I’m not sure where to even start with this topic.

Riding horses is complicated.

OK, not really.

Riding a horse is just keeping the horse between you and the ground.

Right??

Riding horses WELL is complicated.

And this crazy sport called eventing is…………….. extremely complicated.

I was walking a Prelim course with a coach last year when it finally dawned on me just how tough this sport is.

The very 1st combination on the course was a sunken road. The 1st element (the road part was super tight).

This meant the horse had to have a smaller than normal stride to safely (& nicely) drop into the road, stride across and jump out.
But then the distance from the up bank to a sizeable vertical was quite long.

So………………

Early on in the course when you may not have all the controls working that well.

You immediately had a question that required not only good control, but changing your horses stride length in a fraction of a second from long to short back to long.

That was my AH HAH moment when I figured out that this sport was vastly harder than I ever imagined.

As a kid all I really remember was pointing my horse at the jumps and hanging on.

Back to the subject…………… emotional fitness.

Horses, and horse shows in particular have a way of revealing the “chinks in the armor”

 when it comes to emotional maturity and control…………………..

At a recent show I witnessed a grown up (that’s someone over 25 in my world), having a sobbing hysterical fit………………….

over…………………….

A less than ideal dressage score…………………..

Yeah, unh huh.

It reminded me of one of my fondest childhood memories.

I did not have a horse.

BUT
I was willing to ride anything anyone would let me.

So my trainer took me to a hunter show – horseless.
My “job” at the show was to ride in all the classes that a pony’s original rider was refusing to ride in.

Let me explain.

Morgan, Madison, and Maxwell (yeah, really) all had uber expensive hunter ponies.

These ponies were perfect in every way. Quiet, unflappable, pretty, jump anything you point them at, and perfectly capable of bringing home a blue ribbon every time.

However,

Should Morgan, Madison or Maxwell happen to get a red ribbon in a class, they would run to their trailers sobbing, and refuse to ride the rest of the show.

Which was where I would come in…………………….

The trainer would put me on their ponies for all the rest of the classes they were supposed to ride in.  I would typically come home with a basket full of blue ribbons.

I was the poor kid without a pony, who couldn’t afford to go to the shows.

Thanks to the emotional immaturity of these young ladies, I got to show expensive ponies on their parents dime.

Every time they had a tantrum, I learned about emotional fitness and I got to become a better rider………..

One jump at a time.

On their ponies.