My human is just … a lot. She means well, and she tries hard, but she has a lot of room for improvement. 

Take, for example, her approach to my management this fall. I won two regional championships and one national championship for us, after which she (wisely) gave me a richly deserved vacation. But her idea of vacation and my idea of vacation are very different. I think vacation should be about doing your favorite things, which for me is hacking and stretching and running away with her. While she did allow for the hacking and the stretching, she also thinks vacation should include riding with the reins in one hand to continue to battle her tendency to pull. And that’s fine, except that then she expects me to respond to her efforts by actually listening to her seat and not running away, which is what causes her to pull, and that just seems like a very unreasonable expectation. (In fairness to her, I understand that she spent part of her three-day vacation this summer writing her book, so at least she’s consistently confused about what vacation means).

I endured this nonsense from her for a few weeks, only to be rudely put back to work in early December, because she says that she ends her horses’ vacations when we “become too annoying to live with.” The audacity, seriously. But I love my job, and I even love her a little bit, and so it was back to work.

The weather sucked a lot in Virginia our last few weeks there—very cold, and I’d just like to mention again that a great way to stay warm is by running very fast; I simply cannot understand why the enthusiasm for this is not mutual—and my human’s students all do this thing where they realize she’s leaving for the winter and pack in a thousand lessons before she does, so she cannot prioritize me and my extensive list of needs, which is a bummer. (She tells me that she has to work in order to pay my bills. Pfft.) But her team worked very hard to pack all of my things into the trailer, much of them in the pouring freezing rain, which I helped by supervising closely and providing entertainment to boost morale.

The crew left a few days before I did, which allowed me a few last moments of respite before heading south. The transport showed up and, yet again, my requests for first-class accommodations were denied, and instead I had to ride in economy—or as I like to call it, “cattle class”—with all of the other horses. I did, however, get to go on last, which means that I got to get off the van first, to see all of my adoring employees waiting for me at the bottom of the ramp, as befits someone with my rockstar status.

The rest of the horses and I were given a day to recuperate from the trip, and then the annual contest began to see who could be the worst behaved to ride on Day One. It was not me; I decided to save myself for my first lesson with Ali Brock. But I was very proud of my little brother OJ, who earned the crown this year. (In OJ’s defense, he is 5, and my human really set him up for failure by trying to work him alone, away from all the other horses, because of the way the property is set up. While my human can be really dumb, she at least acknowledged her stupidity, and does not hold OJ accountable for his actions. She’s OK, that human of mine. She’s at least teachable.)

The aforementioned lesson with Ali came a few days later, and I was so happy to see her that I turned on Warp Speed, and we got to spend 45 minutes playing a game called “How Slow Can We Go.” I love games! This one was fairly stupid, and in the end, I decided to finally let my human win, out of the goodness of my fabulous Danish heart. 

We travel a little before Christmas, because it gives my staff a relatively quiet two weeks to get us horses settled, get the barn unpacked and up and running, and also let much of my staff have a few days’ vacation—leaving the barn with less coverage—before the lion’s share of the clients arrive. It means I’ve seen my personal human in the barn quite a bit more than normal, which is nice. I have decided to not torture her by pooping in my water buckets, a specialty of mine, but the season is still young. There’s time.

Said human has been teaching me about piaffe for a while now. I have very big fancy gaits, and as such have needed a minute to get strong enough to really sit, but I’m getting somewhere now. The human and I had a second lesson with Ali, and they explained it to me in a slightly different way, and—whoaaaaa—I get it now!! And I am so excited to get it now that I am now heaving my delicious front legs into the air very, very high, which makes my human squeal with joy, which is great fun. It also causes them to get quite wide, which my human says is less enchanting, and also interesting because, while I will be her ninth Grand Prix horse, she has never had one do this particular thing. I am so proud that I can expand her horizons! I am an exceptionally good teacher. So she is going to work on explaining it to me better this winter, as well as do some winning at the shows, because I basically always win, which makes sense, if you ever were to meet me in person.

I suppose I will also share my stage with the young horses coming up behind me, out of the goodness of my heart. Plus my human has a really, really, really pretty new short coat, that we broke in together when I won the open fourth level national championship for her, but now I am so fabulously educated that I will only show with her wearing a tailcoat now, which means she should put her short coat to good use on the kids. And I’m hoping to also court some new owners this year, because everyone should want to own a piece of me. And as ever, I’ll continue trying to make my human into someone a little more useful. I’ll keep you all posted!

Lauren Sprieser is a USDF gold, silver and bronze medalist with distinction making horses and riders up to the FEI level from her farm in Marshall, Virginia. She’s currently developing The Elvis Syndicate’s C. Cadeau and Clearwater Farm Partners’ Tjornelys Solution, as well as her own string of young horses, with hopes of one day representing the United States in team competition. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram, and read her book on horse syndication, “Strength In Numbers.”