PrintOur columnist points out that a rider’s success largely boils down to how many hours he spends in the saddle.
There are several diverse groups of riders who all know, to varying degrees, that in order to become better they need to ride more hours than they currently do.
Whether or not they’ve read two famous maxims by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, they intuitively know them by heart and essence. The two quotations are: “For things that we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them,” and, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Someone who wants to become a great pianist plays the piano. A rider rides. It’s just a cliché for all sorts of developable skills and abilities. There’s even a joke about the man who hails down the New York City cab. “Hey, cabbie, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice, practice, practice!” answers the cabbie.
At the saddest end of our aspiring rider spectrum is the person for whom all doors to riding time seem locked shut. This rider may be on military deployment to Korea. Another may have three children under the age of 4 and limited funds to pay a babysitter. Another may have a full-time job in downtown Chicago. The list is pretty extensive, but the inescapable constant is that time to ride horses just doesn’t exist, not, at least, at this moment of these riders’ lives.
Needed: The Right Horse
There are also many riders who can’t ride because the horse they have is unsuitable, usually because of long-term unsoundness or because the horse has a difficult temperament. In theory, the riders who can’t ride because the horses they own can’t be ridden would simply get rid of their current horses and start over on horses that are suitable. But this isn’t what usually happens in real life.
The harsh fact is that there are only two real options for a basically unsound horse: retirement, which costs several thousand dollars a year, or euthanasia, which is too painful for many owners to bear. Unless these owners can face euthanasia, or have enough money to pay for the unsound horse to be retired and buy a second horse to ride, their riding time gets shut down.
Again, theoretically, those who own horses with problematic dispositions or quirks—too hot, too aggressive, rears, bucks, spooks—could sell, give away or put down the ones they can’t ride, opening up chances to buy horses they can ride. Sometimes they will, and sometimes they won’t. If they won’t, they shut the door on riding time.
There’s another group of riders who theoretically could ride but often don’t. These are children and teenagers who are well supported by their families but rarely show up at the barn. Every barn owner has stories about the kids who “talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.” For them, there are higher life priorities.
It’s easy to blame boys, cars, parties and shopping, but often these riders do have a strong passion. It just doesn’t happen to be horseback riding. It would be nice, I suppose, if these kids would share that information with their bill-paying parents, but I’m sure most of them eventually do.
