There’s a period of time between life as a horse-crazy teenager and middle age where many female riders disappear.

A couple of years ago, I was talking with Steve Day, the owner of Dover Saddlery, and I asked him, “What’s your main customer profile?” Steve didn’t have to think twice. He didn’t have to think for a nanosecond. He replied, “Teenage girls and their mothers.”

As I’ve thought about the implications of his response, and asked dozens of current and former riders their reactions to those implications, I’ve come to believe that for many horse lovers there exists a phenomenon that, for lack of a better term, I call “the gap years.”

We know that, statistically, males scarcely exist in the English riding world, so we can ignore them. They do exist. I actually know two personally and have heard of four others, but that’s about it.

It’s a girls’ and women’s world out there, and if there really is such a thing as a “gap,” and if my friend’s tack company statistics are accurate, that gap occurs somewhere between the time girls are in their late teens or early 20s, and when they are old enough to have riding children of their own. Let’s say that “teenage girls and their mothers” isn’t completely accurate. From all my questioning, I think I’d change the ages slightly, from say 8 or 9 to early or mid-20s as comprising one side of the gap and early- to mid-30s at the lower age end of the other side of the gap.

So what happens in that intervening 10 to 20 or 25 years that seems to take so many riders and horse-loving girls and women away from close involvement with horses?

“Too Everything”

Here’s one “in a nutshell” answer from one of my respondents: “It’s easy. I was ‘too everything.’ Too poor, too involved with college and boyfriends, too newly married, too pregnant, too much a young mother, too busy moving for better jobs, too disorganized. Later, when my daughter wanted riding lessons, that’s when I got back into it. I started riding again so I could ride with her.”

Over and over, I heard the response, “too poor.” Parents support their child’s riding up to and sometimes through college, but then those children are financially on their own. It’s not that the passion has disappeared, but it lies dormant.

One woman said about her love of horses: “It’s like malaria. The disease is still there but just not in its active state.”

Here’s another response that was pretty typical of what many women experienced: “I had a pony when I was small, and then I had a horse through high school. My parents helped pay his board, and I worked at the barn on weekends. But when I moved away to go to college, when I was 18, the horse had to go.

“For a while, I tried to ride some of my friends’ horses, but it was too painful. I’m sort of an ‘all-or-nothing’ personality, I guess,” she continued. “So I stopped riding and even sold my saddle. I didn’t ride again for 22 years, when we moved to upstate New York, and one of the women in my office invited me to take a lesson at the barn where she keeps her horse. Now I have my own horse. I’m back. I’ll never not have a horse again.”

“What made me stop riding,” said another woman, “was that we lived close to where the kids went to school, and where both my husband and I work. The rush hour commute into Boston was already over an hour, and the nearest place that we could ride was about a 25-minute drive in the opposite direction. So if I left work at 4:30, got home at 5:30, changed into riding clothes, drove to the barn, it would be 6:30 or later before I even got there, right when I usually would have supper ready. I just couldn’t deal with the logistics of that. It was years later, after all three kids were off at college, or finished college, two of them, that we moved further out, and I actually bought a horse and started to ride again. You ask about a gap. Mine was more like the Grand Canyon, over 30 years since I was on the riding team at college.”

The gap years phenomenon gets camouflaged, I think, by the high-profile professional riders and those competing on various U.S. Equestrian Federation teams in dressage, show jumping and eventing. So many of them are exactly part of that 25-35 age group, which is precisely when so many other riders are getting away from riding.

These “famous” riders may be small in terms of their percentage of the whole, but they loom large in visibility, so they may appear to be the riders who are “out there doing.” But if a tack and apparel company depended upon these few for profit, there wouldn’t be any tack and apparel companies.

The Silent Majority

Steve Day’s “teenage girls and their mothers” are the silent majority, the mass of the iceberg hidden from view, rarely to be found on the covers of the horse magazines, but they comprise the very large base which allows the tip to exist.

One mother of two teenaged daughters who both ride said this: “When I was their age, I rode all the time, and I wasn’t afraid of anything. Now, since I’m 29 years older than my younger daughter, it’s much harder. Things scare me that never used to, and I really want to lose about 20 pounds and feel strong again. I’ll get there, but it’s hard. But it’s worth it. I feel as if I’ve finally come home.”

So again, the question, are the gap years a real phenomenon?

I suppose it depends upon whom you ask. For some, the horse-filled years rolled by without a pause. For others, once horses were gone, they were gone forever. But optimistically, for a large number of riders whose passions have never waned, hang on, hold tight, the gap is shrinking. You know that horse whose picture you drew and drew all over your third-grade school books? Even though that may feel like “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” that horse never really went away. He’s out there somewhere right now, and he’s waiting for you to go find him again.

Denny Emerson is a former international competitor who breeds and trains sport horses and teaches riders at his Tamarack Hill Farm in South Strafford, Vt., and Southern Pines, N.C. He’s a former vice president of eventing for the U.S. Equestrian Team, a two-time former president of the U.S Combined Training Association and former chairman of the USAEquestrian Breeders’ Committee. He was a member of the gold medal-winning team at the World Three-Day Event Championships in 1974. Denny started as a Chronicle columnist in 1989 and was named one of the Chronicle’s “50 Most Influential Horsemen of the 20th Century” in 1999.