I couldn't end the season with my brain farts at Heritage Park, so I signed up for Texas Rose Horse Trials in November (conveniently also close to my sister in Dallas).
I decided to go down early to take a lesson with my sister's coach and hopefully have a less strenuous and stressful experience for Stromboli. Thursday morning, I got in my frosty truck in the early-morning dark and drove for two hours. In the middle-of-nowhere Oklahoma, I pulled into a gas station and realized that I forgot my purse at home. It did not look like my airhead streak was over. I considered scratching from the competition and heading home right then. Luckily, I had paypal and my sister helped me get an Exxon Mobil Ap set up on my phone, so I ended up driving all the way to Texas without my drivers license and having my husband overnight my purse to my sister's apartment. I had a great lesson Thursday night with Lauren Lambert at Southern Cross Equestrian. Stromboli felt like a real prelim dressage horse and we had a very solid sitting trot, some really nice transitions, and acceptable leg yields and lengthenings. But....by the time we got to the actual show grounds on Friday, he was frantic and terrible. Saturday morning for dressage he was furious, not eating, had hives, was super sore on his left hindquarters, and every aid I had didn't seem to work well. We scored badly in dressage just like usual. For show jumping we picked up one-rail. It wasn't a great course, but we got lucky --and it was still probably better than many SJ courses we've ridden at this level. By Sunday he seemed back to normal, relaxed & happy. Texas Rose is known for having a stout XC course and this one did not disappoint. I felt like I was heading out onto a Rolex course. I rode every single fence and it went according to plan. I took some long routes & rode conservatively so as not to repeat my previous mistake. I never felt nervous or panicky, and was thrilled to gallop through the finish line clean & just a little over time. After my ride, I began cooling my horse out as my sister checked scores. She informed me that I was listed as TE. I couldn't believe it. I had done so many stupid brainless things this season, but I knew that I had total control this round & cleanly cleared every fence. There was one fence that was removed from my division right before my trip that I was a bit concerned about, but it was clearly flagged off & unjumpable during my ride. I also had jumped the wider part of a corner when Stromboli got a bit spooked by someone on the course, but there was definitely no disputing that his entire body went between the flags. I ran up the show office where the TD informed me that I had jumped the wrong fence 15 (down bank) & the jump judge had confirmed this with another witness. I still couldn't believe it. The turn to the intermediate down bank would have been different from the one I rode, and I could clearly remember thinking through my pace and approach to the correct fence. I was absolutely crushed & felt COMPLETELY INSANE. I felt like I had just woken up and someone told me that the year was 2015 and I had hallucinated an entire year that didn't happen. Luckily my sister had watched most of my ride and didn't think I had jumped the incorrect fence. RNS VIDEOMEDIA was on site, so I raced over to their tent to see if I could see some video footage of my ride, at least to justify in my mind my total lapse of consciousness. I can't tell you how incredibly nice & helpful these guys were to get the video of my round up on a camcorder immediately. Sure enough, I watched my ride.......the evidence was indisputable. I JUMPED THE CORRECT FENCE! I ran back to the main office, went with the TD back to the RNS video tent. I finally got the correct score for my round. I can't tell you how defeated & insane I would feel right now if I hadn't had that video evidence! I thank god for the awesome guys at RNS & I will be very hesitant to run XC again, especially at this venue, without having people I know on course watching & preferably videoing. I ended up placing 7th in the large and competitive division. On the long ride home I reflected on my weekend & the 2016 season, scoring issues aside, I could not have cared less about the ribbon. I achieved a personal best score at the Preliminary Level and I finally felt like I was a contender. I started the season having some difficulties controlling Stromboli at the training level and even put him up for sale. I felt like he was nervous and miserable, and would be happier in a different situation. I think fate was looking out for me --only one person ever even sat on him, and I'm so glad I decided to commit fully to making the best out of my current situation. Dressage be-damned, he's the best jumping horse I've ever sat on in my life. It's going to be a long winter trying to keep this confidence, but I will keep reminding myself about the serious prelim horse I have and what an incredible feeling it is to be able to jump the green flags. Who knows what next year will bring, but we are officially qualified for a CCI1* now! SEE THE VIDEO THAT SAVED ME:
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If there's one thing I know about horses, it's that things NEVER go according to plan. I had planned on ending my season with Stromboli at Heritage Park in KS at the end of October. Dressage went well, but I got very stressed before my test due to the bit checker having some issues with my unconventional leather bit and the bell for me to go in the arena seemed to be greatly delayed. Needless to say, I turned the wrong way and got my first error of course --on a dressage test I knew front & back and had ridden a dozen times before. We still picked up our best score at Prelim yet, by 6 points. This was a very bad sign. I felt confident after a good run at Feather Creek, but by the time I walked the course at Heritage Park, the jumps looked HUGE.....and I mean HUGE...and set on weird half-strides --not good for my "attack the course" kind of horse who has been known to put one-stride in two-strides multiple times on course. Things were going well, until they weren't. I was blazing fast...and completely neglected to slow down and set him up for a turn to a very difficult ABC coffin. I blasted through the turn, tried to correct, but came in so poorly my horse had no way of jumping the A-element. Poor Stromboli picked up his very first 20 on course. I circled, approached, and he rode perfectly through it. He blasted around the rest of the course like it was nothing. 50% of the division picked up stops, run-outs, falls, or some kind of elimination on course, so I was in good company. Show Jumping the next day went fairly well with just one-rail. I ended up 11th out of 20 riders. I left this event very proud of myself for finishing with confidence and not letting one mishap ruin my entire weekend, but I still felt like I let my horse down. A small (ok, really a big) part of me was a bit worried about my mental state & nervousness in competition. Being an equine professional was always my dream, but as I grew older and had to face the reality of making enough money to eat and live, I had to make some tough choices about what I was going to do. I choose not to support myself solely by profit off horses, boarding and training, because it allows me to be able to make more ethical choices.
When you are living off ramen and working 14 hour days, how easy will it be for you to tell the person trying your sale horse that the horse might be a bit too much for them? Will you be able to tell owners that their horse still isn't ready to compete or move up a level even though you've been working with it for X months (or years)? Will you be able to resist throwing that horse that's just a little too skinny an extra flake of alfalfa even though the owner doesn't want to pay for it? There's very very little money in this business and you will have to ruthlessly nickel and dime your clients in order to be successful. You will need to have the business sense and fortitude to fire bad clients (which includes horses that may be too difficult or destructive, even though they have nice owners). Horses get hurt, colic, die, behave badly, etc. You will have to be able to deal with these situations as well as be strong enough to counsel other people through them. You will always be working, the work will never be done, and you will have to be "on" when other people are off work (after 5pm, all day on weekends, etc). If you live on site, you will never be able to take a sick day, or even veg out at home while clients are on site without them thinking you are lazy/rude/etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg....I have a BA in English and an MBA. I have a small boarding farm w/ 10 horses. My husband and I do all the work on the farm and and also both work a 9-5 jobs. Even though we both end up working 12-14 hr days I thank god for my office job every day. It allows me to have enough money to feed my horses well, continue to improve my farm, compete, take lessons, and even take the occasional vacation! This season started off at Feather Creek horse trials, where things didn't exactly go as planned (really...do they ever?).
After such a nice run at Champagne Run at the Park, I decided that Stromboli was ready to move back up to the Preliminary Level, so we entered Feather Creek Horse Trials. I decided to try a new warm-up routine at this event --NO WARMUP AT ALL. Shocking, daring, and controversial. I actually did warm him up a bit at the walk and did a little trot since our test was at 7:37AM and I didn't want him to be stiff. He trotted beautifully around the arena, even allowed me to sit the trot, and I thought for sure I was in for a beautiful test. What a surprise, he entered the ring like a drunken fish, did a mini-rear, and then was resistant and tense for the entire test. But we got through it. And I wasn't disappointed or tired and didn't spend hours preparing for this stressful event. We got a 47, slightly better than the usual Prelim score. With dressage behind us, we headed to a tough looking stadium course. Luckily I have no idea how tall 3'7" really is, so apparently I've been jumping much higher at home and the course didn't look huge, but was quite complicated. We did exactly what my coach would have told me not to, and came in with not enough energy to the first jump and tapped the rail. He was great through the rest of the course, but I mis-read the last fence horribly and we also tapped that one. Two rails down! Not great, but not horrible! The cross-country course looked ok, although a few combinations seemed nearly impossible, especially an ABC coffin with a HUGE wide ditch in the middle and a very tight turn to a narrow C element. The water also had a very large duck with a steep drop into the water. I will have to write an entire other post on how big my fear was going into this course, but all of it vanished the second I left the start box. Stromboli absolutely sailed through the course. I don't think he missed one distance, he never once fought me on any turn. The ABC coffin rode perfectly. I felt like I was riding a Rolex horse as he dropped into the water with perfect form. He handled the HUGE square tables by taking off at the perfect place and jumping a good 6" over them. I had to slip my reins to give him his head to get down some very large double drop banks and came upon the right hand turn to the corner with no right rein at all, but he turned off my left leg/left rein and jumped it right out of stride. I stupidly veered off the trail at the wrong place at one point, costing us probably a good 10 time penalties. I am still kicking myself for that air headed move, but he was right on my minute markers until that point and I know we could have come close to making the time if not for that stupid maneuver. We were one of only two people to finish the course without jump penalties! With the time, rails, and really bad dressage, we ended the weekend in 3rd place. But the placing didn't even matter. I completed another prelim, and did it proficiently. No scary jumps, no near misses, no hanging on and hoping for the best, just a really nice honest ride. There's no better way to say it than to quote Michael Jung, "He gave me a really good feeling out there!" Three years. Doesn't sound like very long does it? It sure feels that way. Three years ago, I rode Stromboli in his very first horse trials. He made his unfortunate debut at The Kentucky Horse Park, a show that certainly has a lot of atmosphere. We finished on a dressage score of 47.5. He was completely out of control, which was very much unexpected to me as he had been a pretty steady ride before that point. Luckily he was better for the jumping phases or else I think he would have had to find a new home and new job very quickly. Last week I returned to the Kentucky Horse Park, the site of Rolex, North America's only 4* event, and the heart and soul of thoroughbred country. I knew dressage was going to be an issue with Stromboli, it always is. I have been experimenting with everything: warm-up, no warm-up, day before warm-up/practice test, galloping, not galloping, jumping tack, hacking, wearing him out on the lunge line, coaching, not getting coaching, practicing the test at home a lot, not practicing dressage much at all. Nothing worked. He was horrible in warm up, and I almost scratched from the event. I even had emergency coaching from my sister's (who lives in Dallas) coach. She told me I was sitting a "chair seat." Seriously, it had gotten that bad. After hours of atrocious riding, 45 minutes of lunging, and generally dealing with a hateful and angry animal, my body was completely destroyed and I was feeling extremely defeated. But then something interesting happened....we went into the ring......AND things started to get a little better. For the first time, Stromboli was more rideable in the ring than he was in the warm up. I could think about my figures, my transitions, and I felt calm. We still got a 45.5, a few points worse than usual at the training level. The next morning was show jumping. I forgot my medical arm band and had to make an emergency trip back to the trailer in the campground to get it. While I was driving there a golf cart hit my truck. I was frazzled. I only had a 15 min warm-up. Stromboli was back to normal, he was jumping well. We went in the ring after only jumping 5 jumps and the oxer twice. My round was smooth as butter....he was perfect, it felt easy. He was adjustable, we got our strides and lines. It was a double-clear! The cross-country course looked tough. The water looked especially tough with a downhill approach to a large roll top, then a bending line to a real drop into the water. Stromboli left the start box and was right on the entire time. We blasted through the course with the second fastest time in our division! Although we didn't finish in the ribbons due to competitiveness of the division, I was more than thrilled with his performance and so happy to have another safe and confidence building event under our belts. Horses are my passion, but they are absolutely no way to make money. Early on, I had some important mentors who counseled me to keep my love for horses alive, by not having to depend on them to stay alive. In addition to managing Always August Farm and the care of its 10-12 horses every day, I also work a 40-hour work week as a marketing director for a management consulting firm. Here's an excerpt from an article I wrote for The Zweig Letter, our weekly management publication for the architecture and engineering industry. What did I learn about running an A/E/P firm from a 62-year old former British equestrian Olympian? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
I recently had the opportunity to ride in a two-day clinic with Lucinda Green, a British equestrian and journalist who competes in eventing. She is most well-known for winning the Badminton Horse Trials a record six times, on six different horses, and she also took home team silver at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Just like in business, in horseback riding you are never done learning. I try to keep myself educated through reading, watching others ride, and occasional visits to my coach. When I heard that Lucinda Green, the star of one of my favorite computer games from my youth, an Olympian, and one of the best jumping instructors in the world, was coming to a friend’s farm in Starkville, Mississippi, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ride with her. Lucinda Green did not disappoint. Like any good coach she was tough and clear about areas that needed improvement, but also encouraging of each rider’s individual strengths. Her unique and clearly defined philosophies about riding left me with a lot to think about in my riding, and had some clear parallels to running a successful business. In cross country, one phase of the sport of eventing has a rider galloping at speed over 20 or so solid obstacles. Penalties are incurred for stops or fly-bys, for circling, and for going over an optimum time. Your A/E Firm is like your horse – it weighs a lot more than you do, it has a mind of its own, and it’s responsible for carrying you through a variety of situations. You can hold the reins and try to dictate every single step, but sooner or later your horse will falter or you will encounter some unexpected terrain. No matter how tightly you hold or how strong your arms are, you will never be able to control every movement of your horse. In fact, the act of trying will only set you up for disaster. The last thing you want is a power struggle with a 1,000-pound animal on your way into a solid four-foot fence. Do you want a power struggle with your firm in the face of disaster? Absolutely not. Every person in your firm has an important job to do, but they also have free will. You can harness this free will by empowering your people to use their own creativity and energy, or you can try to micromanage every aspect of every person’s job. As a rider you have to use your eyes, legs, and hands to get your horse pointed in the right direction, then the rest is up to them. As a firm leader, you have to get your firm headed in the right direction, but you certainly can’t work on every part of every project and sell more work, answer the phones, and do all the accounting. As a rider, your eyes are for intention. You always have to focus on where you are going next or your horse won’t know where to go and the rest of your body can’t do its job properly. As a firm leader, you have to have a clear and established vision. Your number one job is not to put your stamp on every project, but rather set the trajectory for where you are going next. Your legs are the gas pedal for the horse. A rider’s legs move a horse forward, but they also help with steering. As a firm leader it’s your job to create energy in your firm that will move it forward. A positive culture, enthusiasm, creativity, all these things will create new opportunities for your firm and be extremely valuable to surviving hardships. A rider’s hands are for steering and putting the brakes on when necessary. Lucinda stressed that it’s OK to slow your horse down when faced with a complex or narrow obstacle that demands a lot of accuracy, but you can never stop the forward motion of your horse’s legs. As a firm leader you can never stop your firm come to a standstill. It always has to grow and move in a focused direction. Some other lessons I learned from Lucinda Green:
One of the things I treasure the most from my early riding days is the wonderful friendships I made with truly good people. Despite moving halfway across the country, I've still been able to stay in contact with some of these people, a few of which are now professional riders/farm owners. Two summers ago, I got to go spend time with my friend Heather Maytham at her farm in horse paradise aka Ocala. This year, I got to go to my friend Jessie's farm in Starkville, MS for a two-day Lucinda Green clinic. I rode Stromboli in the clinic and brought Piney along for the experience.
This has been an odd year for the horses. After working so hard all winter, it all seemed to be for nothing. Stromboli was difficult at our first event in March, and then every event I entered or thought about entering thereafter was sidelined by something. My riding problems have been numerous, but the clinics and lessons and studying has finally enabled me to articulate some of them. The usual "bad dressage" with Stromboli, is really a lack of connection, ability to move his shoulders, and general tension/lack of submission/nervousness at shows. My jumping issues have been related to this "lack of connection" as well as the increased height and width of prelim fences. The size of these fences, the unstable horse in front of me, and the numerous publicized recent tragedies involving deaths of horses and and riders on XC, was making me scared. Scared riders pull. Everyone says, "kick on," but it's incredibly hard to kick at a massive 3'7" table that's over 4 feet wide while you are sliding down a hill nearly sideways. I first heard about Lucinda Green nearly 20 years ago as she was a star in a computer game I had. She's now known as one of the world's best jumping/eventing clinicians. She is the 1982 World Champion and a two-time European Champion (1975–77). She also won World team Gold (1982), three European team golds (1977, 1985, 1987) and an Olympic silver medal in the team event in 1984. Between 1973 and 1984, she won a record six times at the Badminton Horse Trials (on six different horses). She also won the Burghley Horse Trials in 1977 and 1981. Lucinda's clinic focused on training your horse to keep you safe. There were a lot of skinnies and odd distances. On the second day she had us jumping through/into/out of mud, a stream, a coop/skinny/ditch/skinny/coop gymnastic combination, and finally, designing our own XC course where she really got after me about my previously mentioned issues and fear of galloping large tables. Lucinda also switched Stromboli's bit after noticing a small injury on the right side of his mouth and how uncomfortable he seemed in the bridle. I'm supposed to spend two weeks riding him without a bit and then find something similar to the very gentle leather covered full-cheek bit that I borrowed from her during the clinic. Lucinda was so encouraging while also being direct and critical of areas that needed improvement. Her jumping exercising on the first day gave me so many ideas for helping my students and working with the young horses. I left this clinic knowing Stromboli and I have made tremendous progress, and with a new confidence to gallop large tables! I absolutely can't wait to teach another lesson, work with the baby horses, and get Stromboli to an Event! Summertime always makes me a little nostalgic. When I wasn't at camp, growing up I spent almost every day of summer at the barn (usually Coursebrook Farm in Sherborn, MA). My dad or a babysitter would drop me off in the morning after breakfast, and then pick me up again in the evening before dinner. A whole crew of us hung out at the barn all day, riding our horses, ordering pizza delivery to the barn for lunch, going on trail rides, exercising other horses. Despite a few questionable choices (swimming in the mud pond comes to mind), we were extremely responsible and careful with our horses. We organized the tack room, cleaned the grain room, mucked stalls, set up jump courses, organized winter blankets, we "secretly" groomed boarders horses we thought were too dirty, we cleaned and repacked tack trunks. We harassed the vet and farrier. We watched every single lesson, even the "boring" dressage lessons taught by 80-year old Germans to 60 year old arthritic women. We were not being paid, and generally our efforts were self-directed. With a few exceptions, I can't help but notice that most of the kids I have run into in barns lately would never dream of spending the whole day cleaning, organizing, and picking stalls/paddocks. At the sake of sounding like a crotchety grandma: Kids these days....Cleaning their own stuff --only on special occasions! Noticing the other horses on the farm and seeing if they need anything ---absolutely not! Checking their own horse's water/hay --that's what they pay for board for! If any extra time is spent, it's only so they can take a cool picture to post somewhere. I recently had someone come out to ride one of my horses --she barely brushed the horse, it literally had mud clumps on various parts of its body when she showed up in the ring to ride. When she was done riding she didn't even rinse the bit on the bridle she used, and the horse was put back in its stall without even remembering to latch the door! I have had a lot of parents tell me how much their kid would really love to spend all day at the barn with the beautiful horses, but from what I've seen most kids would rather be somewhere comfortable with AC and an iPhone. Has social media and smartphones destroyed the sense of boredom that would provoke a 14 year old to wash 43 feed buckets on their own accord? Is the next generation so entitled that they can't even clean up after themselves or maintain their own or borrowed equipment? I recently read that every generation feels that the next generation feels this way about the next. Am I really getting so old that this is happening to me? I certainly don't want to generalize and disparage an entire generation. I know there are definitely still some hardworking barn brats out there, and I've been lucky to come across a few. We have been doing a lot of riding and training at AAF, but very little showing so far this year. Riding sometimes 5 horses a day, most of them very green, has left me wondering many time "Where are all the normal horses?!" ...no seriously....... Where are the horses that WTC and move in straight AND curved lines? All the OTTB re-training blogs from the pros I know seem to go similarly. Horse comes off track, some time is spent on the ground getting them used to scary obstacles, horse is suddenly going to BN events, getting mid-30's on dressage tests, jumping everything and remaining perfectly sensible at shows. Is this what it's really like? Not in my experience..... I recently got a new OTTB prospect, a 4-year old named "Never Ceasing." He has been incredibly calm and easy to handle around the farm. Almost anyone can halter/lead him, he loves to be outside, he is nice in his stall, he goes on the X-ties, he even stands at the mounting block. He can be ridden at the walk and trot sensibly in the field, he circled well both directions (before I pulled his racing plates), and felt reasonably safe to WTC, although he only canters on his left lead. He walks over poles, and I bet I could walk or trot him over a small jump, although I haven't tried. Stromboli was similar when I got him, and I spent 6+ months leisurely hacking him, riding him on the roads, occasionally popping him over some jumps, and doing a calm "re-start." I thought this approach was going to make him easy to handle at shows, make him level headed, and easy to ride on the flat. I could not have been more wrong. Was Stromboli a fluke? A product of the other training he got between the track and me? Or was this a bad approach? Should I have stuck him in side reins, lunged him every day, taken lots of dressage lessons? Every horse is an individual, and especially when you're a semi-pro trainer like me, with no indoor, a "real" job, a family, a farm to keep up, and a family, you have to make the best choices you can with the time and resources you have. I could look back and second guess all the choices I made about how to bring Stromboli along, but there's no way of knowing if he would be better or worse right now. I rode my 21-year old OTTB mare, Beauty, yesterday. Despite being arthritic & out of shape, she was dead-straight, even in both reins, and extremely correct. I laughed to myself realizing that it only took me 14 or so years to be able to ride her this way.... One of the most exciting things for a student is the purchase of their first horse. It's a big step! This is something I don't recommend to anyone who hasn't taken at least weekly lessons and preferably leased a horse and ridden 3X/week for at least a year. I made a handy list of some things to discuss with both the student and the students family. This list is geared towards students under the age of 18, but it easily could be adjusted for an adult.
List of things that student needs to learn how to do before buying horse: (Pony club has a much better and more complete list)
Trailering: Are you planning on purchasing a trailer? If not, do you have someone you can borrow one from? You will need to at least have emergency access to a trailer in situations when training/barn manager is not available. Farrier:
Vet care: Farm calls in this area are extremely expensive and hard to get in Arkansas (see trailering above).
Training: If your horse develops a behavioral problem are you willing to invest in extra training for in the form of lessons or clinics? Are you willing to have someone put training rides on the horse or send the horse off to an outside trainer? What happens when student goes off to college, becomes ill, or has to move? If student is under the age of 18 does he/she want to take a horse to college? If horse is left behind, who will pay board? If you have to sell the horse, are you willing to “take a loss” on initial purchase price? If not, are you willing to make investments into the horses training/show record to increase its value? Are you willing to lease the horse out of farm? If so, what happens if leaser stops leasing the horse or it has an injury? Budgeting: What are you willing to spend on the following?
Write down goals:
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Christy ZweigAdventures eventing as a semi-pro in the mid-south. Archives
April 2024
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