I, in need of a few items like water and duct tape for the show we were attending, had driven around for nearly 40 minutes passing nothing but tract homes and barren fields drying out in 100 degree heat. Surely, any moment, we would pass a gas station or a 7-Eleven or a supermarket or at the very least a roadside fruit stand. But nothing. We drove endlessly in our bubble of air conditioning finding not so much as a can of iced tea.

Our agitation stirred up as we admitted aloud to each other that we expected this. We were, after all, at one of the large shows held at a facility in the deserted valley between Sacramento, CA and the Sierra foothills. It's a no-man's land, populated by a handful of retirees who can handle the heat and apparently enjoy living on a flat plain void of trees or stores selling goods that facilitate human survival. Things like food and band-aids, ice and towels and string.

In our disgruntled-- and very thirsty-- state, we returned to the showgrounds to sit on overturned buckets in the blazing sun and wait for the day to end. Twirls of sand occasionally blew up in our faces, adhering to our sweaty skin and causing me to wonder how I'd ever squeeze into my competition gear for the last class of the afternoon. The equation of sweat+dirt+skin tight clothing made me want to run off and find a different job. It's moments like these that make me wonder why I chose horse training as a profession over, say, banking or designing or something civilized.

But the larger question for me was why on earth do people organize horse shows in California in the least desirable places? If you're going to invite participants to come be hostage at your event for five consecutive days, at least make sure your venue is some place people actually want to go. My grumpiness on this matter derives, as most things do, from my New England upbringing. Back East, where land is more affordable and large horse facilities proliferate the countryside, horse shows were always held just outside charming little villages. So, if you found yourself gritting it out to finish a class during a torrential downpour one minute, you could then be sitting in a cozy breakfast nook having a warm scone 5 minutes later. A friendly waitress calling you "honey" might inquire why you look so sodden and bring you a complimentary warm beverage. And should you need some duct tape or band-aids or string, you will find them within 25 steps of your scone at the main street hardware store.

Every summer through my youth, my dad and I traveled all over the Northeast for Combined Driving competitions. I served as his groom, traveling companion, and cheerleader. We went to New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania-- the same circuit of shows every season. After the first couple seasons, we had our favorite stomping grounds in every horse show town. In Massachusetts, we liked to go to the Blue Bonnet Diner for mid-afternoon hot chocolates and a break from the bustle of the showgrounds. In Pennsylvania, we hit the Iron Skillet every morning for gigantic breakfasts that kept us fueled all day. In Connecticut, we knew exactly where to stop for ice, supplies, and carrots for the horses. Whenever dad broke something on his carriage or harness, we knew who to call and where to go. And any time we wanted to just sit down and take a break, we knew the best places in all those charming villages. We knew where to get the best croissant or berry pie slice, the best quiet bookstore, the best outdoor park where we could nap in the grass. Sometimes, these things were vital to a good performance at the show. I grew up naively assuming it was all part of competing horses.

Then I moved to California.

Land is a precious commodity here in California, the largest available amounts of it existing in far-flung deserted areas. And these deserted areas during mid-summer show season tend to be so hot that many folks get heat stroke just from standing around. Less of them might fall victim if there were cozy stores nearby where one could duck out of the elements for a moment or grab a buttery scone after morning classes. But there are none of those. No shops, no stores, no villages. Just a horse show venue sticking up in the midst of these flat bone-dry plains. Some days, I've wandered around so long looking for a single tree under which I could sit and shade myself that I've nearly missed my class. I've finally realized that trees just don't grow in hot barren plains and therefore gotten used to that sizzling skin-scorched feeling on my forehead and cheeks.

On this particular day of failing to find a store, as if one might miraculously appear on our hundredth search, my groom and I pondered aloud about the oddity of the scene. The mercury pushed past 100-degrees, dust swirled, horses wilted. And the show went on. Participants tried their best to present themselves glamorously with polished black boots and shiny saddles, but the glamour fleeted quickly. Within five minutes of all the polishing, everything was drenched in sweat, filmed in dust. Ladies' makeup melted and dribbled down their starched collars, making pink and blue stripes from eyelids to ribcage. Wet rings blossomed under their arms, triangles of moisture pressed through the backs of their show jackets. The horses huffed and puffed, their sleek coats turning to foamy lather.

I dreaded my own class within an hour and the temperature by then well over 100. To assuage my bitter mood, my groom reminded me that things weren't that bad. They could be worse, after all. Remember Woodinville? With that, I almost fell off my bucket.

A year ago, we'd gone to an early spring show in Woodinville, a town that maps describe as "historical." After spending 72 hours there, I discovered that 'historical' is a euphemism for "place you never want to visit." I entered town via main street, where all the buildings seem to have emptied out at the turn of the 20th century, and promptly locked my car doors. I couldn't tell if I'd somehow driven onto the set of a creepy Hollywood movie or if the place was for real, but nonetheless, the town-- if I can call it that-- sent out bad vibes in every direction.

Block after block was filled with abandoned stone buildings rotting into the earth. I passed one or two other cars carrying folks trying to figure out the quickest route out of there. For miles, I passed shuttered saloons, deserted storefronts, and crumbling facades, all of which were surrounded by acres of scorched plains baking in the heat. In fact, the temperatures that weekend held steady at 112 degrees and all I fantasized about was a cold bottle of Gatorade. My horses fell sick from the heat and my car broke down, but all I could think about was a cold Gatorade. For 72 hours, I dreamt of getting the hell out of Woodinville and its ghostly downtown and sitting down in a patch of shade with a Gatorade.

On this particular day, my groom was right. Things could have been worse. My makeup might melt down my shirtfront and I would undoubtedly contract some minor heatstroke by day's end, but at least we weren't in Woodinville. We would get by without the towels and ice and string we searched for earlier. Then, like delirious souls clamoring towards a desert mirage, we will tell stories about our favorite aisle in Target. Oh, Target. What we wouldn't give right then for a place like that with bonafide signs of civilization! Then, my groom will listen politely as I reminisce for the billionth time about those charming little horse show villages in my youth.

And the show goes on.

Re-defining "Fun"

2009-09-02T09:16:00.000-07:00

Not often prone to surfing the internet, I decided last week to buck that trend. I plunked myself down with morning coffee and logged on to a horse web site that offers 10-minute videos on every equine topic imaginable. Initially, I planned to check out videos about any discipline outside my daily world as a dressage trainer, like maybe an expose on spotted draft horses or the price of hay in Iowa. But then I saw a really curiously title that yanked my attention: "The Fun of Dressage." What? I read it a few times to make sure I saw it right. The FUN of dressage?

Anyone who's spent five minutes either doing or watching the stiff-lipped sport of dressage knows that "fun" might not be the most accurate description. After all, we are talking about a pursuit based on trying to achieve perfection, not one where folks spend most of their saddle time laughing. I am by nature a studious creature, relishing in pursuits that require fierce concentration (which is a colorful way of saying I take myself too seriously), so dressage has always suited me. However, I DO recognize that we dressage riders quite often need a reminder to lighten up a little. Or a big "Don't Forget to Have Fun" sign hanging in the tack room.

When I stumbled upon this video, I thought maybe I'd found the Holy Grail we all needed. Perhaps this was something I could recommend to my students when they turn purple-faced from holding their breath and micro-analyzing the latest set of aids they picked up at a recent clinic with Mr. Famous European Trainer.

Click. I hit the play button, put my feet up, and readied myself for a good chuckle. Bring on The FUN of Dressage. Curiously, a stiff-lipped British fellow opened the first scene in customarily tight beige riding apparel. He donned a riding helmet and leather gloves-- everything clean and tidy. He stood in the middle of a perfectly groomed arena with manicured flowers landscaped around its edges. The camera zoomed in for a close-up as he reminded viewers that learning dressage can be fun. Just to give us all a sample of this process, he mounted up on a gleaming Warmblood whose trot looked so uncomfortable that it would probably bounce the kidneys out of any mere mortal who tried sitting it, except for this British chap.

By now, I'd become positively excited to see how this guy could transform the process of learning dressage from complicated/frustrating/fleeting to pure fun. I slurped my coffee and leaned forward closer to my computer screen. Bring on the FUN of Dressage, indeed!

The camera panned out now as this well-dressed British gentleman carried on in a bone-jarring sitting trot, trying at the same time to speak. Immediately, his face flushed and beaded with sweat. His eyes narrowed as he described the correct riding position and the camera focused on his nicely straight spine sucking up the shock of sitting the trot on this 17-hand catapulting horse. His breathing became irregular while demonstrating how to hold one's legs close to the horse's sides while riding. Viewers quickly recognized that, were this fellow not in exceptional physical fitness, his limbs would be whipped around like a rag doll's. He reminded viewers to hold their hands still when riding, and by now his face was truly contorted from fatigue and concentration. He asked his horse to walk so he could catch his breath.

So far, he hasn't said anything remotely humorous and he himself appeared to be in physical agony. What happened to the fun? I was still waiting for it. While regaining his breath, he gave the viewer a few allegedly light-hearted reminders. Make sure your horse uses his body properly at all times. Practice sitting trot without stirrups every week. Don't even think about going for a ride without doing a precise and consistent warm-up and cool-down.

And then the credits rolled. It was over. Surely, I missed something, even though I hadn't taken a bathroom break or even so much as averted my eyes once. Where was all the promised fun?? For its alluring title, the video ended up being just like all the others in the universal Dressage collection. It left the viewer with that combination inspired/deflated feeling that she is pursuing a sport that is, well, very difficult. It really is. There's no way around it. Damn! So much for the Holy Grail, or at the very least, a good side-splitting laugh.

Ah well. I suppose I'll just keep my brow furrowed as usual and keep concentrating intensely. But don't worry, I'll let you know when I find myself having a really FUN time when sitting the trot without stirrups.

Trendsetter

2009-08-05T07:32:00.000-07:00

The horse-human partnership struck me as especially remarkable last week as I slurped down a fermented yeasty beverage at Whole Foods market. We humans are just so different from our equine friends. In fact, we lack most of the traits that we love about horses. Take simplicity, for one.

Being creatures of habit, horses are almost foolishly simple. For 20-plus years, they will get excited every day for their same bucket of grain or patch of green grass. They never stomp their feet and demand different flavors of grass or a more modern bucket. Nope, they just feel the same excitement for the same thing at the same time every day.

Then there's us humans, about whom the same thing cannot be said. Evidence to this fact: me slurping a fermented yeasty-- and mostly gross-- beverage last week. This cup of bubbling Kombucha had made its way into my hands via some compelling marketing at Whole Foods. I had been drawn in by the fancy signage, the promises of better health, intelligence, strength, productivity, etc. Actually, the sign nearly promised that, upon consumption, each customer would instantly become a rock star or a wealthy supermodel or something along these lines. So, I plunked down $4 and sipped and waited.

In one word, I'd describe Kombucha as heinous. It made my taste buds want to jump up and run out of my mouth. Within minutes, my stomach rumbled unpleasantly, prompting me to scout out the nearest restroom. Meanwhile, the Kombucha's acidic aftertaste made my eyes water. You might wonder if, after this disagreeable Kombucha encounter, I have tried it since. Well, this is the point I want to make about human nature versus horse nature. Not only have I tried the yeasty beverage again, I've committed to having it every day. Why? Because, simply, it's the latest trend in the health world, and if it does turn consumers into rock stars, I don't want to miss out! You might recall that last summer's big craze was goji berries. For $18 per pound, foodies could get a bag of red pellets from the Amazon rain forest that supposedly cured cancer, balanced moods, caused weight loss, etc. This year, the goji berry trend has been replaced by Kombucha. And I, being a fickle human, have joined its ranks.

That's what we humans do-- we hop from trend to trend. We like the adventure, the newness. And our poor horses, those noble steeds that love the same old same old, often get dragged into this trend-hopping with us. While horses will live happily their entire lives eating the same grass and grain ration, we humans like to invent all kinds of new concoctions for them. A few years ago, garlic had become the latest trend for horse diets. Promoters said a few teaspoons of garlic daily would benefit horses in dozens of ways, like increasing circulation, warding off bugs, improving digestion. We humans responded by buying up tubs of garlic powder and feeding it religiously.

Then, research started to show that garlic actually wasn't very good for horses. It can cause inflammation and irritate their stomachs. Oops. We all threw away our tubs of garlic. We were ready for a new trend anyway, and scooped up all the latest aloe juices and pro biotics to treat our horses' now ailing stomachs. This hot new item-- stomach soothers-- shot to the top of every one's equine shopping lists. Articles ran in every major magazine about stomach soothers and their unparalleled affects on health. Most recently, though, there's been some debate on how to determine if these products actually work or not.

So, capitalizing on this budding doubt, equine food producers have tried to launch a new trend-- fish oil. Many of us feel like feeding fish byproducts to horses is just inherently wrong somehow. But nevertheless, producers are gaining ground and these products are becoming a bonafide trend. After all, they promise enticing health benefits: strength, healthier digestion, circulation, etc. etc. Bags of grain infused with fish oil are showing up in barns. Folks are eagerly buying special Omega 3 supplements for their horses, wondering how these steeds ever stayed healthy before. How did they stay healthy before?

That's a simple one. They stayed healthy by consuming the only things they need and still get excited about every day-- grass and grain. It's us humans, not them, that need these trend changes every couple years. Nothing excites us like believing we've discovered the 'secret' to ever-lasting health. Our horse friends are happy without further discoveries. They're content with a diet that's worked for them for centuries. I can't say the same for myself. I'm hurrying out to Whole Foods to gag down my daily Kombucha and I need to rush before this trend gets replaced by a newer one!

Keeping up with the Joneses

2009-07-19T08:38:00.000-07:00

It's not that a wild haircut or an armful of tattoos detracts from one's competence to train a horse. But horse owners tend to think that. Which is pretty funny, since the horse world is mostly populated by free spirits. Nonetheless, when an owner seeks a trainer, he or she is typically drawn to a professional that is, well, clean-cut. Tidy. Smooth-talking.

Never mind that the most qualified trainer for the job might not fit that description at all. In fact, most of the trainers in this industry that I respect the most for their unparalleled skill occupy the margins of societal norms in terms of appearances. Think odd fashions, social awkwardness, potentially distasteful tattoos. And then there's a population of trainers I've known that had very little to no skill but presented a perfectly coiffed look. You know-- shiny black boots, clean leather gloves, steam pressed breeches. I once met a trainer here in California with the shiniest boots I've ever seen, like reflective pools of water. But I don't think this person had ever ridden a horse, let alone trained one. Yet that seemed to matter little, because the look was just right. And that can get you pretty far.

I had this discussion last week with my colleague, a Western trainer, who wanted to come watch one of my dressage competitions. She didn't think she could come, she said, because the hot summer weather prevented her from wearing enough clothes to cover up her tattoos. And she didn't want to offend anyone, or to embarrass me. Let me clarify that she has more than a couple tattoos; in fact, she's thoroughly inked from neckline to toenails. When first meeting her, it is admittedly difficult not to stare at her limbs. When I met her, I did in fact question some things, such as why someone like her might want a five-inch swirling blade permanently colored onto her upper arm. But I never questioned her abilities as a horse trainer. From the first moment I saw her teaching a student, I knew this gal meant serious business. She is unusually focused and committed, and she elevates her students to a level of excellence they probably would never achieve otherwise.

I tried convincing her that it would be just fine to come watch the dressage show. Sure, she might stick out a little bit, but I didn't think anyone would be overtly appalled by her. That was the glitch, though. I didn't think anyone would be appalled. I couldn't guarantee it. Most trainers I knew-- in any discipline-- stuck with the same general appearance and mannerisms, and she was well outside the norm. But that's the funny thing. Everyone knows that horse trainers are an odd lot of folks. They're folks with unorthodox social graces, obtuse opinions, highly independent. A little rough around the edges. So, why then, do they all try to look the same? Who are they kidding with that tidy appearance?

Growing up, I knew a trainer around New England who specialized in breaking young, wild, or dangerous horses. Rick didn't work with good equine citizens; he only wanted the scary ones. Nobody could rival his skill with them. In 60 days, he consistently transformed unruly beasts into steadfast, reliable mounts. Yet, strangely, he lacked the number of clients his skills should have garnered for him. And that's because Rick was a bit-- how to say this?-- strange.

Every year in January, he traveled for two months to Florida for what he called "alligator wrestling season." We never confirmed if alligator wrestling is an official sport down South, much less if there's an organized season. But Rick went down there every year to tangle with the life-threatening reptiles and returned each spring with a few bruises and scrapes on his shoulders. He then spent the next eight months telling and re-telling tales of his heroics from those two months. Peoples' responses to him varied. Some bored of hearing the stories. Many thought he was making things up. Most, though, thought he was just plain odd. Very odd. This tended to repel would-be clients, regardless of his skill with equines.

I pondered this last week-- on the topic of competence, that is. Why would a person's appearance have any correlation to his or her competence? And how did we in the horse world make this tie? A former client of mine turned down my referral of a colleague due to the fact, she said, that she'd seen him wearing a "Gay Pride San Francisco 1999" t-shirt once. Huh? Would that somehow affect his ability to train her horse? I asked. She paused a long time trying to dissect the question. Then she replied that, yes, well she supposed the t-shirt made him seem very 'non-horseman like.' In other words, he lacked the proper trappings-- leather gloves, collared shirt, pressed breeches.

In the end, my Western trainer friend with all the tattoos did not come to the dressage show. And, truthfully, I had to admit it was for the best. Setting aside my idealism, I conceded that she was right. Her lip tattoo really would stick out in this sea of women in designer wear and straw hats. And the five-inch swirling knife blade on her upper arm? It wouldn't only be distasteful to this crowd; it would be plain startling.
Nevertheless, my idealism still rears its head sometimes, like when I'm reading Dressage Today magazine. I'm convinced that one day, rather than the photos giving an impression that we all shop at the same store, we'll see pictures of horsemen of all colors and backgrounds. Just think about it. How cool would it be to compete for a dressage judge with a mohawk? Or how about one who alleges to wrestle alligators in the off season?

Move Over, Hank Williams

2009-06-01T07:06:00.000-07:00

This might negate any chances I have of being hip, but let me confess that I love country music. It’s a secret indulgence of mine, warming me from top to bottom and soothing me no matter if my mood is up or down.

I’ve kept this secret because nobody else on the planet seems to like Country anymore, even horse people. And that baffles me, because where I grew up, horse folks were the only ones who actually did like country music. Nowadays, every horse person I know turns the dial when Randy Travis or Waylon Jennings comes on a radio. If cowboys of all people don’t listen to Country, then who does? Besides me, of course.

I’m worried that Country is going to disappear and this bums me out.

Maybe the problem is that we’ve become too urban, so tunes about ridiculously simple things just don’t pull any weight now. Who relates anymore to twangy songs about dogs or yodels praising pick-up trucks? A whiney guitar and a ditty about old men sitting around talking about the weather just don’t move people.

Fortunately for now, though, Country radio stations continue to exist. I can still hear Dolly Parton sing about her coat of many colors or Johnny Cash croon the Folsom Prison blues. For me, these melodies are somewhat synonymous with life with horses. Much of this has to do with the hole-in-the-wall Country station in my off-the-beaten-path childhood town in Vermont. Back before things like automated programming or satellite radio, this tiny station—WCVR—ran from a four-room clapboard shack, manned round the clock by deejays that were employable for no other capacity than what WCVR required of them: drink lots of stale coffee and burble into the microphone.

In the early days of getting our farm operating, my mother sold ads part-time for WCVR. Her ‘colleagues’ included one drunk and one parolee. She sometimes brought us along with her and let us peruse the stacks of tunes while she hawked air time to livestock feed companies, lumber yards, and tractor dealerships. All these establishments, the backbone of any rural economy, piped WCVR into their shops.

This meant that anyone with livestock had a steady daily diet of Country music. No matter what errands you ran, you would hear Hank Williams, guaranteed. Then, if you happened to be a single guy, you’d inevitably develop a crush on the afternoon deejay, “Rena,” and keep all your radios (truck, home, barn) tuned to WCVR so you didn’t miss an instant of her sultry voice. Rena’s smooth on-air persona defied her real-life stats. In person, she was neither smooth nor sultry. Rena was an exceptionally large woman, prone to sleeping in her clothes and forgetting to wash her hair. She told jokes without punch lines and then cackled and snorted at her own humor, sometimes stopping mid-joke to pop zits on her cheek. But if you only knew her on-air voice, you’d assume Rena was a real sex kitten. Thus the dozens of stalkers sending flowers to WCVR.

Then there was “Wild Willy,” the deejay that took over from 6pm to midnight, and gave painstaking monologues about his latest heartaches. Wild Willy refused to play “new school” Country and held instead to a playlist of strictly “old school” music, though no one else could tell the difference. Crooning, swaggering vocals all sounded the same to us.

We baled hay to Country, fed and trained horses to it. Like all farm families, our lives unfolded to a soundtrack of Country music. But now, apparently, the horse world has shucked off some of the attributes that always made it less cool than normal society (things like canvas clothes, chapped hands, maintenance-free haircuts—to name just a few).

Tunes about dogs and blue jeans and the weather have disappeared. It’s not that they’ve been replaced by anything. It’s more a matter of the horse world becoming more… well, maybe sophisticated is the right word. Nowadays, folks are busy with ipods and cell phones, email and digital cameras. There’s no room for a twangy soundtrack in the background of one’s life. Instead, we’re more modern now and arguably more hip. Minus me, of course, because I’ve replaced WCVR with a station here in California at 95.5 on the FM dial that plays old school and new school, whatever that means.

Idiotic Idioms

2009-05-20T09:49:00.000-07:00

I've been kicking around a couple of common phrases from the English language lately wondering just what deceptive fool created them in the first place. You know when something gets repeated so many times that we start taking its literal meaning for granted? If it ever had a literal meaning, that is.

Let's start with the meaningless phrase "healthy as a horse."

In my everyday wanderings, I hear folks say that someone is "healthy as a horse" if he is, for instance, running marathons at 85 years old and has never suffered an ailment, prolonged sickness, or injury. In fact, the specimen in question is so genetically superior that in seven and a half decades of life, he's never experienced even the most minor upset like indigestion, fatigue, toothache, or hair loss. And so, therefore, he is "healthy as a horse," right?

Nothing could be further from the truth. To be precise, if this gentleman were in fact "healthy as a horse," he would have been lucky to live to his tenth birthday without a major medical procedure, never mind his 85th. By now, he would have racked up a retirement's worth of medical bills and expensive nutritional supplements. He would become perilously ill from a fly bite or minor scrape on his leg, or he'd mysteriously develop gastric distress after eating his routine meal of 20 years.

Anyone with horses knows what I'm getting at. Horses are the most fragile animals I've encountered, susceptible to bizarre fevers and split-second injuries. They can be in fine health one moment and then in a welted rash the next. Or have an unexplainable swelling. Or a foot abscess. Or any number of debilitating anomalies which will empty a horse owner's bank account from vet bills quicker than a stock market crash.

Just last week I went to the barn on Monday to ride my horse who was bright-eyed and energetic as usual. We had a very pleasant ride, after which I washed him off and let him graze for a while in the sun, all the while pondering contentedly how wonderful life with horses was. On Tuesday, I went back out to the barn to ride again. And there stood my horse with a fever, three legs ballooned to the size of elephant limbs, and really gross edema pockets all over his body. What? I backed away, stupefied. What on earth could have happened to transform him overnight into... this?

The usual scenario played out. A vet was called. My horse was treated with every injection medicine available. A diagnosis formed loosely: "Hmm...not really sure what it is. Could have been caused by a tick bite... or an allergy... or who knows. Sometimes this stuff just happens. Call when you need more antibiotics." And that, dear reader, is how my bank account wound its way closer to $0.

I spent the last 10 days driving 40 minutes twice a day to the stable to administer drugs and check on my guy. He is fine now. Totally fine, in fact, and back to his normal healthy self. Who knows what caused his episode last week. Must have been a fly bite... or an allergy... or something. One thing's for sure, though. After writing out all those checks to my vet, I wanted to punch the lights out of whoever invented that idiom "healthy as a horse." I would have blurted out, in lunatic fashion, "oh yeah? healthy as a horse? You call this the epitome of health?-- a creature that can just fall to pieces overnight, possibly from some innocent wildflower blooming?" I think "healthy as an octegenarian" might be far more accurate. I intend to start using that phrase in fact.

My animosity over the idiom has settled since last week. I'm no longer screaming it-- 'healthy as a horse?!-- out my car window, anyway. Instead, my mood has turned more reflective, which accounts for my study of these horse-related phrases.

"Horsepower" is another one that mystifies me at the moment. At first, it seems to make sense. I mean, sure, a lawn mower could be called 'six horsepower' if it pushed itself along with the strength of six horses in full motion. But this makes the assumption that there is a basic unchanging standard for an ordinary horse's power output. As a horse trainer, let me assure you that this is not the case.

How do lawn mower manufacturers, for instance, account for times when horses just aint putting out any power? Like when a mare comes into heat and flat-out refuses to do anything for three days? Would she be counted as a 'fussy horsepower' during that period? Or then there's the stall bound horse recovering from a strained tendon that needs to be confined for three months. Is he counted temporarily as 'no horsepower?' Although maybe his tally gets cancelled out by the feisty Arabian who tears around the arena, tail arched over his back, and bucks off his rider every day. Perhaps he gets counted as 'one horsepower with spunk to spare?'

You can see how this Horsepower term gets vague. A dozen ornery Shetland ponies will not produce the same output as a dozen steadfast draft horses. And a dozen mares will simply never give a consistent output of agreeable, hormone-free, activity from week to week.

So who came up with this term in the first place? Definitely a non-horse person, that's who. Most likely, an enterprising salesman in a machine shop many moons ago looked out his window and came up with a genius marketing plan. No doubt he looked out at a team of harness horses clip-clopping its way down the street, lean and muscled and perfectly behaved. Such industrious animals, he probably thought to himself and then pondered how many more engines or motors or machine-like things he could sell if he aligned them with man's good friend, the noble Equine. And, thus, he began equating the capability of his motors and engines with the clip-clopping harness horses he'd seen. A common motorized something-or-other now became a "three horsepower" item. Consumers, therefore, now had all the muscle and brawn of a few horses but without the hay consumption and pooping. Perfect!

Today, I hope most consumers realize how defectively 'horsepower' defines what it purports to. For instance, I hope mega-billionaires realize when they rev up their 200 horsepower sports car engines that if, in reality, 200 equines stood at the ready in their driveways, only about ten of them would produce any power. The other 190 would be spooking, grazing, mating, or napping. How's that, for horsepower?

Alternative Universe

2009-05-13T06:14:00.001-07:00

Today, our lives have adopted such a blurring pace that folks now outsource parts of their lives or just neglect them altogether. And horse owners are certainly not immune from this acceleration. But fortunately we have a quick remedy for these times where even reminders to brush our hair need to be written on a list, lest we forget. The local feed and tack store offers an injection of solace and simpler times unavailable to our non-horse counter-parts. I like to think of it as yes, a place that drains my bank account, but also a mental oasis.

See, here's the profundity of feed stores: time stands still there. Just last week, I found myself fiddling with a multi-tiered chicken feeder one moment and then looking at squishy bottles to feed baby calves the next. Everything I fondled seemed devoid of any relevance to our modern times. It was grand! I inhaled deeply the old-fashioned smell combining oats, rubber footwear, and caged Angora rabbits in a nearby corner. I recollected moments with the exact same ingredients in various times and feed stores throughout my life, at 6 years old, 12, 15, in my 20s. Nothing ever changes in these places. Nothing. Being inside a tack and feed store is so delightfully timeless and technologically deficient that a person can actually forget about cell phones, text messages, day planners.

In fact, if a person were to spend an abundance of time in these wonderlands, her bonds with modern day reality would loosen pretty swiftly. Spending all that time surrounded by hand-held scythes, garden seeds, and livestock troughs can skew someone's perception of which century we're in. From inside a feed store, you might easily assume everyone led a homesteading lifestyle, driving their horse and buggy to market and raising hogs at home. You'd think that everyone in your mostly urban surroundings knew what to do with the oddities I played with last week: four types of chicken scratch, a sleek magnet for pulling nails from cows' bellies, bags of sodium chloride, seed potatoes.

It's definitely not your average retail browsing experience, though feed stores are predictable and that's what comforts me. Ironically like McDonald's and Starbucks, every feed store in every town across America is nearly identical except for small differences in floor plans. They all seem to have a senile old cat curled up by the cash register, a quirky fellow (or gal) behind the counter who has lived in the same town a lifetime and knows every scrap of historical lore. They all have stacks of free agricultural magazines by the front door and fly catchers hanging from the ceiling. There's a guy out back who divides his time between loading sacks of grain into patrons' trucks and flirting with women in the bird seed aisle. His sidekick divides his time between loading hay bales and napping. Some of the store aisles will be laden with cans of brass polish and leather dye so old and dust-covered now that they qualify as antiques. And no feed stores I know follow normal business practices like sales, promotions, or customer appreciation days. Nope, they all just keep marching along to their own never-changing beat.

The feed store of my youth-- Braley's Feed in Randolph, Vermont-- was a high point for me when Dad took me along on Thursday mornings. During my decade of visiting Braley's, the scene inside remained unchanged. Braley himself, grandson of the original founder, wore a long sleeve white thermal shirt under denim overalls no matter the season. He always lingered near the front of the store, flanked by four or five local farmers that came in every morning around 7am for the hot coffee and fresh glazed donuts that Braley set out between the Farmer's Almanac stacks and display rack of gardening gloves. Their conversation lasted the duration of a glazed donut for each, or approximately enough time to comment on the weather, their hay crop, and the maple sap flow. Extra agenda items included the idiocy of members of the local select board.

Initially, I loved Braley's because of the glazed donuts. Then, over the years, I began to savor the scene. The brown braided rug by the front door occupied by a three-legged black Labrador, the way Braley wrote out receipts with pencil and paper even long after the invention of computers, the cluster of farmers or wanna-be farmers leaning against his counter with a cup of hot coffee and no other place in the world to be at that moment. The lazy conversation and Braley's opinion (he had one for everything) about the best type of salt minerals for livestock. The boxes of peeping fuzz balls in the spring that would grow into chickens by autumn. As I grew up and changed, Braley's remained the same, which in time endeared the place to me. It somehow made the store more precious and trustworthy to me in a world quickly becoming fleeting, changing, or deceptive. Braley's is in fact still operating in Randolph, Vermont in the same location, and probably with the same handwritten paper receipts, although it's a younger generation of Braley now writing them with pencil.

Last week, after spending more time than I realized in the feed store and pondering the purchase of nostalgic items I didn't really need like little cans of Bag Balm, I wandered slowly out to my car. A very busy day lurked ahead of me and, yes, I should have been moving at a franctic pace. Instead, though, I meandered. I clung to the slow rhythms of our local feed store here and thought about finding uses for a hand-held scythe. A noise startled me once I got back in my car. My cell phone rang from the passenger seat and due to my temporary time warp, I wondered aloud "What the heck is that thing?"

A Sport Without Underdogs

2009-04-28T08:59:00.000-07:00

Growing up, I loved to watch Olympic coverage on T.V., especially the track and field events where sometimes a 'nobody' from a little known country might sprint out of obscurity on her own two feet and topple a field of preferred athletes. I savored these come-from-behind scenarios, and cherished them more if the runner had overcome major life challenges to get there. You know, like poverty or broken limbs or genocide, that sort of stuff.

So much thrill and excitement followed these races. Sports announcers went wild into their microphones, newspapers clamored for the story, television news would broadcast the footage over and over in slow motion. And in mere seconds, a single moment in sports was carved in history. A previously unknown athlete with no Nike sponsorships or other endorsements had written her ticket to the top of her sport. I remember walking away from the television with a warm glow of inspiration inside my chest as if I, too, could someday blast out of a rural town in Vermont into the history books.

It's curious now to find myself in the world of dressage-- a sport with no underdogs. During primetime coverage of this past month's dressage World Cup in Las Vegas, I reflected on how anti-climactic these big events can be when there are positively no come-from-behind moments in the sport, or unlikely candidates competing alongside the 'big names'. I mean, who has ever seen a Welsh Cob at the Olympics? Or a rider from Belarus on the medal podium? When has a Bashkir Curly horse ever shown up in a Grand Prix test? Now, that would be cool.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not denouncing modern Grand Prix dressage competitors who have worked long and hard to claim their accomplishments. I'm just saying that if every now and then a Shetland pony actually ended up on the winner's podium, dressage competitions would be a lot more... well, exciting. We'd get announcers yelping into their microphones rather than droning in hushed librarian-like tones. We'd have spectators showing up in dozens, wondering which underdog might make a run on the first place ribbon-- the Appaloosa, the Arabian cross, or the Fjord pony. We'd finally get some news coverage and little boys and girls saying they wanted to grow up to be dressage riders. Wouldn't this be different? If nothing else, it would definitely change the landscape of modern competitions.

As is, the only time I find myself saying "Holy cow! How about that?" is while watching an upper level stallion blow up in the warm-up arena, clearing out other horses and riders like bowling pins, rather than when an unlikely candidate turns in an impressive performance and WINS. The only 'excitement' or unpredictability comes when high winds pick up and horses start losing their marbles. The only spectators that come to endure the hermetic silence at dressage venues are family members who have been threatened/cajoled/arm-twisted to be there. Wouldn't it be refreshing to have them come willingly because there were some storylines to follow (like the Chincoteague pony that used to live in the wild and is now going head to head with the top-ranked dressage horse/rider in this country?)

By its nature, dressage is a sport for all. It was developed to improve the training and performance of any horse, regardless of breed, talent, or Olympic potential. And for that reason, riders of all abilities and financial means undertake it as a hobby in this country, many of them with lofty competitive aims. The caveat, though, is that in theory a horse need not have Olympic potential to participate in dressage. When it actually comes to the Olympics or World Cup, though, you darn better get the right horse. I might be unpopular for saying it, but in dressage, someone who rides a $10,000 Welsh-Arab cross is very simply never going to pull off a feat like the relatively unknown runner Wilma Rudolph in the 1960 Rome Olympics, sprinting on a sprained ankle to become the first American woman to win 3 gold medals in a single Olympics. Rudolph had overcome a premature birth, polio, scarlet fever, whooping cough, and measles.

During last summer's Olympics, I watched with glee as a 16-year old member of the Brazilian dressage team competed aboard her plump Lusitano stallion-- a total oddball for such levels of this sport. Maybe I hoped for the equestrian version of Rudolph. Luiza Tavares de Almeida performed nearly flawlessly. I held my breath, sort of like you would for a girl of modest means from one of those Balkan countries doing her floor routine in gymnastics. The Brazilian gal turned in an incredible ride, her perfectly obedient steed huffing and puffing his way through the test. I couldn't wait to see her score, hoping she'd make the cut for final rounds.

It was one of the lowest scores I've ever seen in an Olympics. And, see, that's my point. How exciting would it have been if this gal stood a real chance of scoring well and getting into the top ranks. How many dressage announcers would have jumped out of their chairs? Darn it, dressage might have even made it into mainstream news for a moment or two. Other riders with plump unfavored breeds of horses might show up at competitions and that would be... well, fun.

Ever since my 8th grade English report on Wilma Rudolph, I've always had a picture of her with me, either taped to a wall or close at hand someplace. Strategically squinting my eyes regarding reality, I just can't let go of this notion that sports should be a place for everyone. Dressage included. Maybe one day in my lifetime, things will change drastically and our sport, too, will suddenly have underdogs! And story lines! And hype from sports announcers! Just to be prepared, I'm in the market for an Olympic caliber Chincoteague-Bashkir Curly cross. One with really bizarre markings would be preferred. And one that can do an excellent victory lap

Voluntarily Homeless

2009-04-17T15:43:00.000-07:00

It's officially Spring, which for many of us signals the start of good riding weather and competition season. For others, though, it marks an annual period of voluntary homelessness, punctuated by events like sleeping in one's automobile, skipping showers, and eating whatever can be scavenged in a barn. I'm of course referring to the most selfless group in the horse industry: breeders.

During two months every spring, this segment of the population quite simply stops leading normal lives. Every moment-- literally every one-- is spent waiting for a new baby horse-- slimy, delicate, and hopefully healthy. Any number of misfortunes can strike in those first few hours of life, a fact about which breeders hold their breath starting in February every year. Sleeping in their cars or the barn aisle begins soon afterwards. Skipping meals and all social interaction with fellow humans follows. Friendships are put on hold, household obligations suspended, national news ignored.

Last week, I noted that an ordinarily reliable client of mine had failed to pay her bill for three weeks. Since this was unusual behavior for her, I called to see if maybe she'd fallen ill or had a family emergency. She answered the phone gravelly voiced and sounding confused, as if her ringing telephone perplexed her. After gaining some bearings, she cleared her throat several times (most likely from hay chaff and sawdust) and apologized profusely. What day was it, anyway, she asked? Had the first of this month already passed?

Yes, about 20 days ago, I pointed out.

Oh. Well, then was it still the month of April? Or did we somehow skip right over into May?

No, still April, I said. But well past time for a paycheck not only to me but probably other folks, too, like landlord, tax guy, etc.

Oh. Oh dear, she replied. She must have lost track of time, she explained, sounding slightly less confused now. Without hesitation, she told me she'd been sleeping on a hay bale outside her pregnant mare's stall, wearing more or less the same pair of clothes for weeks now. In fact, she couldn't remember her last meal or the last time she'd spoken with a real human being besides her veterinarian.

The good news, though? Her mare gave birth to an adorable brown filly yesterday morning. And the little girl looked healthy so far. This meant that in another 24 hours, my client could probably comfortably move back into her house, start picking hay from her hair, and maybe eat something other than carrot chunks and oat cookies. Normal life could start back up and my check would be in the mail pronto.

I chuckled to myself, knowing what "life as normal" consists of for horse breeders immediately following a new baby. It usually starts with the proud breeder referencing herself in the company of friends as a "grandma" and asking every one's opinion about potential names. I could picture my client at the supermarket querying the checkout clerk "What do you think of the name Maestoso? Or should I save that one until I get a boy next year?"

The clerk, oblivious to what on earth she's talking about will stare back at her blankly, waiting for an explanation beyond the bits of hay stuck in her hair. Taking this as an opportunity to show off baby pictures, my client will quick-draw her digital camera from her hip and show the clerk a slideshow of a knobbly kneed creature teetering next to its four-legged mother. She will follow the picture show with descriptions of umbilical, colostrum, and nursing. Other patrons at the supermarket who assumed this beaming woman was talking about her own newborn will suddenly wonder how come she has a camera with her but no baby? Where's the baby? Now uncomfortable, they will start to shift away from her or sprint out to her car to see where she's left the newborn.

Poor souls, they've just never met a horse breeder. They've probably also never met anyone who would willingly exchange a warm bed for a scratchy hay bale.

For Sale: Overpriced, High-Strung, and Mostly Lame

2009-04-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this during the worst economic downturn most Americans have ever witnessed, which I decided to face head-on by sprawling on the couch and flipping through horse magazines while ignoring radio, news, and gloomy neighborly forecasts about the crisis.

I knew equine media would provide me the obscurity I sought, because the horse world excels at distancing itself from fiscal norms and realities. So, yes, while unemployment rates in the U.S. surge higher day to day, banks collapse, and businesses capsize, the prices for horses are... going up. In a market where--logically-- sale prices should be shockingly low, there is not a deal to be had. If I relied on the equine industry for my bearings, I would be led to believe we're actually in financially lush times where money is spilling in abundance from Americans' pockets.

This is nothing new, though. The horse sales market is one that makes zero sense. It follows no such thing as trends, measurable gains or losses, logic, or financial cycles. Above all, it does not make sense and likely never will. In fact, I'm recounting the number of my mid-30 year old students that have decided at some point to buy a horse. Each one has set out on his or her shopping spree with specific requirements such as wanting only a male horse, 10 years old, extensive training, black in color, priced around $5,500. A week later, every one of them has returned with a three-year old female possessing no training (unless you count the four times it bucked off its current trainer) with a $12,000 price tag. When I point out that the new acquisition is neither rideable nor sane and then query about the logic behind its purchase, my client can only stammer: " I can't explain, except as soon as I looked in her face, I knew she was my horse. She chose me."

Um, Okay.

This horse, which will turn out untrainable, will cost the proud owner roughly $50,000 in board fees over the next ten years. And here's the thing: unlike real estate and vintage cars, horse's don't gain value. The new-- and, now, poor-- owner will eventually sell this horse for $1,200. Anyone with an ounce of financial savvy will be shaking her head by now. But the horse world does what it does, which means it keeps stumbling along in its illogical and nonsensical ways, daring somebody, anybody, to figure it out.

For sellers, this is good news because it allows them during times like this to charge staggering sums for four-legged steeds without talent, brains, or beauty. Last week, I was contemplating a photo of a horse for sale that, all kidding aside, had such a dysfunctional body that I couldn't tell for a moment which was the front end and which was the back. Yikes. The cost for this gem? $9,500. The seller had indicated the price was "a steal" in this bad economy. I held off calling her to suggest she donate the horse to the petting zoo because it would never be capable of a riding career.

At the end of the day, though, it will be her and not me laughing to the bank. This seller has obviously operated for a while in this bizarre horse economy. She knows how it works. One day, her phone will ring and the caller will say he's looking for a bay colored, 16-hand Anglo-Arabian with competition experience, but within a week that same caller will be loading her midget 14-hand unregistered and untrained brown horse into his trailer with a money order payable for the full amount.

A year later, the fellow will probably return the horse to her, explaining that it just didn't work out for him. He will swallow the $9,500 price he paid for the horse, an additional $4,000 in board fees, and $1,300 in vet and farrier costs. Then, odds favor him repeating the whole scenario within six months-- purchasing an unsuitable horse for $9,000 or more, dumping time and money into him, and then either giving him away for free or re-selling him for $1,500. How's that for a return on investment?

Meanwhile, the seller of the original untrained unattractive brown horse I saw last week will gladly accept the cost-free return of her horse, because soon her phone will ring again and she will sell the horse for $10,500 this time around (because he now has a year of training, compliments of the fellow who returned him). It ends up being a sweet deal. She gets to profit twice on the unattractive horse with no talent and escapes paying a whole year of his feed and upkeep expenses. It's ingenious in an unexplainable way. Really, automobile dealers could learn a thing or two from the horse world. If it were measurable or made any sense, that is.

For anyone who's genuinely downtrodden about this economic downturn, I'd like to offer up my couch and this pile of horse magazines as therapy. A few minutes immersed in horse economics will leave you feeling more upbeat or at least so perplexed that you'll forget your woes. By the way, I know of a horse with relatively no talent for sale. Any takers?

The Unscheduled Dismount

2009-04-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

Interestingly, the average riding lesson never delves into the skills necessary for a maneuver that faces nearly every equestrian at some point: the emergency dismount. Sometimes also called the unscheduled dismount, this rapid exit from a horse's back includes a moment of urgency, a little terror, and a brief heroic belief in one's superhuman capabilities. In a nutshell, it involves voluntarily flinging yourself off the back of your horse-- most often at high speeds-- onto the hard ground.

Personal preferences determine whether the rider in question opts to tuck and roll, lands on her feet, or keeps hold of the reins. After her first emergency dismount, a rider tends to bring her own individual style to the maneuver. A trademark, if you will. And from then on, this tumultuous parting of company from one's mount becomes a bragging right. It's a way of holding onto our human integrity, maintaining a sense of control. It's our mortal way of believing that, in the face of no possible good outcome, we made an optimal choice to rectify a bad scene. Yes, instead of going down with the ship, we bailed out early. And therefore that proves our intelligence.

Style aside, though, the emergency dismount is never a good thing. It's generally accompanied by life-ending reflections or other "this is how I'm going to die?" sorts of thoughts. And, let's face it: most riders really intend to stay mounted once they get on board every day. Who, after all, wouldn't prefer to be jogging around rhythmically on her horse rather than tucked into a tight ball flying through the air ready for impact with the ground?

For obvious reasons, the emergency dismount is a major bummer. Not only does it bang you up but it bruises your ego, too. When your barn mates ask how your ride went, you hate to answer "Well, things didn't go quite as planned..." In my lifetime around horse people, though, I've observed that after an initial few hours of feeling embarrassed and battered, riders use the mishap to explore the reaches of metaphor. Put simply, they start bragging. In fact, they end up bragging about the unscheduled dismount more than they would about a perfectly flawless ride.

It starts innocently enough with the rider admitting to his or her coach that, after an unexplained something or other spooked her horse, she decided to bail off. Then later she tells the same story to her friend, except embellishes it with a colorful detail like this: "At first, I hit the ground running, but then I figured I'd tuck and roll, because why not? Well, after the roll, I was right back up on my feet."

Later that afternoon, she retells the story to a group of fellow riders, adding a little more flare: "After somersaulting through the air, I ended up on the other side of the arena fence, but I broad-jumped back into the arena, ran alongside my horse, grabbed his reins..."

By the time, the story reaches its final version, the rider performed a stunt that involved hitting the ground and then somersaulting under the horse's galloping hooves, then she sprung back up on her feet and swung her leg up (while sprinting at Olympic speeds, mind you) and did a flying re-mount onto her horse. So, basically, she never dismounted in the first place. Not only was there less shame in this version of the day's happenings because it maintains the guise of control but it was so grossly exaggerated that her friends thought Hollywood would be calling any second for stunt training. In sum, it was far more exciting-- and in some ways, fruitful-- than just another day in the arena.

Admittedly, I've spun my own fanciful tales about emergency dismounts. I've added a fictional somersault here and there, exaggerated the speeds of the occurrence, etc. I mean, it's just a lot better than saying Things got bad and I jumped off. So, now as a trainer, I know to believe only a fraction of what follows when a student starts out "Well, things didn't go quite as planned..." And for this reason, I think I'll petition the American Riding Instructors' Association to develop standard operating procedures for these emergency dismount maneuvers. I'm envisioning something like this: Step 1.) Admit things are getting bad quickly, Step 2.) Recognize that you are neither John Wayne, a circus trainer, nor a rodeo rider, Step 3.) Say a Hail Mary and jump! Forget about gymnastic routines, cartwheels, or other heroics.

Whoa

2009-03-16T18:08:00.000-07:00

Non-horse people naively assume that "whoa" is one of the most important words in a horse person's vocabulary. In reality, "whoa" has little significance in the horse world. Unfortunately, the word's lack of directive power is almost comical. It's as if horse people use it just to see what might happen.

I've seen terrified veterinary assistants tethered to the end of a chain shank holding a snorting, leaping stallion uttering "whoa" incessantly in barely audible tones with blank stares and obviously zero conviction that "whoa" is actually going to STOP the menacing beast from his antics. Likewise, I've seen owners trying to groom their antsy, dancing horses at a tie post, chasing the steeds around in circles with their brushes and muttering 'whoa,' 'whoa,' 'whoa.' Now, if they intended that word to actually mean something, they'd be darn sure to get a response when they said it, rather than continuing to chase their four-legged friends around to brush mud off their hocks.

I've lived a long time in the horse world and mostly what I've seen is that the word 'whoa' is used with zero purpose other than to fill silent air and give our busy human minds something to work over and repeat incessantly. Here's a perfect example. We've all witnessed moments at a barn where something really awful is happening, like a horse starts panicking while in the trailer or rearing on wet slippery concrete, etc. And how do their humans react? By screaming-- and I do mean screaming-- WHOA! at decibels that could rupture ear drums. Now why, I ask you, would a panicking and terrified animal suddenly calm down by being hollered at, especially by a word that he has been trained to ignore? Why would a whole bunch of yelling and shrieking settle the horse down? Well, obviously it doesn't. Yet, we horse people keep doing it. It proves that we have no intention that 'whoa' is going to do anything, but it makes our frantic minds feel better. And that's what counts, right?

I've ridden frequently in Portugal over the past 10 years and the horses there are completely bombproof... except for Guinea hens. One year, the riding school's neighbor bought a flock of those clucking hens and deposited them across the arena fence. When riding past that particular spot in the arena, our normally stalwart stallions bolted at the speed of light. It didn't matter how skilled a rider you were. The sheer speed alone ejected you from your seat and you could only hope to hang onto the stallion's mane until he ran out of oxygen. Of course, the flurry of bolting, charging stallions only excited the Guinea hens more, which elevated their clucking, which in turn accelerated our respective runaways.

Meanwhile, my dear trainer stood in the center of the arena quietly telling our group "whoa. whoa, Ladies." He said it so unassumingly, as if it were our ideas to have a white-knuckled ride and we needed a reminder to rein things back in. Our cries for help, our cursing at the stallions and the hens-- it all passed him by. Whoa.

Those years of Portuguese horses and clucking Guinea really confirmed for me how little punch the word "whoa" packs. So, you might say that like most riders, I had become programmed to say whoa only when I expected positively nothing to happen.

Then one night I was riding my buddie Mark's young stallion. I don't recall how the circumstances aligned for me to be in the dark arena at 9pm with about a dozen 4-H kids but there I was. The air was chilly, Mark's horse was frisky, and children on ponies darted around like air hockey pieces. I was just thinking to myself "This can't get any worse..." when the young stallion under me shook his head so vigorously that his bridle flew off. Now I sat holding reins attached to nothing. In its launch, the bridle flew towards the ground and the bit smacked my horse's knee hard, which startled him. So, he started running. I of course pulled on the reins out of habit, but the bridle was now dragging along in the sand next to me. Likely mystified by his sudden lack of restraint, the young horse kept running and 4-h children scattered.

I froze in the saddle, then quickly realized I'd need to be more proactive. "What should I DO?" I yelled over to Mark who casually watched the scene without concern. He gave me a look that confirmed I had asked the stupidest question in history. In his slow Texan drawl, he said "Well, tell him whoa."

I, in turn, thought this reply was the stupidest one in history. Why say "whoa"-- a tactic proven NOT to stop a bolting stallion? Well, apparently, 'whoa' actually means something in the Western world Mark hails from. Convinced that once again nothing would happen, I whispered "um...whoa?"

Upon hearing my feeble mutter, that young stallion screeched on the brakes so rapidly that I flew onto his neck, toppled over his shoulder, and landed on the ground beside him. He stood like a statue while I composed myself and even while kids on ponies crashed into his backside. So this is what WHOA looked like! The word did mean something! Granted, I've decided since then that "whoa" is like a Holy Grail and only precious few know its real identity.

Step-by-Step... Yeah, Right!

2009-03-03T07:51:00.000-08:00

I'm not trying to shoot myself in the foot here, since I am after all someone who writes books about training horses. However, I flipped open a catalogue yesterday and was dumbfounded by the number of books, DVDs, manuals, workbooks, and other materials on the market allegedly to help people train their own horses and to ride better.

By page 40 of this catalogue with products promising results, I thought to myself that either horse people need things explained to them in a thousand different formats OR we trainers must have a compulsive desire to write books even though we agree that nobody learns anything about horses from a book. My mentor, for one, gets really feisty about this topic. He spews and sputters and paces around in circles waving his arms, trying to make horse owners realize they need to learn things from their horses, not from a book.

I tend to agree with him, especially since training horses is a never-ending learning process. Even after a lifetime with them, old masters still something new every day from their steeds. However, I also have observed how blissfully full of hope most amateurs and riders are. No matter the frustrations and setbacks, regardless of the financial sacrifice and marriage turmoil, their hope never dies. They have a will to improve their skills and master tricky riding techniques. And where there's a will, there's a way, right?

This optimism must be what keeps those horse book catalogues in business. Despite the fact that the last five years' worth of equestrian magazine subscriptions haven't given a rider one morsel of tangible, measurable, useful information about working with her specific horse, she will keep renewing. Never mind that the last dozen training books purchased at a recent equine trade show was so confusing that she never got around to reading them. And those instructional DVDs about how to be a better rider in four weeks? Those were both boring AND confusing, so they're now collecting dust next to an old collection of Star Trek VHS tapes.

Yet the average horse owner still hopes that someday one of these books or DVDs or pod casts will give her just the information she's searching for. And that hour in the saddle every day will suddenly take on a new level of clarity and progress. So we trainers keep writing books and horse owners keep buying them.

We do have very good intentions in writing our books. We want to be useful and helpful and to give the average rider an "ah-hah!" moment. But the gritty truth is that each individual horse is SO darn different in nature, ability, and behavior that no matter how good a respective book might be, its message will never be 100 percent applicable too all horses. Thus, Jane Doe the average horse owner buys the book on-line because it has a groovy title or at a trade show because its author gave an inspirational demo and goes to the barn intending to follow its instructions line by line.

After perhaps the first chapter, she is very confused and frustrated. She has followed all the steps so far in, say, "Finding Your Inner Dressage Path" but now it's becoming clear that her Mustang-Belgian cross actually doesn't care too much for the counter canter exercises called for in Chapter 2. And if she can't get through Chapter 2, does she just skip ahead to Chapter 3 or 4? Confused, she picks another training book off her shelf to cross-reference and hopefully find an answer to her puzzlement. But this other book suggests a lot of lateral bending, which her horse only does well in one direction. So, should she do those lateral exercises in that one direction and then attempt the counter canter in that same direction?

Even more confused, she consults her magazine subscriptions and finds an article that sums things up this way: if she sits perfectly straight with proper weight in her seat bones, her horse will execute a nicely balanced counter canter all day long.

Later that day, with two books and multiple magazine articles splayed out on the arena fence, she sits perfectly and yet her horse still turns into a chomping, agitated beast when asked for a counter canter.

Huh. Now what to do?

At this point, she might consult her friend, who will confide that she is in the same quandary. The friend may suggest a few other books to contribute to further confusion, or she may simply throw up her hands and admit that she's given up on books and other such information. But to admit this is nearly sacrilegious in the horse world. To admit that you're no longer buying and trying to navigate your way through manuals intending to guide you to the Holy Grail of horsemanship is akin to admitting that you're flunking yourself out of the community. Surely, no amateur horseman can find his or her way along without the step-by-step manuals that actually only work in an imaginary time and place where everything goes according to plan. Surely, stumbling along on one's own cannot be as productive as getting mired in confusing instructional texts, can it? Not in an industry with so much hope, that's for sure.

Stumbling along on one's one is just that: stumbling. Amateurs' vibrant hope, however, is an invigorating spark that lures horse owners into continuing to try things they've already tried and proven not to work. Just because all they've met with so far is frustration and confusion, it doesn't mean one more book or DVD won't cure this streak, right? On this note, I highly recommend that everyone should purchase my forthcoming book about Equine Fitness in the fall of this year.

Horseplay

2009-03-02T15:01:00.000-08:00

My friend Carmen's adorable daughter Simone is, against all logic, horse-obsessed. I, too, suffered horse obsession as a child, but unlike Simone, I lived on a farm, so my craze seemed mostly normal. Simone, however, lives in a condominium in a high-density neighborhood in a populated metropolitan area. Neither her parents nor friends share her equine enthusiasm; it developed in her apparently out of the blue. This charming little blond-haired girl now has horse pajamas, pony coloring books, Breyer models, a wooden stable, horse-themed Valentine's cards and cookie cutters, etc. She is afflicted so severely that all the non-horse people around her can only scratch their heads.

To me, Simone proves a hypothesis from my trainer in Portugal. He said to me one day, "It's either in your blood or it's not." He meant it didn't matter what any person's financial situation, environmental influences, or anything else happened to be. If horses were "in your blood," you were fated to have an undying affection for them. Some folks might not actualize this fate until later in life, he pondered, while others seize on it immediately at birth. Simone appears to fall into the latter category, which warms my heart because so did I.

As a young child on our farm and surrounded by horses all day, I still wanted to play horse games at night, read horse books, or make horse drawings. I couldn't get enough. My elementary school teachers telephoned my parents on several occasions to express concern over my potential neurosis. Meanwhile, I submitted book reports about The Black Stallion, science projects about veterinary topics, history essays about ancient breeds, and I invented four-legged games at recess. My teachers panicked about this single-mindedness and told my parents to make some kind of intervention. As if they hadn't tried.

Indeed, they gave me Barbie dolls, bicycles, mini baking sets, and Lincoln Logs. But I only wanted horses, horses, and more horses. My parents had to give up and pray that I matured-- magically somehow-- into a well-rounded adult. And mostly I have. Or at least I trick myself into believing that. Then, moments like one last week rattle me out of that comfy daydream. I was chatting with Carmen on her couch when suddenly I noticed across the room a small stable filled with Breyer horse models. Childlike, I bolted off the couch mid-sentence (I believe we were discussing grown-up stuff like politics) and ran over to it. Simone joined my side instantly and I begged her to show me the little stable.

She obliged but only after her tiny hands showed me her "favorite" member of the barn, a thick-necked plastic draft horse. My favorite was the Appaloosa with splotches painted on his rump, although Simone didn't get around to asking me which one I liked best. She was excitedly relaying the details of her pretend farm to me, like the fact that all twelve of her horses were stallions. And the Palomino one didn't get along with the others. And that her horses had just gone into the stable for the night before I came over. "Uh-huh, uh-huh," I followed along, instantly a four- year- old again myself. Oooooh, my chest filled up with joy when I remembered my own Breyer stable and teeny weeny pasture fences and the endless hours of "playing horse." I was starting to feel like Simone and I were birds of a feather, never mind the nearly thirty years between us.

Then she offered to show me the 'rocking horse' that she'd received for Christmas, which I agreed to in a heartbeat. We skittered upstairs to her bedroom and within a moment, I gave thanks for the nearly 30 years between us. A lot has changed between the days of making up four-legged galloping games at recess and today. Namely, technology has intervened. Had I owned a rocking horse of the likes that Simone now possessed, I never would have stood a chance at being a well-rounded adult. In fact, I'm pretty sure I never would have left my bedroom.

Simone's "toy" horse is frighteningly lifelike. "Rosebud" stands as tall as a Shetland pony, is able to swish her tail and move her head and neck. She even chomps carrots and makes chewing noises. She is able to carry a grown adult on her back and when the rider swings her arm overhead and says "giddyup," the horse actually does. Its body starts herky-jerking and the fuzzy little technological beast makes clomp-clomp noises. When I pulled on the reins, it stopped.

whoa.

Wide-eyed, deeply envious, and truly speechless, I curried this almost-real horse's hair and assured Simone she was the luckiest girl on the planet. As for whether she stands a chance of ever "out-growing" her horse-obsession, I'd say there's no way. But I secretly hope she does because I've got a place in my house already picked out for Rosebud.

Murphy's Law

2009-02-17T15:51:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure who this guy "Murphy" was, but once upon a time he invented a law that applies to any average day in the horse world.

Murphy's Law goes like this: Whenever something totally random can occur and cause a minor (and expensive) crisis, it will. If you adhere to this Law with horses, you're all set. If on the other hand you forget it sometimes, you're guaranteed some gnarly headaches and emotional turmoil.

Consider the following points as both illustration and warning.

If you've secured your fencing to the level of perfection of an electrical engineer, your horse WILL still find a section to break through during the middle of the night, necessitating costly repairs to the now-very-broken fence and excessive vet bills to mend a now-gaping shoulder wound on your horse.
Even if you put your horse in a rubber foam padded stall, he will find SOMETHING on which to bang and bruise his leg and/or scrape his face. Again, costly vet bills are in order.
If your horse normally loads in the trailer quickly and easily, he or she will balk and refuse to do so on the one day you are scheduled to ride in an expensive clinic and are running late.
Your horse will only be stricken with colic or other life-threatening illness when you are on vacation or otherwise out of town.
After several months of having your farrier both return your phone calls and show up on time, he will revert to his former pattern of disappearing for long periods of time and not answering his phone.
The trainer that you like and trust who you've been working with for a little over a year will decide to move across the country.
Your horse will find a way to get his leg stuck in his hay feeder, no matter how inconveniently or high off the ground you place it.

You see, I'm a bit grumpy about this man Murphy and his Law and admittedly it's because I had a run-in with Murphy's Law last week.

I have a particularly feisty and opinionated mare in training at the moment that I have been preparing for some big competitions in the spring. As is often the case with mares, some days are a lot better than others. Some days she is an angel and other days she is a vixen. On the vixen days, I have a very tough time convincing her that MY way of doing things-- and not HER way-- is the best. It becomes a battle of wills and stamina. It becomes one alpha mare (me) trying to out-alpha the other. It has been this way for a few months. Some days go quite smoothly. Other days go the very opposite of smooth. All the while, I've been patiently (okay-- willfully) guiding her towards these competitions, hoping like hell that the vixen days get fewer and farther between.

And then a couple of weeks ago, aha! The little mare had a breakthrough of some kind. At last!For five days in a row, she performed beautifully. Her work ethic, her attention span, her willingness-- everything was lovely. I started to visualize success at these competitions. I called her owner with a glowing report. After workouts, I brushed her endlessly and whispered "see, my way of doing things aint so bad, huh?" We were becoming a little team, she and I. We were pretty darn ready for competitions (without suffering embarrassment). I let out a contented sigh.

Then last week I arrived at the barn and it looked like someone had swung a baseball bat into the mare's leg. A lump the size of a golf ball protruded from her right cannon bone. What? I poked and prodded it. The mare lurched back and in those two steps, showed me that she was dreadfully, horribly lame. Yes, my young training project had blown a splint. Right out of nowhere. And now those competitions that, a few days earlier, had seemed so positively do-able looked like the farthest away things in the world.

I did allow myself a brief pity party. I mean, could the timing have been any worse? My willful little mare had finally turned the corner in her training, we were coming down the homestretch. Then overnight we were sidelined completely. Damn Murphy! That stupid Law about random things! Why does it have to be so accurate?

Shorter, Smarter

2009-02-10T08:07:00.000-08:00

There's something about standing shorter than 15 hands that imbues members of the equine species with an attitude best suited for global rulers, bawdy cabaret performers, or criminals. Or all three. Ah yes, those feisty steeds we know and love as ponies.

Horseman's lore has long defined ponies as just plain ornery. But as a trainer, you tend to dismiss sweeping generalizations like this. How can one section of the equine population, each with completely different breeding and upbringings, share the same behaviors? Nah, it's just not plausible. We trainers like to believe that a horse's demeanor and attitude is the direct result of any handling and training he's had. All those stories about ponies bucking their riders off and galloping back to the barn, or ponies that turn from angels to stubborn beasts back to angels in the blink of an eye-- all these antics we trainers diagnose as simple training problems. Those particular sub-15 hand steeds have been allowed to do naughty things and therefore they continue to do so, we say.

Then along came Sally. Jet black, doe-eyed, and just 14 hands, this pot-bellied little Morgan mare strolled innocently into my training barn as a three-year old. She was the sweetest looking animal I'd laid eyes on. Or so I thought. She fixed me in her big-eyed gaze, sashayed her round rump around the stall and left me with the impression that I just scored a really easy training project. In hindsight, I can't stop laughing at the foolishness of my thinking.

I would estimate that for 80 percent of the time, Sally is pure delight. She is sweet, docile, pretty, mostly uncomplicated. Then there's that erratic 20 percent of the time when she is devilish, sneaky, and highly unpredictable. And as much as it pains me to admit this, no amount of good consistent training will ever change these facts. If Sally were taller than 15 hands, I might stand a chance. But she never will be. So, therefore I am forever at Sally's merciless whims.

There was one particularly memorable afternoon at Pebble Beach Dressage Show, a very high-pressured and classy competition, when 30 minutes before her scheduled class, Sally "colicked" in her stall. This is to say she buried herself in shavings, splayed out flat on her side, and could not be made to stand up. I got down in the dirt wearing my show jacket and boots trying to roll her up onto her knees at least, but the little pony laid out stiff as a board. Panicked, I called the vet and cancelled our class. Within about 60 seconds of my canceling the class, Sally hopped onto her feet, shook off her shavings, and batted her eyes at me. Had she been faking sickness? Nah, said my inner trainer voice, horses do not fake things.

When Sally's self-burial in shavings began happening at every competition we went to, I had to concede that the blasted doe-eyed mare was in fact out-smarting me. She was faking sickness in order to get out of this stupid thing called Dressage that she was being made to do, she let me know.

Sally sometimes goes months at a time behaving like the world's most perfect equine. She is so submissive and well-mannered that a complete novice could handle her no problem. And then one day, like today, half-way down the barn aisle she will stop dead in her tracks, grow roots, and refuse to move an inch further. She will become the world's most stubborn beast for a few sweaty moments as I cluck, pull, poke, and prod her forward to the cross-ties. Finally, when she budges, Sally blinks those big lashes of hers and looks at me as if to say "What was the problem?"

Our ride goes no better, though. She spooks at an imaginary something-or-other in the brush, which sends her tiny body squirting straight ahead at light speed bucking and snorting. When she regains her composure (amidst much yelling from me), she again stops dead in her tracks. Like she has grown roots into the ground. I kick. I tap with the whip. I scowl. This is a horse that I have competed all over California in all kinds of weather, noise, and disruption, sometimes competing in classes at 10pm, and yet here we are acting like she's never had a day of training in her life. She stands there flicking her ears, annoyed by my disturbance atop her back.

Finally, she obliges me and walks forward... and then swivels her neck around and grabs my stirrup in her mouth. Now we are cascading sideways towards the fence as a colleague of mine looks on in wonder. I know what she's thinking. After four years in training, horses just don't do these sorts of things.

Unfortunately, she had also last week witnessed a mishap when I was leading Sally to turnout. I marched along in my ever-alert and attentive trainer's way with Sally close at my heels. Seeing my fellow trainer, I nodded my chin briefly to say good morning, and in that nanosecond my eyes shifted their gaze, Sally struck. Like lightning, she darted sideways, yanking my arm nearly off my body. Once she had me off balance, she kept pulling. Her target: a patch of sweet spring grass 20 feet away. I stumbled and staggered, trying to yank her back into my control. But I soon found myself ankle-deep in a mud puddle and looked around for the quickest way out before I ruined my new Ariat paddock boots. Damn!

Now splattering mud in all directions, I was still yanking and growling at Miss Sally who had arrived at her destination and burrowed her face in grass (she avoided the mud puddle, by the way). "S-A-L-L-Y!!" I snarled as I tugged on her halter with a force that would dislodge a draft horse. But not a pony, obviously. She had again grown roots.

The other trainer abandoned any attempt at being polite. She now stared unabashedly at me. My face flushed with embarrassment. I knew how ridiculous the scene looked-- me , a trainer, getting dragged around like a novice child.

In that moment, I swallowed my pride and all my former beliefs in training, horsemanship, horse behavior, etc. I heard myself saying out loud what I once believed was just a cop-out for explaining behaviors that hadn't been properly addressed. Trust me, I have addressed ALL of Sally's behavior more than once.

"Ponies! You know, they just do the darnedest things," I mumbled to my colleague. "I mean, they're just plain ornery."

The Kiss

2009-01-28T07:30:00.000-08:00

I tend to think that all of us in the horse world are pretty similar even if we participate in different disciplines. Surely, we're birds of a feather and all that, regardless of the fact I ride English but you might ride Western, right?

Well, sometimes this rosy picture of oneness crumbles apart as I realize that there are indeed vast differences that accompany individuals from other disciplines. Last week, I bumped into this realization yet again while schooling a dressage horse in our arena while a Western lesson took place. The Western rider and I stayed out of each other's way no problem. But I couldn't help being distracted by her trainer's instructions for schooling her horse. To be polite, they sounded far too simple. Almost easy, in fact.

You see, in the dressage world, giving your horse a cue to do something (which happens at minimum every half-second), nearly requires a Graduate degree in Physics. For instance, a dressage trainer would tell you to make your horse canter like this:

"Half-halt-on-your-outside-rein-and-then-step lightly-into-your-inside stirrup-and-lift-your-ribcage-on-that-side-and-now-deepen-your-outside-sitting bone-and-draw-your-hips-forward-and-count 1,2,1,2-and-and give a squeeze-with-outside-leg-at-2."

Whew.

It's no wonder dressage riders carry around the stereotype of being too serious and slightly uptight. Constantly wrestling with that much data input and output would be enough to give someone an anxiety disorder. Interestingly, though, after a while we all get used to it. Until I observed the Western lesson, that is.

The Western trainer told her student to get her horse to pick up the canter by making a kissing noise. If you've ever hung around Western trainers, you'll notice quickly that they use a kissing sound for pretty much everything. Want your horse to step over a pole? Kiss to him. Want your horse to turn through a gait? Kiss. Pick up a right lead canter? Kiss. Left lead canter? Ditto.

Admittedly, when I first encountered this Kiss phenomenon a few years back, I struck an uppity high-brow dressage attitude. Where were the nuances of training and riding? I asked. How was a horse supposed to tell from one slurpy wet kiss whether he was supposed to a.)canter, b.)go backwards, or c.) get in a horse trailer? Where was the micro-managing and hair-splitting of signals that we dressage riders had perfected? Surely, no horse could rightly perform without this impressive library of cues such as when, where, and how often the rider should contract her right inner thigh. And yet there were all those Western horses doing all kinds of things with just the prompting of their riders' lips pressed together.

Huh?

I won't hide that my uppity attitude towards this Western riding came from a big dose of envy. Yes, my belief that the myriad of dressage cues ranked superior to Western training came from the simple fact that I had tried the Kiss... and failed miserably.

Several years ago, I was helping my lovable cowboy friend Mark compete some of his horses. I was doing very well with them except for one large problem: I couldn't make them canter. Despite my years and years of training and instruction all over the world, I could not make his horses canter even one stride. I used the most sophisticated signals that my butt and legs could muster and still nothing happened. Embarrassed, I asked Mark for help.

His horses only responded to a Kiss, he explained. A what? Were we talking about training horses here? Mark got a good chuckle that I'd not only never heard of such a thing but likely could not pull it off. A quick note: Mark's perception of New Englanders like myself is that we are, in his words, "frosty." That's his polite way of saying we're tight-lipped and rigid. I prefer to think we're simply reserved and cautious, but Mark had his own ideas, thus dubbing me the "Ice Princess," which I guess for a dressage trainer is pretty suitable.

After demonstrating several rounds of an appropriate Kiss, Mark told me to ride off on his handsome stallion and give it a try myself. Already deeply humbled that I, the well-heeled dressage trainer, was taking advice from someone with a Texas drawl in blue jeans, I was determined to nail this thing. I launched into a big ground-covering trot with his Arabian stallion, aimed for the corner where I wanted to canter, and then squeezed my lips together. And made a sound like spitting out a cherry pit. I tried again quickly and this time sounded like I was sucking food from my teeth. The horse kept trotting. I pursed, blew spit. We never cantered.

Mark told me if I were ever going to nail that Kiss, I'd need to be a whole lot less "frosty." That meant, of course, I needed to act like less of a dressage rider. Like not sitting stone-faced with a broomstick stuck down my jacket. Like not trying to cue his horses with one-hundred fidgety nuances of cues at once. Just relax a little... and Kiss. And don't Kiss with that tight-lipped uptight look on your face, he said in his slow drawl. Maybe practice at home with a mirror like a teenager, he smirked, or read some romantic novels.

Of course, I'm reticent to admit this, but I did go home and practice. And I just never got any better than that sour cherry pit noise. I never managed any well-articulated slurpy sounds that even remotely resembled what I heard in Western arenas. Damn! Maybe what I previously thought was the world's easiest riding cue would be forever elusive to me. I, however, prefer to think that my tight-lipped failure at the Kiss simply means I belong in a dressage saddle giving mind-boggling cues to my horses. So, nowadays whenever a Western trainer asks me to ride his or her horse, I politely decline because I'm still at home practicing that Kiss with a mirror.

So Much for Harmony

2009-01-07T07:33:00.000-08:00

Who knew Feng Shui could be so unsettling? Here I was trying to add some harmony to my living space and all I'd met so far was disruption. Could this woman really be telling me to remove the horse photos and paintings from my walls? I understood that the sheer number of them might seem excessive to some people or that the fact I had only horse images and no humans throughout my house might appear anti-social. But did this woman really expect me to take down the pictures of pretty galloping horses with manes and tails sailing in the wind? Really?

She met my resistance head-on. Had I considered the fact I might have an obsession with horses?, she asked. Well, duh, that's the nature of being involved with them, I blushed. Being "sort of" into horses is like being "sort of pregnant." There's no such thing. You're either full-on or you aren't. The way she said obsession, though, made me feel diagnosed. Like I had a problem. Perhaps a certifiable addiction or something that could be cured if only I would allow it.

To bolster my protests about removal of my beloved horse paintings, I tried to explain the equestrian community to Ms. Feng Shui expert. I steered clear of words like fanatical, devotional, and single-focused and attempted instead to convey us equestrians as exceptionally inspired about what we love.

I mean, it was perfectly normal for me to be wearing horse motif socks and a horse-patterned sweater and be drinking tea from my Thelwel Pony mug, I explained, because every other equestrian that came to mind would be doing the same thing at this moment. We all had horse towels and doormats, horse cutlery and Christmas ornaments, horse pajamas, horse key chains. When not at the barn, we read books and magazines about horses or watch movies like Seabiscuit or Hidalgo or Disney's Spirit. If all this were such a problem, wouldn't there be self-help groups or special therapists for us? To date, I had yet to see any listing for groups focused on "helping individuals recovering from horse addictions."

The Feng Shui woman, however, ignored me. She wanted to hang photos showing me with my arms around family members, not childhood ponies. She wanted to frame images of me laughing and leaning into friends, not praising a sweaty stallion at a competition. She thought my office should have more candles and fewer horse show ribbons and medals. Ditto for the bedroom.

All in the name of harmony? Granted, I may have paid this woman to come to my house and share some of her expertise about the finer nuances of prosperity, harmony, and all that other good New Age stuff. But I now found myself in the odd position of pondering whether any of it was applicable to us horse folks. She could call us whatever she wanted. But obsessed or not, we with our cluttered homes seemed to have our own brand of harmony.

For an equestrian, prosperity means finding a good bale of hay for $1 less than normal. It's finding that perfectly colored saddle pad to match your horse, or having spare change in your pockets to buy him carrots. Harmony is the ability to sit his trot without bruising your bum. It's the compulsive desire to fill-- and I do mean fill-- your house with trinkets and images that remind you of all the special horses throughout your lifetime. Harmony is hearing your horse nicker when he hears your car tires arrive at the barn. It's the moment your trainer chooses the right words to push your skills without making you feel hopeless.

Yet, I couldn't find references to any of this sound knowledge in the Feng Shui materials. And the more I talked to this Shui expert, the more I started to think maybe we were a little nuts, we equestrians. Yikes. I babbled on and on about everyone I knew in the industry and how their passion for these four-legged creatures just doesn't get left at the barn. My friend Mark, who has trained horses seven days a week for over 40 years, still wants his phone to "whinny" when it rings. For his birthday, he wants to ride horses down a pretty trail (never mind that's exactly the thing he does 365 days a year).

Another friend of mine used to run home from the barn in order to watch horse videos on-line. Sale videos, Olympics, training videos, whatever-- so long as they showed horses doing exemplary things. My own mother, who has been around horses for what seems like all of eternity, still gets excited to decorate her Christmas tree with about one thousand horse ornaments. Then, she anxiously puts out her holidays horse motif chinaware, which differs only slightly from her everyday horse chinaware.

So, the more I talked to this poor Feng Shui consultant, the more I realized two things. First of all, she had never before dealt with equestrians. Secondly, she may have been right that we were a bit obsessed. But I wouldn't admit that part out loud. In the end, we struck a deal.

I hung some red cords around the knobs of exterior doors, said a few chants, promised to keep my bathroom door shut. But, if she so much as removed a single horse photo from my wall, I would break her fingers. Understood?

Calling Hollywood

2009-01-02T15:29:00.000-08:00

It was with a large slice of humble pie this morning that I paused and looked at myself standing in the tack room. I mean, really looked at myself. Mud caked my chaps in thick furrows. Horse slobber dripped off my elbow, and several strands of grimy tail hair stuck out from my jacket zipper. I pushed my rain-sodden hair off my forehead with fingers coated in molasses and oat debris.

In moments like these, when my unsightly appearance is beyond words, I like to reflect on how far removed the realities of the horse industry are from fairy-tale images in children's storybooks. Or Currier and Ives' paintings. Or The Black Stallion. You get the idea. Yes, the real portrait of horsey life is so unglamorous that I sometimes feel the need to blurt this out when I first introduce myself as a horse trainer to strangers. When asked what I do for a living, I want to answer "I train horses.. but it's not as glamorous as you might think."

Admittedly, I am probably just trying to safeguard myself from any misinterpretations that I am a well-coiffed, clean-pressed member of the cast from National Velvet. In reality, I am just like every other trainer-- covered in horse drool, reeking of hay and hooves, picking sand out of my scalp. In fact, we equestrians rarely-- if ever-- resemble the amusing images of us portrayed by artists and Hollywood.

This fact re-confirmed itself for me this morning when, after taking in my dismal appearance, I reflected on a sadistic and bizarre event that my father used to compete in called Sleigh Rallies. Held in sub-zero New England winters, these frosty events involve several horse- and- sleigh combinations lurching around a judge in snowy circles. The objective: whoever does not freeze to death first or flip his sleigh over into the snowbank is deemed a winner. Other ways to get a winning edge include adorning your horse in lots of jingling bells and outfitting your sleigh with lap robes resembling large animals like bear and sheep.

A regular attendant of these events to this day, my father recently sent me a Vermont calendar featuring a photograph of him competing in a Sleigh Rally. To an uneducated horse person, the picture probably looked iyllic. A dapper looking gentleman wrapped in fur and resembling a member of the Russian army promenades merrily through the snow in his horse-drawn sleigh. It's the stuff of Christmas carols and greeting cards, after all. I, on the other hand, know the real truth. A closer inspection of the photo reveals ice hanging from my father's beard and snow balled so thick in the soles of the horse's feet he can barely move. I'm guessing it was no warmer than 5 degrees Fahrenheit in that photo. Not to ask the obvious, but who wants to be outside in that weather at a sporting event involving cold metal buckles, steamy perspiring beasts, and lots and lots of icy snow? Left to Currier and Ives paintings and greeting cards, a portrait of the scene would indeed seem idyllic and glamorous. In real life, it's a whole different story.

As a kid, I was once talked into participating in one of these Sleigh Rallies. Or, more accurately, I was tossed into some one's sleigh and told to go drive in the "Junior Driver" class for participants under 16 years old. I was 11 and had never piloted a sleigh. I was blathering in protest. Nobody seemed to care. The pony's owner tossed me the reins, slapped him on the butt, and next thing I knew, the judge was evaluating me. Within moments, my eyelashes collected snow, blurring my vision. My nose ran and I resorted to use my coat sleeve. My butt cheeks froze to the seat and my hands formed into such rigid claws around the reins that I couldn't have let go if I wanted to. In the end, I won the class for the simple fact that the pony went on auto-pilot and I sat in a state of frozen misery.

If Hollywood had had anything to do with that day, the pony and I would have been the centerpiece of a joyful, fashionable picture, taking part in a pastime reserved only for the very fortunate or very wealthy. More realistically, I was engaged in an event reserved for the very foolish. So it goes with horses, especially when competition is involved.

In the movies, the star always wins his race, jumps the highest, or has a miraculous recovery from a horrifying injury. His owners are always jovial, never broke, never dirty. In real life, none of this happens. Plans get derailed, there's constantly a strange illness or injury, mares become psycho at shows. Owners get frustrated, trainers have meltdowns, and everyone is always dirty. Always dirty.

My "to do" list now includes a note to contact Hollywood about this very point. I'm going to suggest a script that more accurately portrays my life with these magnificent (and drooly) beasts. I think I'll pick Jennifer Aniston to star as me. I can't wait to see how alfalfa slobber looks in her hair.

Let it Rain, Let it Snow!

2008-12-31T17:09:00.000-08:00

My student's husband said it best when he quietly murmured "you guys are insane" before climbing back into his warm truck and pulling away from the arena. We, meanwhile, watched him drive down the road to a warm office somewhere as we stood in a combination of rain/snow, wind/hail, and frigid temperatures. I had come to this small isolated town to give a day of instruction to local dressage enthusiasts, who actually showed up with horses in frozen trailers for the occasion.

We all stood for one brief moment looking at each other, or what little we saw of each other under layers of waterproof bundling. My feet froze to the insoles of my boots. My fingers throbbed, my eyes teared. We looked at each other with the storm swirling around our ears and questioned silently if we should cancel or proceed with the day. And just as silently, it was made clear that of course we would proceed as normal. A series of invisible gestures and gumption led us through our motions as if each of us said to ourselves "we're horse people, for God's sake, this is what we do, now let's get on with it." That "what we do" part could be translated as: routinely suffer extremes of weather.

You see, my student's husband calling us insane had some truth. Horse people do activities with or for their horses in weather miserable enough to cancel any other event. Horse people will postpone weddings, cancel reunions and graduations for torrential downpours but they will still go to a horse show, clinic, or group ride. They'd never imagine joining friends for soccer or a hike or anything else outside when the wind whistles against their doors. But a horse event? Sure. When the weather is so inclement they can barely see their hands in front of their faces, they will hesitate only a fractional second before saddling up.
This is just another illogical thing about life with horses. It's almost as if we all solemnly assume that foul weather is part of the deal with horses, whereas elsewhere in our lives we have more sense. A lot more.

I, for one, am an avid cyclist, yet I'd never dream of pedaling down the road for a long spell in rain, hail, or mud. The notion strikes me as impossibly unbearable. Given the same rain, hail, and mud, though, you'll likely find me out on horseback. I can't explain it. I recall recently riding a horse for a client while big chunks of icy hail bounced off my face and collected along the horse's crest. In the same conditions, you would never find me on my bike, out for a walk, or for that matter doing anything other than huddling under a comforter in front of the fire.

And next time a hail storm pushes through, I'll probably once again be out on a horse. I'm a horse gal. It's what we do.

What Are YOU Looking At?

2008-12-23T13:29:00.000-08:00

At some point, every rider has endured a hair-raising, nail-biting moment of time when one's life flashes before one's eyes due to a wildlife critter that would under normal circumstances seem adorable and charming. In these moments, though, wildlife seems like one of life's great cruelties.

I had one such ride this morning, which got me thinking about this. Afterwards, I felt like I needed to go to the local ASPCA chapter or wildlife protection agency and apologize for the 15 minutes I spent cursing profanely at a majestic male deer that nearly ended my life. Normally, a six-point buck perched atop a foggy cliff would incite a flutter in my heart and even inspire a verse or two of haiku poetry. But he's the last thing I want to see when I am on my horse, who instantly turns into a fear-crazed, runaway lunatic.

Let me give a disclaimer here before going any further that I personally love wildlife. I am a dues-paying member of Sierra Club, I mountain bike and hike regularly, and I take time every day to stop and ponder the sheer wonder of mother nature. However, when I am on a horse, I often curse the fuzzy and furry members of the forest. It is fair to say I even shout and sometimes think about throwing things at them. Were it the case that my horse did not gallop away and jeopardize my mortal existence, I would definitely view them otherwise. Yes, the leaping jackrabbits, startling deer, and darting birds would be met with a friendly "aw, aren't you cute?" rather than a "shoo! Get the heck outta here, go, go, go!"

Anyway, back to this morning's ride. I was precariously convincing a feisty three-year old mare that even though everyone else was eating their breakfasts and she was grumpy, we still needed to get some work done. I had a hard time selling her on this. After a few good revolutions around the arena, she was looking to convince me that here grumpiness was going nowhere and I should take her back to the barn. She pinned her ears, swished her tail, spooked at a few things here and there. Basically, she made my job of riding her a whole lot of work.

About 20 minutes later, though, she began to come around. She started to go through her paces rather nicely in fact, so I asked her to pick up a brisk ground-covering canter (a risky move with a young horse on a chilly morning!), which she did promptly. I began to smile like a proud teacher. And then I glanced up the hill outside our arena. There in the mist stood a very large buck looking straight down at us. I gritted my teeth. The mare hadn't seen him yet; she was still performing beautifully, although I knew the second she saw him, it would be over for me. She would take the opportunity to bolt wildly and throw some wretched antics at me, re-starting her campaign to be done with riding for the day. Shoot! We were already in a rather speedy canter. Once she laid eyes on that muscular fellow with the antlers, she would hit the speed of light. And I would either be in the dirt or saying prayers.

So I started to do the only thing I could do. "GET OUTTA HERE!" I snarled. No movement. In fact, the big guy seemed more interested in us now. My mare kept cantering along, miraculously not yet noticing him. In fact, she kept things far cooler than I in that moment as I launched into a verbal tirade.

"Go ON! Git! Go away! Get outta here you blasted fool... do you want me killed? Don't you have some deer harem you need to get back to? Why are you looking at me? WHAT? Get outta here. Why are you just STANDING there?" My screams echoed off rocks and down canyons. It lifted up into tree tops and skimmed across mud puddles. I admitted to myself that I probably appeared like someone recently escaped from an asylum and not meant to be on horseback. But I didn't mind if anyone standing nearby wanted to label me a crazy person. I just plain didn't care because I was determined to finish this ride still on the back of my horse, not in the dirt.

Finally, the giant antlers turned the other direction and trotted off to pester something else. I felt myself start breathing again. My mare kept cantering and I smiled at her. What a delightful ride we were having. And that was what mattered, right? Who cared if I momentarily became a crazy person who shouted at furry adorable forest animals?

Merry Christmas

2008-12-22T09:35:00.000-08:00

Even today, a scene of Christmas music and holiday ornaments ignites a feeling of magic in my chest. It’s as though I am instantly six years old again, filled with wonder and excitement and raw bubbling joy. And the belief that at exactly midnight on Christmas Eve the horses would speak in human voices.

My mom planted this idea in my head when I was four years old, whispering it to me in the barn aisle and stooping low so nobody else—especially the horses—overheard this little-known secret. She shared it with such conviction that I assumed it might be an accepted truth amongst grown-ups. Naturally, I felt jealous that they’d had so many more years than my tender four to talk to their horses with real voices just like in the movies. So, I vowed on that chilly afternoon of Mom’s revelation to do my best to catch up. Every year on Christmas Eve from then on, I would sleep in the barn waiting for my beloved four-legged friends to speak out loud!

Nearly thirty years later, I’ll admit that I have never once heard a horse speak out loud at midnight. It took only until I was ten to realize that Mom dreamed up the story as a way of getting me out of the house so that she and Dad could stuff stockings and set out gifts in secrecy. Her plan worked. I departed the house with my blankets at 9pm and didn’t return until 3am, leaving her and Dad uninterrupted.

Frostbite aside, I never regretted waiting in the barn every year. After yet another year passing without our horses speaking out loud, I never felt the disappointment I expected. I suspect Mom knew this would be the outcome when revealing her ‘secret’ to me. You see, anyone who’s spent time in a stable after nightfall knows the magic it embodies. When the doors are slid shut to the frost outside, the only sounds in that little haven are quiet, peaceful—horses munching hay, a rustle of shavings, barn cats skittering in the rafters. It is impossible, especially as a child, to sit in that space and not feel the magic of the animal kingdom.

After wrapping my blankets around me mummy-style, I sat on the barn aisle floor outside Equinox Black Silk’s stall. ‘Black Silk’ was my mom’s cherished black stallion, a dramatic beast who acted like king of our farm. For hours, I sat cross-legged leaning against the front of his stall, waiting for him, Sunnybrook, Charlotte, and Trinket to speak out loud. Occasionally, he poked his coal black nose through the stall bars and rumpled my hair, warming my ears with his nostrils. Then, he went back to his hay, contemplating what he’d tell me at midnight, I assumed.

Some years, I dozed off until the early hours of dawn, awakened by our barn cat trying to snuggle inside my blankets. Other years, I stayed awake by talking to the animals. Even if they weren’t going to speak, they could listen to my musings. They could bend a compassionate ear to my worries that Santa’s sleigh might get stuck in the snow or that Mom wouldn’t like her slippers that I made by hand from sheepskin and duct tape. The horses listened to it all—without saying a word in return.

Every year, as I walked back up the driveway, I pondered how delightful those creatures were. How peaceful and majestic. How much like the perfect best friend. A glance in our living room revealed that Santa had come and gone, without getting stuck in the snow, during my barn-sit. Several small packages peeked out from under the tree awaiting our little family to gather around in a few hours for a festive period of ribbon-tearing, sharing, and chatter before barn chores, snow shoveling and other duties called. How wonderful, I smiled on my way to bed, how divinely magical…

En Vogue?

2008-12-03T07:42:00.000-08:00

One of my students arrived last week wearing breeches that defied the normally dismal fashions of English riding apparel so thoroughly that I went momentarily speechless. Not only were they electric eggplant colored but they had a five-inch tassel dangling from the left side of the rider's buttocks.

Stupidly, I asked if she realized she had a fringe swinging from her seat. Of course she realized; it was an identifying feature of the brand. This particular apparel manufacturer also made styles in various other show-stopping colors with tassels attached almost anywhere someone could imagine.

After moving past how bizarre I found them, I had to admit that I found the new brand of slightly wild pants pretty cool and imagined myself in a pair of hot yellow ones with tassels swinging from my knees. And then, sinking, I admitted that I am probably too uptight to sport such fashions. It would be such a break from my stiff-upper-lip English riding upbringing that I feared a total identity crisis. After all, dull-colored unflattering breeches have been a mainstay of my entire equestrian life.

A client of mine recently summed up how unfashionable English breeches are with perfection. She used to ride Western and back then, she and her friends referred to English breeches as 'Dork pants." It's a pretty accurate description, I think. I mean, let's put it this way: I don't know a single person who reaches for her riding pants when she's looking for something really cool to wear. Now, if those breeches had tassels swinging from them, it just might be a different story.

For years, dressage riders have been begging for a rule change regarding competition dress code. How about another option besides white breeches and a black jacket? Any other colors, we begged. And finally a few years ago, the higher powers of dressage regulations announced new flexibility in the choice of riders' outfits. The news was met with cautious excitement. After decades of wearing only black and white, what colors were now allowed?

The answer we got resembled the moment last week when I admitted that my stiff-upper-lip English upbringing wouldn't allow me to fully break from the mold of the world of Dork pants. In addition to white and black, dressage riders could now also wear navy blue and grey. While this was indeed a change, I wouldn't call it a wild break from the norm.

As loud as we dressage riders begged for change, I guess we weren't really ready. We're too serious or fashion-inhibited or something like that. Maybe we just can't see ourselves in electric eggplant colored pants or pants with funky patterns and fringes.

I'm not sure what it does take to wear these oddities, but I'm working on it. In fact, I'm trying my best at amnesia for the last 30 years of dark colored synthetic fabric breeches that never fit quite right. I'm close. I think it's just a matter of time until I'm in those hot yellow pants with tassels. And I'm pretty sure the rest of the dressage world it close behind me.

Food Wars

2008-12-03T07:20:00.001-08:00

Some days, it seems like the mere act of surviving life with horses mandates a person to form fiery and tightly held beliefs about anything and everything, and to verbalize them assertively at any opportunity, lest you become confused or led astray by others' tightly held beliefs.

Either people without a tendency to form firm convictions stay away from the industry to begin with or they're kicked out. I haven't determined which.

This struck me recently while teaching at a new barn when one of the boarders had an episode after discovering some blades of alfalfa hay in her horse's stall. This then drew everyone around her into a heated argument about whether horses were meant to eat alfalfa, and how her horse might likely colic from the offending scraps she found in his stall.

A woman nearby quickly countered, "No, no, you're mistaken. Alfalfa maintains the correct calcium-phosphorous ratio in the gut. Grass hay doesn't. You have to feed alfalfa."

Another gal cut in, "Well, no, you're only partially right. It depends on the breed of horse. Stockier breeds risk becoming laminitic on alfalfa."

Yet another shot in with "No, all breeds can eat alfalfa. It's sugar ya wanna be careful about, but there aint sugar in alfalfa so it's okay."

All told, the debate about alfalfa lasted 20 minutes, everyone offering well-researched and eloquent, albeit opposing, opinions. Absolutely nobody agreed or was indifferent about the topic.
Then somehow the bickering about hay types segued straight into a debate about beet pulp. Again, a dozen fiery convictions flew. Beet pulp was good for digestion. Nah, beet pulp was indigestible. It should be purchased in shredded form and then soaked. No, the pelleted form was better and needed no soaking. Etc.

I listened within earshot, withholding my own speculations about beet pulp, alfalfa, or any other feed. It was a classic example of too many cooks in the kitchen. I knew that in a matter of minutes, the conversation would switch to training methods, giving the cluster of equestrians another issue on which to weigh their opinions. And again, no two of them would share the same one.

I chuckled under my breath, gaining insight into the drama or 'barn politics' that vexes most boarding facilities. Barn politics could be best described as frequent outbursts, tantrums, and personality clashes amongst boarders.

In a sport filled with such opinionated participants, I reflected, it's a small miracle we can co-exist at all.

Greener Pastures, Part II

2008-11-05T17:15:00.000-08:00

I visited my hometown in Vermont last week and was immediately reminded that traveling to the Northeast from California means boarding a plane in flip-flops and shorts and then six hours later trying while deplaning to stuff myself into five sweaters... at once. By the time I left the airport terminal, I was wearing everything I packed in my suitcase. And I was wishing for one more scarf to cover the drafty parts on my neck not yet fully mummified.

My father, meanwhile, pointed out that it was a lovely Autumn day with "balmy" temperatures well into the 40's. I begged him to roll up his window and stop trying to tell me that the biting air outside was "warm" by any one's definition. It has been only six years since I left Vermont for California, but apparently one can soften up quickly. I used to laugh at Californians during January wearing their Ugg boots and woolen scarves as if it were actually 'winter' outside rather than a mid-60 degree day with light breezes. But now I have become one of them. I wrap scarves around myself as soon as the temperature dips below the high 60's, I use the word "storm" to describe a light rain shower, and I talk about winter as if it's actually a season here (which it isn't).

While visiting Vermont, I realized just how soft I've become. Back when I lived in New England, I often taught riding lessons until I was frozen solid. Then I would call it a day, rubbing icicles out of my eyelashes. One year, I got frostbite in all ten toes and instated a policy that from then on, I would teach only in temperatures above 10-degrees Fahrenheit. The following year, though, I got frostbite in all ten fingers, and I raised the temperature minimum to 20-degrees. However, a horse trainer in Vermont cannot survive with such a policy as I soon found out. You see, during the months of January and February, the temperature sometimes sits below 20-degrees for weeks at a time. This meant my prospective income-earning days reduced from 30 per month to zero. Thus, I moved to California.

Last week's visit home coincided with my birthday, and so my friend Sarah took me to her favorite tack and saddle shop. The idea was to buy me a gift. Not being a great shopper, I asked Sarah to help me choose a pair of riding pants. Next thing I know, she's holding up something that looks like a uniform for ski patrol in Alaska.

"What about these?" she asked, obviously pleased with whatever it was that she found.

"Um... well what are those, exactly?" I asked as politely as possible.

Her brow pushed together. She looked at me like a stranger, or someone who had gravely disappointed her.

"What? You don't remember these?" she finally mumbled, looking off into space now. I could sense an odd tension in the room, as if she'd asked me if I remembered my own father's name. I tried to ease the growing alienation I sensed between us. Clearly, I should have recognized whatever she held in her hands. And honestly, to me, it looked like a cross between a bathrobe and a sleeping bag.

"Fleece riding pants? Don't you remember? Do people in California not wear these?" asked Sarah, trying to fathom how anyone could survive in winter without insulating herself in four inches of unflattering fabrics.

Upon closer inspection, and a very chilly recollection of my former life, I did remember the fleece riding pants. I remember owning an entire drawer of them. They were thick and fuzzy and added at least three inches of bulk to each thigh. Well, I should say they would have added three inches of bulk...if worn alone. But a rider would perish in Vermont's winter trying to wear only fleece pants. One also needed 1.) silk long underwear 2.) thermal undergarments 3.) heated socks and 4.) an external waterproof shell of some sort. In that order. All told, when I got dressed to ride in Vermont, I inflated from a size four to a size 10.

With so many layers of clothes, it's almost impossible to ride a horse. I mean, you are so padded and insulated that you can barely move, let alone feel anything like a horse moving under you. Giving lessons always highlighted this challenge. Riders would ask me about their form, their position in the saddle, etc. "Is my leg in the right place?" they would ask. "Is my back straight?" And I would stand in the middle of the arena staring at them, trying to see them through all those layers. Sometimes, I had to admit, "You know, I can't even see your back." A person could be entirely slouched over or slumped down in the saddle, and I would never be able to tell under all the jackets and flannel.

But the beauty of life in the Northeast is that riders there assume that equestrians across the country suffer through the same winter experiences. They think the sunny portrayals of California are just a fabrication of Hollywood. Shivering with their frostbitten fingers frozen around a pair of reins, they believe we Californians are donning fleece riding pants and sniffling through riding lessons, too. Not so, dear New Englanders! I will always remain a Vermont native at heart and I do harbor a fierce pride in that frigid northeastern United States. But I have to admit that I don't miss fleece riding pants, no matter how sexy this year's color selection might be. I'll stick to riding in shirt sleeves and everyday breeches.

For now, I need to get going. Tomorrow is forecast for light rain showers and I need to go prepare the barn for a "storm."

Greener Pastures, Part I

2008-10-07T20:40:00.000-07:00

Call me an idealist, but generally when I think of horses, I simultaneously think of rolling green pastures in which to keep them. This is one of the reasons I'm often told I have a chip on my shoulder. You see, originally I'm from the East Coast, where pastures are as common as rodents. Almost any homeowner outside major metropolitan areas has one... or five. With this much land, a person can happily accumulate horses to her heart's content and the horses will lead a happy grass-grazing life out there under the sky.

Here in California, it's another story entirely. In order to have a pasture, you would need to be a multi-multi-millionaire. In fact, in the town where I live, even if you were a multi-multi-millionaire, you would likely end up with only a quarter acre on the side of a steep cliff that will either disappear in the next mud slide or burn up in a major wildfire mid-summer. This is usually when I start saying things like; "Well, back East a quarter acre isn't considered enough land for a horse, anyway. Our pastures back there are at least 20 acres..." Most folks in California haven't owned 20 acres of raw land since the Gold Rush. And when I start sentences with "Well, back East..." people tend to roll their eyes. Frankly, they're sick of me talking about greener pastures.

So, recently I've been trying to stifle my comparisons about horse-keeping on both coasts and fully embrace my current surroundings. For instance, I've begun talking to myself when retrieving horses from stables the size of shoe boxes, saying things like "Yes, Jec, this is perfectly normal. Horses adapt to their living environments. Never mind this horses doesn't have enough space to comfortably lie down; he's just fine." I've become more at ease referring to a 12' x 16' area being defined as 'turnout' where a horse can romp and kick up his heels. I've convinced myself that it is in fact possible for horses to be raised in sand lots without ever seeing or tasting a blade of fresh green grass. In fact, I've spent so much time trying to shed my previous paradigm about horse-keeping that some days I feel like I'm repeating a mantra in my new state: "This is normal. This is fine. This is just fine. Yes, normal."

Sometimes, however, I totally fail at convincing myself. Maybe this does equate to me having a chip on my shoulder, and so be it. At certain points during my day, I just can't help yearning for endless miles of open land for my horses and I to romp and roll in the dirt and relax. I can't help pining for the peace and quiet that comes from riding across 80 open acres without a sound except birds and breezes. Luckily, I'm able to snap out of these nostalgic longings quickly and get on with my day.

Last week, however, my mantra "This is just fine" suffered a prolonged blow. I was riding a client's horse at her property, which borders a very busy highway near out coastal town. Sometimes, the din of utility trucks, zooming sport scars, and Harley Davidson motorcycles can make it impossible to form a complete thought. I've often thought it might be more peaceful inside a food blender. Just to hold a normal conversation with my client, I am forced to yell at a level that actually hurts my neck. The horses, though, have adapted to highway life just fine and go about their workouts without being distracted at all by the nearby traffic mayhem. Truthfully, it's me that suffers more. So, I was repeating my mantra while putting this particular horse through his paces. And it was working.

Then a giant speeding SUV passed the arena and slowed down to watch us for a moment. The very second it slowed down, a ferocious bout of growling and barking erupted from its interior. The sheer volume startled me so much I dropped my reins. Confused, my horse trotted to the center of the arena awaiting a cue from me to do otherwise. I regained my composure enough to look over in the direction of the giant SUV in time to see an entire herd of Chihuahuas crawling out the driver's window snapping and yowling at me and the horse. Let me tell you, they may be tiny, but these little guys were out for blood.

Meanwhile, the driver tried to get them under control by rolling up his window which only agitated them more. They barked and scratched and yapped, all half dozen of them swarming around the driver, who obviously could no longer see enough to drive and was now blocking the road. Along came a Honda Civic pouncing up and down with rap music and piloted by a teenager in a beanie and hooded sweatshirt. The rollicking Civic slammed to a stop but continued to bounce up and down from the sheer volume of music pumping through its speakers. The teenager leaned on his horn. This, of course, startled the carload of Chihuahuas, spurring them into more mania.

It was right about then that my mantra completely failed. This was not normal or fine or even fun for that matter. Here I was trying to school this horse in the majestic and graceful maneuvers of dressage, all while under siege of yapping dogs and an angst-ridden teenager with a car that bounced like a basketball. No, this was not normal horse-keeping. Call me prejudice, but I'll trade the carload of barking dogs for a silent arena any day...

Value Added

2008-09-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

I left the post office today having nearly filled the recycling bin with catalogues offering pages of nutritional products promising to make my horses sounder, healthier, more athletic, happier, and in some ways more talented. As I walked out into the late afternoon sun, I pondered how horses from days bygone seemed to live to a ripe old age just fine without all that stuff. No joint formulas or intestinal toners. No herbal mood remedies or hoof builders. At what point did we decide that they needed scoopfuls of powders, potions, and pills, lest they not be suited to see the light of another day?

When I was growing up my parents maintained a 12-stall barn of performance horses. These were serious athletes, horses that competed only in rigorous sports like combined driving and long distance trail riding. And I don’t remember a single one of them ever being unsound or having some malaise that left us standing around scratching our heads saying “gosh, if only there were a supplement we could add to his feed….” Our horses got three things every day: a pile of hay, a clean bucket of water, and a coffee can full of sweet feed laced with corn kernels and molasses. Period.

But some time around the mid-1990’s, equine nutritional companies decided that modern horses weren’t as functional as they seemed. Which is another way of saying they saw an opportunity to create a profitable market. In no time at all, they convinced horse owners that their steeds were compromised; they needed supplements. Thus began the burgeoning business of manufacturing products that promised to do everything from make a horse’s coat shinier to settling him emotions. In fact, some supplements promise to do everything but clean a horse’s stall for you.

Recently, a client of mine handed me a brochure for a supplement she had begun feeding her horse. The impressively glossy brochure promised the following for horses that ate it: improve digestion, create mental focus, tone muscles and ligaments, boost energy and stamina, reduce anxiety, etc. That’s an abbreviated synopsis of what the product promised. In fact, if I recall correctly, the yellowish powder was supposed to take care of every need your horse might have except for daily training. Maybe if you fed two scoops a day, it handled the training, too.

“What’s in this?” I asked, noting that nowhere did the manufacturer list any ingredients.

“Who cares? Did you see what it does for your horse?” asked my client in a tone that indicated she might be thinking I was illiterate.

“Well, no, I’m not sure it DOES do those things for my horses, since I don’t know what’s in here,” I pointed out. And, you see, this is why I’m often labeled a cynic. Before I plunk down $50 on a bucket full of granules promising my horse a better life, I want to know what’s in there. What’s more, I want some sales guy or gal to prove there’s some real science behind the product. You know, like it’s actually been tested and PROVEN to create the results it promises to. And by proven, I mean tested on more than one horse, one pony, and one donkey.

By this point, I was raining on my client’s parade as she had been quite excited to discover this new product and I was obviously failing to take on the level of enthusiasm she had hoped for.

“Have you noticed any difference in your horse since you started feeding him this stuff?” I asked, trying to be upbeat.

“Well, no, not really. But it’s just a matter of time,” she smiled, conveying utter faith in the prophetic label on the supplement bucket.

“Uh-huh,” I mumbled. “Well, was there any particular reason you started feeding it to him? Was something deficient or was he lacking health?”

No, she said. But things could always be better, right? Her horse had always been healthy and fit, but now with this new supplement, he would apparently be even better than healthy and fit.

“Let me ask you this,” I said. “If I developed a fancy label and packaged Twinkies with this label promising that the contents would make you more focused, fitter, energetic and so on, would you automatically start supplementing yourself with Twinkies every day?”

After a moment, she understood my analogy. But that doesn’t change the fact that horse people hate logic. My client—like all of us—did not want the holes pointed out in her decision to purchase and start feeding this unproven magical supplement. At the end of the day, it made her feel good, regardless of whether it had any scientifically substantiated effect on her horse. It made her feel good to go out and buy something for him that was supposed to improve his life. And that’s what counted. When she feels good, her horse feels good.

Monkey See Monkey Do

2008-09-25T15:21:00.000-07:00

I’ve often heard that people choose pets that look like them. And while I’ve never actually decided whether my friends’ dogs look like them, I can attest that their pets do eventually act like them. With enough time, a pet will take on the characteristics of its owner, for better or for worse. Horses have proven this repeatedly to me over the years.

I’ve seen perfectly well-mannered horses under everyday circumstances turn into basket cases the moment they hear their owner’s car in the driveway. Suddenly, they’re pawing at the wall, pacing circles, chewing the wood from their stall doors. It’s as if the presence of their owner unleashes a spoiled personality that is otherwise dormant.

Likewise, I’ve witnessed stolid and steadfast mounts turn into spooky freaks once their owners mount up for a ride. It never fails to amaze me, though I should have become quite used to it by now. Like it or not, our animals mirror us. They take on our neuroses, our strengths, our weaknesses, and everything in between.

And sometimes it’s uncanny how little we want to admit that. I recall a few years ago riding a client’s young mare and having a productive schooling session when the client raced in the driveway, kicking up clouds of dust behind her sports car. She spilled out of the car, eyes bulging from a day of stress at the office, clutching a cell phone in one hand and a large extra-caffeinated mocha from Starbucks in the other.

She was using the speaker function of her phone to have a conversation with her ex-husband that used volumes of profanity I hadn’t heard since high school.

Anyway, before I knew it, she was in the arena with me (having put the ex-husband on mute) and wanted to ride her horse. Mentally, I came up with a dozen immediate reasons that amounted to a bad idea. Against my better judgment, I told her that would be fine if she could take five minutes and settle herself down. To her, that meant finishing her mocha and setting down her keys.

Before I knew it, I was giving this stressed-out, hyped-up woman a leg up on her young unsuspecting horse. Needless to say, within moments, the horse mirrored the woman, even without the ingestion of a 16-ounce mocha. It began darting around the arena, jumping out of its skin, and—I’m not kidding—its eyes bulged, just like its owner’s.

The woman wanted to know what was wrong. I gently pointed out that the horse had picked up on her frenzied state and was absorbing that energy, causing it to be unsettled. Of course this made no sense to Ms. Starbucks. Horses are horses, she said. As if they are completely dead to sensory input. No, I reminded her, horses are like their owners.

Fortunately, this can work favorably. My trainer friend Mark Schuerman is one of the calmest, unflappable people I’ve ever met. After two months in his barn, any horse takes on his quiet nature. It’s like a magical transformation, an osmosis of sorts. I was deeply grateful for this fact six years ago when I had just moved to California.

I shared a barn with Mark, who trained exclusively Arabians at the time. For some reason he had a fondness for these otherwise high-strung animals that became docile puppies under his hand. Being reputable in the Arabian world, he was invited to give a short riding performance at the Western States Horse Expo, the largest horse exposition on the West Coast that regularly attracts 65,000 or more spectators over one weekend in June. Mark was honored. He would ride one of his most prancing, gorgeous, bay Arabs under spotlights in the late-night ticketed show. He agreed to it with enthusiasm.

Then he got a hot date for that same night. But he didn’t want to let down his fans from the Arabian community, so he held his commitment to do the Expo gig by recruiting yours truly to ride his horse. I agreed without further thought because, first of all, I had no idea what I had gotten into and secondly, I knew Mark really wanted to go out with this attractive blonde woman. So, there you have it.

A few weeks later, I found myself mounted atop an increasingly nervous Arabian gelding squeezed into a crowd of roughly 100 other demonstration riders on equally nervous horses in the pitch black scrambling around on pavement while we each awaited our turn to blast into the main arena for five minutes of glory.

There’s much I don’t remember about that evening. What I do remember is that the act preceding my ride was a mounted shooting demonstration, which meant that while I waited with my snorting Arabian outside the arena’s main gate, a dozen or more out-of-control riders galloped around inside shooting pistols at balloons until they all popped. I’m not sure if it was the gunfire, my sudden nausea, or all the yelling and screaming, but my horse was quickly coming unglued.

I tried dialing Mark on my cell phone to tell him not only was I not going into that arena, but this night marked the end of our friendship, too. Before the call went through, though, a rearing giant Friesian stallion streaked across the pavement towards me, slid on his shoes, and rammed into my horse’s backside. That itself would have been startling enough. But the horse and his rider, a wanna-be—eighteenth century knight, were entirely decked out in chain mail armor. The more the horse reared, the more his armor clanked and rattled, which added further mayhem to the gunfire in the arena.

It was at this point that I realized I’d not ever drawn up a will. It became clear that I would not survive the evening alive and I was chanting to myself “huh, so this is how it ends…” when I remembered that the only thing in my favor was the fact that I was on top of a horse Mark had trained.

This meant that even with the Friesian stallion attacking us from behind and gunfire in front of us that things might turn out fine if I just acted like Mark. So, in spite of my chattering teeth and trembling bones, I did just that. And my horse reflected it. Albeit a little nervous, the horse kept himself composed. Someone swung open the arena gait, and we cantered in under huge spotlights in front of a crowd of a couple thousand people. We floated as if on air, as if my life hadn’t just passed before me moments earlier.

Part of me thanked Mark for being such an exceptional horseman. The other part wanted to hunt him down on his date and tell him I would never again ride at an event with both gunfire and horses.

Do You Want a Baseball Bat With That?

2008-09-22T15:06:00.000-07:00

My father claims that he was pouring out his heart the other day when my cell phone cut out and he realized he was talking to himself. I find this hard to believe for two reasons.

The first is that my father’s version of ‘pouring out his heart’ includes either reminding me why female drivers should not be allowed on the highways or describing why our government is full of phonies. The second is that, being a horse trainer himself, my father knows that we equine professionals are nearly always in areas with spotty cell phone coverage. Therefore, one should never pour out one’s heart to a trainer on a cell phone.

The cell phone issue has amused me for several years now, mainly because these little technological devices present an anomaly for we horse folks. You see, the average horse trainer is eccentric, introverted, and socially isolated. That’s part of the reason we train horses; we don’t really fit into any other type of employment. Days full of non-verbal connection with four-legged animals suit us perfectly.

Then along came cell phones. Suddenly, our days of talking only to ourselves, our dogs, or our horses now included a ringing telephone with real live people on the other end! Our social isolation went out the door. Our introverted ways were being challenged. We now conducted conversations with prospective clients while sitting on a hay bale or bathing horses. We called in feed deliveries while mucking stalls.

In essence, we were no different than corporate executives who never seemed to take the time to do nothing but swat flies and contemplate what sized saddle to put on the new Arabian in the barn. Next thing we knew, we’d be resembling corporate Americans in other ways, like running to Starbucks at 4pm every day and talking too fast and putting more thought into how we dressed.

For most of us, the transition has been a little awkward. It has presented the opportunity for us to become bona fide businesspeople, a venture we trainers have been reticent to embrace for centuries. Moreover, technological concepts like “cell coverage,” “bandwidth,” or “phone web browsing” all seem terribly advanced and tedious in the face of issues like whether Timothy of alfalfa hay is better. Personally, I’d rather determine if the brand of fly spray I’m currently using on my steeds is actually working than try to figure out what key on my cell phone will create a question mark symbol in a text message.

Until recently, I’ve regarded the cell phone a bit skeptically. Was it a business tool? A means of being more connected to family and friends? An emergency device? Last week, my good buddy Mark provided me the answer we trainers have been seeking for years. We were at a horse show when he excitedly pulled out his new cell phone to show me. It looked like a hockey puck.

“Watch this!,” he said and promptly hurled it against the side of a metal barn. It bounced off and flew into a pile of sawdust. Mark then ran over and jumped up and down on top of it. The new phone, he explained, was guaranteed to be more or less indestructible. It was allegedly waterproof, weather-proof, and vehicle-proof, meaning that Mark could drive over it with his big diesel truck, which he had of course already tried repeatedly. He had also verified its claims by submerging it in water troughs and leaving it in his horse trailer to endure extreme heat. So far, it had been indestructible. The following day, he intended to test its survival under a set of tractor tires, he told me like a giddy child with a new toy.

And in that moment, I came to terms with these little technological devices called cell phones that never seem to work in the areas I desperately need them to. I now understood why they had become such an integral part of we trainers’ lives. We all needed a little amusement, a little something to see if we could crush under our tractors

If I Only Had a Bran Mash

2008-09-07T20:36:00.000-07:00

I just got home from a horse show and all I want to do it eat. You see, if you’ve been to many shows, you quickly realize that it’s a darn good thing we don’t feed our horses what people stuff down themselves at shows.

After all these years, I still cannot understand this irony. I mean, a show involves at least three or more days of grueling labor, sun exposure, often extreme weather, long hours, and performance. You would assume that equestrians would feed themselves in the nutritional ways of an athlete. Nah, quite the opposite.

I pondered this fact yesterday morning as I wandered the show grounds in a desperate search for something to eat that resembled real food. My options included: sugary over-processed muffin from Costco being re-sold at the show’s only food vendor, the sugary complimentary glazed donuts and coffee tasting like jet fuel given out by show management, or a sugary baked good from the nearby Starbucks. So, basically, the only ‘choice’ I had was in what form I wanted my sugar. I decided it was better to starve another day until I could get my hands on a piece of fruit or something without mass quantities of corn syrup.

What really amused me was that when I arrived at the show four days ago, people were carefully administering bran mashes and electrolytes to their horses, ensuring their fine steeds would drink ample water and handle the miserably hot weather in good health. Meanwhile, they themselves stuffed down glazed donuts, ice cream sandwiches and whatever else was more or less guaranteed to make them dizzy, red-faced, and worn-out in 100-degree heat. By the third day, competitors were seriously wilting… and I was dreaming about things like bananas and whole grain toast. The horses, on the other hand, fared just fine. Luckily they don’t have to suffer the offerings of show food vendors.

I think somewhere around the mid-1990s, with a plethora of processed and imitation food products at their disposal, food vendors caught on to the very sage capitalistic knowledge that horse show competitors are a captive market. Usually, the nearest supermarket is a 20-minute drive from any showgrounds and competitors are tight on time. So, their one option for food is the show vendor. Much like in the case of movie theater prices, this has resulted in things like $3 bottles of water and $8 hamburgers. It has also resulted in offering items that marginally resemble real food but cost as much as a restaurant entrée. After all, why prepare a fresh-made sandwich when a horse show competitor will shell out $7 for a corn dog nuked in the microwave for 30 seconds? Never mind that the competitor will suffer digestive duress for the remainder of the afternoon.

What is sadly missing from most shows today is a staple from my childhood spent at horse competitions all over the East Coast. The mighty fried egg sandwich. Back in the day, almost every competitor downed an egg sandwich in the morning, because then they were bolstered for the day with strength and stamina. In fact, fried egg sandwiches become synonymous for me with horse shows. And I do not mean a pre-made plastic-sealed sandwich with imitation eggs and bright orange cheese. I mean the real deal. They were always fried up fresh by a slightly grumpy gentleman in a white aluminum trailer. They were served piping hot on toasted English Muffins with a slice of cheese. With one of those in your belly, you could tackle the stress of competition and inclement weather all day long and wake up bright eyed the next day.

It may not count as an actual revolution, but I’d like to start a movement that brings the fried egg sandwich back into style at horse shows. I say out with the glazed donuts and in with the English Muffin goodness. Until my revolution takes hold, though, I’ll be here in my kitchen stuffing my face until my next show….

Dollars and Sense

2008-08-11T21:12:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I found myself shopping for a new car. Apparently, this activity incites those around you to offer unsolicited advice. A client of mine, mid-lesson, lectured me about my endeavors to find the right new car for my needs (fuel-efficient, compact, nice color). Her reasoning: I should purchase a used car instead. New cars, after all, lose value the second you drive them off the lot.

I pondered her advice for a moment. Then, I asked if the brand new custom-made saddle she was riding in had lost value since she first put it on her horse. She looked at me puzzled. Wasn't it the same thing?, I asked. How was her new saddle any different in depreciation than my potential new car? Well, here's the thing. There is a rather significant disconnect when it comes to horse people and the money they spend on their furry friends as opposed to what they spend on themselves.

Yes, the saddle had lost value from the first moment my student sat in it. But these kinds of things don't seem to matter. Where the horse is concerned, most owners refuse to cut corners. I once worked for a very wealthy couple who used to spend heaps of money on special grain and vitamins for their horses but clipped coupons for Friday night pizza discounts for themselves. More recently, a client of mine skipped a few haircuts and dye job for her gray hair, which resulted in an entirely new frazzled, split-ended hairdo that was not completely flattering. I made a subtle comment about the lofty price she'd paid for a snazzy new curry comb for her horse (which would have covered two haircuts for her), and she replied simply, "Yeah, I know. But he likes it."

Equestrians' disparity between what they spend on themselves versus what they spend on their horses is so bizarre that even those outside the industry know about it. A friend of mine who knows very little about horses gently pointed this out a few days ago. I was reporting that so far the bad economy had not-- thankfully-- dented my business too much. She stopped twirling her hair around her finger long enough to roll her eyes and say, "Yeah, but isn't it common knowledge that horse people will pretty much sleep in the gutter before they sacrifice what they spend on their horses?"

Sheesh, are we that bad?, I wondered.

Within a second, I had answered my own question. I recalled a week earlier when I stopped at the health food store and didn't balk at purchasing several pounds of high-grade organic flax seeds (for my four-legged critters) but then opted to buy a pound of conventionally grown, rather than organic, bananas for myself in order to save something like 10 cents. I sort of knew there was no logic in spending more money on my horses' lunches than my own. But it just seemed like the right thing. Granted, it's still a long way from sleeping in the gutter (so far, anyway). At the end of the day, we horse people probably justify the disparity the same way. Speaking for myself, anyway, I'd like to think that if things got bad enough, and long before I curled up in the gutter, that one of my beloved horses would spare a little room in her stall and look upon me with gratitude for all the expenses I never complained about. This is what I tell myself when I'm writing all those checks. Oh, and buying that new car to drive... to the barn.

You want me to do... What?

2008-08-08T13:36:00.000-07:00

There is no industry standard per se on lesson and training fees, although most equine professionals charge similar amounts with the exception of a few high rollers setting outrageous fees. But unlike environments like corporate America, there is no clear correlation between a trainer's experience, qualifications, and salary. It's all sort of random.

However, possession of one particular asset does seem to ensure a trainer's ability to charge-- and receive-- rather lofty figures. A foreign accent allows an instructor who might otherwise make $60 per lesson to charge over $100. It matters not whether the accent is Slovakian, Finnish, or German.

All that counts is that it hints of a person's roots being beyond U.S. soil. This fact alone gives the person a huge advantage in attracting equestrian clientele. His skills never need to be scrutinized; the foreign accent, along with a tidy riding outfit, leads to the assumption that he is in fact superior to domestic trainers. It's much like assuming that because someone is Japanese, he must be an expert of sushi. Riding and horsemanship have existed for so much longer overseas that we Americans tend to cling to foreigners as if their DNA is encoded with riding wisdom.

I myself was lured in by the centuries of dressage traditions in Europe and over the years have made not one, but twelve, pilgrimages to ride and train there. Honestly, I can't tell you that I learned any more there than I have from my domestic trainers here in the U.S., but I did come away with a feeling of storybook magic-- cobbled barn courtyards, well-groomed horses, charming little indoor arenas, and well, all those accented lessons.

Following an instructor's directives in a lesson is difficult enough. I can tell you that when you only marginally understand what he's saying, it's far worse.

One time in Portugal, my mother and I were being yelled at to "Sit cloze to zee wizards!" My mom tried to satisfy the instruction by riding her horse close to everything around-- the fence railing, spectators, chairs. Our trainer kept yelling. Finally, Mom trotted her horse up alongside mine and through clenched teeth asked me, "Where the hell is the wizard?"

I chuckled. "Withers, Mom. Sit close to the horse's withers...."

I figured I was owed a good chuckle because a month earlier, I suffered my own accent-induced embarrassment. In Germany, I convinced the revered trainer Egon von Neindorff, by then a very old and cynical man, to allow me the use of a translator for my lessons as I didn't speak German very well and old Neindorff refused to speak anything but his native tongue. An American journalist kindly sat in on my lesson, translating every comment Neindorff made to me, which wasn't much. His lesson went much like this:
"Trot.......good.......Walk......good....Circle....good."

Then, the translator got up to use the bathroom and the second she left the arena, Neindorff started spewing orders in rapid fire. Of course, I had no clue what the old codger was saying, so I just kept trotting my horse. This was obviously the wrong decision. Neindorff's voice escalated, he fired off instruction even faster, his arms waved. Panicked, I clenched by legs and held my breath, which must have been the cue for my mare to begin a lovely, if entirely unsolicited, piaffe.

There I sat atop this horse with legs moving wildly, and yet we were going nowhere. I poked with my spur, I clucked... and we went faster in place. She bounced up and down, working herself into a lather and I could not get her to move forward. I was horrified. But then I noticed Neindorff had stopped shouting at me. I looked across to arena to find that he was doubled over, holding his stomach in laughter, so heartily humored by my embarrassment that he was gasping for air.

More recently, my mentor-- a Spaniard living in Australia-- unleashed his own very strange dialect in an order that went something like: "Now, mike aye twanty meh-ter half curcle." Confused, I just kept trotting (obviously having learned nothing from my previously mentioned German adventures) while he stared at me. He repeated his instruction, giving me the benefit of being hearing deficient. Then he stared more. After I trotted another four times around the arena, he asked wearily "Why you no do what I tell you?"

If only I knew what he told me...

Will Work for Free...

2008-08-03T15:19:00.000-07:00

Someone asked me last week what I would do now that my groom was moving out of the area. I scoffed at the person because without giving it much thought, I reacted with a startled sense of "What do you mean? I'll be just fine, just like I always am!"

Then I gave it some thought. With my groom moving away, I was now solely in charge of the daily operations of my business, the horses, and myself. Whoa. The last part of that sentence hit me hard. I made a quick mental list of my groom's duties and stopped after the list exceeded several pages. Chief among her duties was keeping me in line. I now faced the grim reality of being an adult without a little helper to clean up my mistakes, answer my calls at midnight, drive me around, and in some cases remind me to change my clothes.

You see, we horse trainers are fragile folks. We like to pretend that we are plenty tough, emotionally devoid, and self-sufficient. But in reality, we need a lot of ego-stroking. We are emotionally volatile and most of the time, we get in our own way. We need someone there to remind us what day it is, what our clients' phone numbers are, where the horse drugs are stored. Stuff like this. On occasion, we also need someone to point out that our eyes are bloodshot from way too many cups of coffee or that we're getting crabby from too little rest. Imagine the strain put upon a marriage to expect this of a spouse. Most of us are wise enough to realize a smarter bet is to hire someone who needs to be polite to us but doesn't have to share a home with us. Someone who won't complain when her duties include not only horse care, but also Christmas shopping for our mothers, cooking for us, picking up our dry cleaning, washing our cars, etc.

My good friend Mark, with whom I shared a barn for a few years, always had a groom around and after watching me exhaust myself by caring for-- and training-- a whole lineup of horses alone, he recommended I follow his lead. Somewhat persnickety and possessing too much puritanical work ethic, I waved him off. I could do this all by myself, I assured him, dragging my weary limbs home at the end of the day. Then, one day I drove up to the barn and observed the scene in front of me.

Mark strolled around the arena on a handsome Arabian stallion while a U2 CD blared, telling his groom in a single sentence to 1.) remember to wax his truck after washing, 2.) answer his ringing cell phone, and 3.) switch the U2 CD with a Dave Mathews. The groom accomplished the orders within a blink, and happily. You see, the opportunity to work around horses and to get a foothold in the industry can be tough to come by. So, young women line up enthusiastically, hoping for a chance to work for pittance in exchange for learning the ropes. They are energetic, responsible, and flawless. In sum, we don't deserve them.

I wised up to Mark's sense and got myself a groom. I've never looked back. Who else but some kind young woman who works for me, would put up with my rantings, my meltdowns, my pipe dreams for horses? Who else would listen to my grandiose plans and not dispel them? Who else would shop for barn supplies because she recognizes my phobias for retail stores? And who else would possibly share a hotel room with me and never complain about my snoring?

Grooms are priceless, I tell you, truly priceless. I can only hope these young girls get the footholds they seek, because the industry will surely benefit from them. Meanwhile, I want to assure them that their efforts do not go unappreciated. Now, they may not be valued as much for the horse skills as they eagerly hope, but we trainers sure are thankful for efforts in keeping us in line!

Walk Like Me, Talk Like Me

2008-07-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has spent much time around a training barn or at horse shows recognizes quickly that a trainer's most valuable accessory is what I like to call his "groupies." These folks comprise the small cloud that follows him around, always close at his heels and aware of every move, much like the syncopated block of folks in a marching band.

When the trainer sits down, his groupies cluster around like baby hens and find their own seats near the nest. When the trainer acts busy, the swarm in turn flusters off in various directions to occupy themselves. And so it goes. They are like a loyal shadow, mirroring the trainer, propping up his ego, laughing at his less-than-funny jokes, and marveling at his unparalleled skill with horses. And they pay him for the opportunity to do this.

You see, groupies are important and worth cultivating because in large measure, they are an extension of us trainers and whatever impression they give the industry is-- sometimes unfortunately-- how the industry then sees us. This can obviously work in a trainer's favor, or to his detriment.

As a trainer, you hope for well-heeled groupies, not to mentioned well-behaved ones. At shows, you picture the cloud that follows you around as a fashionable ensemble of sophisticates tastes and articulate speech. You hope for a tidily groomed batch of grateful and polite women, eager to help each other out, encourage other competitors, and tell you that you're the best rider they've seen on the West Coast. When they stock your cooler with your favorite snacks and beverages, it's an added bonus.

Equating you with the quality of your groupies, fellow trainers and competitors immediately elevate you to a level that would take years to achieve by sheer hard work, good training, and a successful show record. Your colleagues and prospective clients automatically assume that, judging from the caliber of your groupies, you must surely ride only the best horses, collect top dollar for your services, and speak in a snooty nasally tone.

In fact, groupies are so pivotal in the status of trainers' careers that I've witnessed more shrewd trainers than I focus their efforts on cultivating groupies more than on training horses. Instead of riding horses all day, they put their efforts into shmoozing, photo-ops, and managing their image. They actually sometimes end up making far more money than the rest of us for the reasons I stated above. It's like the Enron business model applied to the horse world.

What the average trainer usually ends up with, however, is quite different than a uniformly well-heeled group of loyalists. There are generally at least a handful of questionable seeds in the mix. And as I've said, these characters do far more for your reputation than your talent, skill, or show record. For better or worse.

I recall an episode at a Regional Championship competition that all too clearly illustrated this fact for me. The loudspeaker paged me to the show office--a stereotypical nexus of paperwork run by over-worked grey-haired ladies and occupied by nervous competitors. Certain that I had handled every detail of my entry forms, stabling payments, etc., I couldn't immediately imagine what business I possibly needed to attend to in the office. So, I took my dear old time wandering over there.

By the time I arrived, not only was the loudspeaker paging me for a third time, but a small army of horse show officials in golf carts had been dispatched to come haul me in. I heard the commotion inside the office long before I got near the door. There was yelling and screaming. There was crying. There were boyfriends involved. Upset over-worked grey-haired ladies. It sounded bad, very bad. And I had a nagging suspicion that the source for the commotion, and the explanation for my being paged and the golf cart brigade, was one of my clients.

I swung open the door and, yes, there stood one of my own. Apparently, she had taken it upon herself to go straighten out some paperwork in the show office (ignoring strict instructions from me to never go anywhere on her own, lest she go off like a loose cannon as she was now), and nobody seemed to know what prompted it, but she was now in the midst of a full-blown hysterical breakdown. Perhaps it was the sheer stress of needing to put signatures on a few entry forms. Or deciding between entering her horse in a class on Saturday versus Sunday. Who knows. She was now choking and shuddering for breath, throwing papers around the office, her eyes were bloodshot.

The other competitors unfortunate enough to be in the show office with her had smeared themselves against the walls, much like at a high school dance where pimply teenagers try to blend into the furnishings. In this case, they tried to stay out of arm's reach from my now- crazed client. The ladies running the office stood aghast, like four helpless deer paralyzed by headlights. They had contemplated whether to call the police, the state mental hospital, or me. Obviously, they settled on me. They had decided this spasmodic emotional eruption was my problem, let me deal with it.

In the end, I did somewhat deal with it. With the help of my cowboy friend, we physically extracted the wailing woman in question from the office, restrained her in a horse stall, and outlined for her why she was never welcome to attend another show as my client. Given the extent of her distress and flailing, I considered our efforts heroic. However, they did nothing to smooth over the damage that had been done by the episode.

To this day, fellow competitors still talk about the "great horse show office meltdown." For years, I was known as the trainer "who has the crazy client," even though I never again had a repeat offender of that behavior. I was known as the trainer who could ride well, yes, but who could also sling a blathering adult woman over her shoulder and haul her from the office.

Does Anyone Know What Day It Is?

2008-07-21T14:09:00.000-07:00

One day last week, I woke up in a strange bed and tried to recall what day it was. Aha! I remembered that I had to ride a young horse in the Materiale class at 3pm today and therefore today must be Saturday. Working my way back from that information, I determined that we were in the month of July, I must be in the town of Woodside (where the show was being held), and I was therefore in a bed at my friend's house in a nearby town. Whew!

Welcome to the life of a horse trainer. We equine professionals spend so much time on the road that entire weeks blur together. In fact, I don't even remember June of this year. I'm wondering if leap years ever eliminate whole months. Anyway, I sometimes think the life of a traveling circus performer may indeed bear more stability than what we horse trainers have.

I was giving a clinic recently somewhere on the coast of California after a five-day stretch of teaching and competing in different towns when a gentleman asked me where I live. I couldn't remember the last time I slept in my own bed.

"My car?" I feebly offered, thinking that might be the most accurate thing to say.

He had read on my web site that I live in Santa Cruz, Calif.

"Oh yeah. Well, yes, I have an address there," I answered.

He looked puzzled.

"I mean, in theory I do live there... if I were ever there, that is."

You see, the nice gentleman fell into the category of people who don't own horses and are unfamiliar with the vagabond lifestyle necessary to sustain oneself in this industry. I was at a party last night with several other such folks. Pleasant innocent folks who "ooh and ahh" when they hear I train horses for a living. Their eyes widen, their mouths turn up rapidly into giddy smiles. I know what they're thinking, these people who have to work in offices all day under fluorescent lights. They think I lead the most glamorous life on the planet.

Wow, they think, she works with horses all day! Of course, to them this means that I live in a world much like the one portrayed in National Velvet. I wear fancy hats with feathers in them. I drink mint juleps every day at 4pm. I have a stable boy who lives to polish my boots and wrap my horses' legs. I gallop like Lady Godiva through lush green countryside in the late mornings. All while collecting a paycheck.

"It sounds more glamorous than it is," I admitted to the party-goers, wondering if the goo on my right arm was dried horse slobber or fly spray. Little do they know I've never had a mint julep in my life and I think the last time I galloped through lush green countryside was in 1996. But I can live for weeks out of one suitcase, and like most horse people, I can sleep positively anywhere. I may not immediately know where I am when I wake up, but I can usually toggle together those details after a cup of coffee and a phone call to my groom!

A few weeks ago, I was driving down a highway somewhere here in California when my mother called. I was admittedly a bit groggy from shaking off the previous day's heat exhaustion, horse show fatigue, and general weariness. Nonetheless, I was leaving a horse event in one town for another event in a town a few hours away. Characteristically chipper, my mom asked where I was.

I looked at the road signs and then at the brown hillsides. Then, I looked at the other cars on the road with me. Embarassingly, an answer did not present itself immediately. I forgot for a moment if I were leaving a horse event or heading to another one, or both.

"You know, Mom, I'm not really sure," came my answer. "Hopefully, I'll figure it out by the time I get where I'm going."

God Bless the Mares

2008-07-16T20:55:00.000-07:00

My sanity as a trainer had been called into question numerous times. The reason is because I love mares. Most trainers-- perhaps possessing better judgement than myself-- prefer to work with geldings for the simple fact that they are easier to work with. Much easier.

With mares, you get unpredictable moods, sometimes erratic work ethics, alpha issues, etc. Basically, you need to spend twice as much time to accomplish the same thing with a mare that you do with a gelding. But as lacking in reason as it is, the fact remains that I love them.

I blame my affection for mares on my father. Put a bitchy mare in front of my dad and he goes all soft and mushy. He still denies it, but the doey look in his eye when a mare is trying to kick him or bite his arm off is indisputable.

My father belongs to the small percentage of the horse world that lacks enough self-preservation to compete in Combined Driving Events. To the unacquainted, these events include hurling a horse and carriage through death-defying obstacles at the speed of sound. For these competitions, my father was well-known for always driving an ornery mare that no other trainer in his right mind would hitch to a carriage.

At one competition in Gladstone, New Jersey, my dad galloped out of an obstacle, his mare kicking apart his carriage until pieces began to fall off. The crowd gasped. The mare squealed and charged, champing on the bit. My Dad could be heard softly uttering "Adda girl, git up. Good girl." I think he may have actually been smiling as his carriage fell to pieces around him.

Somehow, he managed to finish the course in a record-setting time and win the competition. Afterwards, he sponged down his mare like a proud father. The rest of us wanted to kill her for any number of reasons: public humiliation, financial loss of broken harness and carriage, knowing the next competition would be a repeat of the same, etc. My father, though, gently patted her and went to collect his blue ribbon.

Over the years, he drove numerous feisty mares to unlikely victories. Once, a mare he was conditioning at home took off in a full gallop headed straight down a busy road. The fact that his life was in jeopardy seemed not to phase my Dad, who decided his best option was to stop fighting with her to slow down. Instead, he stood up in the cart and pronounced, "Okay, you wanna run, girl? Then, let's run!" We heard her thundering hooves against the road from miles away. Next thing we knew, she streaked past our farm like a race horse with my Dad standing upright in the carriage, chariot-style, holding on to the reins to keep from flying over the back of his seat.

When I began training professionally on my own, I quickly realized that I, too, was cursed with this affection for mares. While sane enough to avoid Combined Driving Events, I'm still askew enough to always have a far greater number of mares in my barn than geldings. And when their moodiness impedes my day, I blame not them but my father!

A Face Only a Mother Can Love

2008-07-08T14:10:00.000-07:00

Another foaling season has come and gone, and this means top breeders across the country have put a new crop of future champions on the ground. It also means that hundreds of 'backyard breeders' have put their own versions of good horse flesh on the ground.

Let's face it: we all know someone who has too much time on his or her hands and an old hay-bellied mare in the back field that they decide suddenly needs to procreate (as if there aren't already enough horses on the planet). Next thing we know, this person employs his or her entire equine reproductive knowledge, which amounts to having read one article in Equus magazine a few years ago, finds a stallion with a cheap stud fee, and puts the mare in foal.

A year later, the new "breeder" is standing back looking at the world's most poorly assembled, ugly baby horse deciding it is so exceptional that its mother must be bred again immediately to produce another such offspring. And so on and so forth. In the industry, we call this "barn blindness." It is defined as the sheer inability to see one's own horses for what they actually are.

Horse overpopulation aside, I find this trait somewhat charming. Lord knows I was an ugly duckling as a child and my parents had the audacity to shield me from that fact. So, when backyard breeders see their nonathletic and unattractive foals as future world champions, my heart patters a little. In fact, I like to keep abreast of the barn blindness epidemic by scanning the horses for sale classifieds.

I find folks "proudly" offering for sale a Quarter Horse-donkey-Warmblood cross that more reputable breeders would only consider a genetic mistake. I find promises of "highly talented" draft horse/Arabian mixes. I read captions to photos under a Neanderthal-looking head that say: gorgeous refined face. And see, that's the beauty of barn blindness. Where I see a prehistoric looking profile that's barely recognizable as belonging to a horse, the animal's backyard breeder sees a majestic representation of the Equus species.

After many jolly years of poking fun at those suffering from barn blindness, my father fell into the backyard breeding habit last year. A highly successful carriage driving trainer, my father is also a stubborn New Englander. This means that once he arrives at an opinion (after much hemming and hawing...), he absolutely cannot be talked out of it. So it went last year when he reported his plan to breed his Hackney mare to a Friesian stallion.

"Are you serious?" I asked him and then gave him a feverish explanation for why this was a poor idea. Neither mare or stallion had good temperaments nor conformation. Moreover, who on earth had ever heard of a Hackney-Friesian cross?

Well, Rosie (the Hackney) needed to do something since she'd only been standing in a field for the past three years and he had this Friesian stallion right here in his barn, so why not?, he said. And--voila-- my father evolved from trainer to 'breeder.' Foaling season came and went and I didn't hear from my father. Worried that something may have gone wrong for the mare, I called him to check in.

Don't worry, Rosie was fine, except for now being the mother of the world's least desirable offspring. My father hadn't called me because his foal experiment had yielded a baby animal that for the first week wasn't easily identified as a horse. Dad said it looked like something between a dinosaur and a Great Dane. Lovely. He admitted that the backyard breeding habit may not have been a good idea...

Then, within a few weeks, his barn blindness started to develop and he stopped seeing the Hackney-Friesian for what it was. Suddenly, he started speaking fondly of it, planning a future for it, speaking of its "remarkable" looks and so on and so forth. He started referring to 'hidden talents,' the way a parent talks themselves into agreeing to let their child with two left feet enter a dance contest. I asked him what he'd named the foal.

Bucket head.

Huh?

"Well, yeah. I figured the name fit 'em, because if you put a bucket over his head, he's not a bad lookin' horse," Dad explained. And there you have it. A future world champion with a bucket on his head.

Me and the Weirdo(s)

2008-07-06T20:01:00.000-07:00

This week, I want to give a shout-out to my favorite woman in the world: my mother.

Back in 1997, she wrote and published a somewhat esoteric book titled "Dressage in the Fourth Dimension" (http://www.dressageinthefourth.com/). To say she was ahead of her time would be like describing the Great Wall of China as a sort-of-long fence.

I read the book with a Thesaurus close at hand, a dictionary, an encyclopedia, and a large glass of wine. It was heavy stuff. In a nutshell, the book takes a metaphysical look at the animal-human relationship. Admittedly, metaphysics does not come up often in the context of half-halts and shoulder-ins, but as I'm trying to get across, my mother is not your ordinary horse gal. She paints, plays music, climbs mountains, kayaks rivers, teaches philosophy, and rides horses like she is still 30 years old. Before I digress, let me celebrate (with her) that "Dressage in the Fourth Dimension" is being re-published this fall by New World Library and the horse world is finally ready for it!

Being raised by two horse trainers was undoubtedly the best childhood any kid could be blessed with. Even though my parents always lectured, "You don't know how lucky you are," I did know how blessed I was. I never took a day for granted on that darling little farm of ours. Alongside my parents, I broke horses, reassured horses, conditioned horses, and loved horses. And never once did I ever wish to be anywhere but out there in the country with them running their little training business. Anyway, one of the many reasons I admire my mom so much is that she put me on a horse at three-and-a-half years old. I have been astride ever since. And I can't imagine life any other way.

Mom and I used to ride together every day and somehow it forged an unshakable bond to each other. You see, my mother was incapable of simply riding a horse. What she could do was showboat. This is best described as turning any mediocre horse that she happened to be riding into a show-stopper the second a crowd formed. People stopped by our farm all the time. And when they did, my mother pulled a horse from the barn, hopped aboard and gave them a show they'd never forget.

Something happened in those moments when spectators clustered outside the arena door. Under my mom, a perfectly ordinary horse became charged with the desire to perform like an Olympic contender. Nags suddenly danced and pranced. Ill-tempered youngsters forgot their antics and went boldly through their movements, with Bach or Vivaldi blaring through the loudspeakers.

I remember this vividly because it was during a particular Bach fugue that my mother performed a rather brilliant extended trot across the diagonal upon a normally weedy Arabian to the sheer delight of six women gathered and gasping near the arena... and rammed straight into me at the end of the diagonal. She smashed into me so hard that we both undoubtedly suffered whiplash, my pony crashed into the wall, I flew over the front of my saddle, and my mother kept on riding by.

It was in that moment that I realized my mother was a little off kilter, but even though my leg throbbed, I couldn't help but idolize her. She imbibed passion, a rare spirit of leadership, and a remarkable knack for not caring when she slammed her horse into another rider during the extended trot.

Since then, we have ridden horses together all over Europe. We've gone in search of dressage in Vienna, Amsterdam, London, Lisbon, Seville. Instead, we've found pig farms, drunkards, bad food, snow, and a few good horses along the way. We have laughed so hard that we forgot what was funny in the first place. We have disagreed, argued, tried to out-ride each other, leaned on each other, and been perplexed together. Horses have been the glue that holds us together through life's journeys. My mom used horses to teach me about patience, kindness, and what she calls the "spiritual economy" in the universe. Basically, live life with an open heart and life will give you back the same. This is the stuff in her book.

All of us have had someone special in our lives who has helped or nurtured our obsessive love of horses, whether through encouragement, financial help, mentoring, a supportive spouse, etc. For me, it has been my mom. She has humbled me, humored me, and poured me a beer at the end of the day, reminding me not to take life too seriously. One day in Amsterdam, she put her feet up at the pub after our lesson, tipped back her chair and asked "Hey, did you see that hell-of-a-good extended trot of mine during our lesson?" I savor how her face is beaming, how delighted she is in her performance and whether or not a crowd of people noticed, too.

"No, Mom, I didn't, because for once you didn't smash into me."

This week, I raise my glass to you, Mom and say congratulations on the success of your book and for being the off-kilter woman that you are.

Does this Spandex Make me Look Fat?

2008-07-06T14:39:00.001-07:00

Unfortunately, I've become an avid mountain biker in the past year. I say unfortunately because it's yet another activity that requires wearing a skin tight outfit.

It was already bad enough coming home from the barn every day in my riding clothes and mustering up the courage to stop at the supermarket where invariably, some mid-30 year old male asks "have you been out riding?" which he asks as a way of excusing himself from staring at my backside in ultra-tight breeches. What Mr. Supermarket fails to realize is that NOBODY wants attention drawn to them in their riding clothes. Terribly outdated in style, uncomfortable, and awkward, riding clothes definitely rank at the bottom of the fashion ladder within the sporting world.

I used to think dismal fashions applied only to my discipline of dressage. But after closer inspection, I concluded that, no, the horse world in general looks straight out of Vaudeville.

Whenever I start to really lament the necessity of tight breeches for English riding, I go and watch a Western class at a show. Now, those riders have some funny outfits. Shiny belt buckles the size of dinner plates, enormous hats, gaudy shirts, flapping fringes dangling off nearly every surface from saddle to pants to gloves. To me, they look like they belong more in a parade-- or circus-- than in an equestrian competition. And this does my heart good because my outfit seems a lot less strange.

Of course, Western apparel pales in comparison to the cabaret styles on display in a Saddle Seat class. Probably not since the 1940s have so many people under one roof donned derbies and tailcoats. Neon-colored tailcoats, I might add. However, those styles might seem positively modern compared to what carriage driving folks pull out of their closets. I grew up on the back of my father's carriage and I probably never stopped asking him the purpose of his lap robe or "apron" as drivers call them. Weren't aprons for kitchens? How did they contribute to one's driving skills? It's just part of the outfit, my Dad always replied. Also part of the outfit was a funny looking straw hat, a blazer, and thick leather gloves. Whoever introduced carriage driving to this country was obviously a huge fan of The Great Gatsby.

Equestrian apparel remains far beyond my mountain biking outfits in terms of absurdity. But it also has something really good going for it, in my opinion. Once you get past the discomfort of artificial fabric materials and the fact that they cling to you in all the wrong places, riding apparel forces us to give up being so self-conscious. You get past any shyness about wearing tight clothes or looking silly, because after all, you're wearing the threads necessary to do what you love.

So, when Mr. Supermarket asks me his ridiculous question "Have you been out riding?," I look him square in the eye with my best sarcastic tone and answer "Well, I sure didn't put on this outfit just to come to the store..."

Are We Having Fun Yet?

2008-07-03T06:15:00.000-07:00

It's horse show season, which means riders nationwide are cultivating ulcers, emptying their savings accounts, and dreaming up stories to explain the disappearance of said savings accounts to their husbands. All in the name of fun.

Horse shows are perplexing things. Mostly, I know riders find them fun in some way, which is why they choose to participate in the first place. But there are endless side effects to showing that most riders either overlook or, in a masochistic way, also must view as fun. These include: 1.) turning purple from holding their breath with nerves. 2.) Pacing around in circles talking to themselves anxiously. 3.) Suddenly being agitated by every judge, fellow competitor, and umbrella-toting spectator. Some riders opt to chug a beer before they compete to calm themselves down. Others let the effects of sleep deprivation render them delirious and therefore less stressed.

All the alleged fun aside, though, when you consider the sheer amount of money and time that goes into horse showing, it does come with a hefty dose of stress. In fact, if a job were to deplete someone so much emotionally, physically, and mentally, the employer would be called deplorable. Obviously, though, when a person self-inflicts the same stress, it's called a hobby.

As a trainer, I spend a lot of time at shows and I am always mesmerized by the scene of women in the throes of exhaustion, fretting, and jitters. Why do they put themselves through this? I wonder. I think I've found the answer: amnesia. Yes, I believe horse owners suffer amnesia which settles in approximately 10 days following a big competition. My conclusion draws from the scenario outlined below that plays out frequently at shows:

A rider will come to her senses briefly and realize that wearing a wool coat in 100-degree heat is somewhat miserable. Her head is fuzzy from lack of sleep and probably too much cheap wine at the show's 'welcome party' last night. Her horse's bucking antics in the warm-up arena this morning were actually terrifying rather than endearing. Her trainer is annoying her by pointing out things she already knows, like the fact she would have scored higher marks if her horse had not spooked and bolted for the gate during her dressage test. And in this moment of clarity, she vows never to show again. There just doesn't seem to be much point in it...

Then, a week passes and her horse is back to his normal angelic self at home. In fact, he seems more gorgeous than ever. And then, roughly 10 days after the competition where she vowed never to show again, she has forgotten her embarrassing performance, the heat exhaustion, and worrying how her thighs looked in white breeches. Totally forgotten. Next thing she knows, she's in her trainer's office signing up for the next show. And she's so excited about it that she cancels her previously planned weekend trip to the wine country with her husband for it. He, of course, will scratch his head and ask, "But, honey, didn't you say you were never showing again?"

Glancing up from the checkbook (while ordering new clothes for the next show), she replies.

"No, I never said that."