There are plenty of drawbacks to being 70 years older than the OTTBs I ride—lack of former agility, lack of all courage, lack of being able to get on without a winch and a hoist—but there is one thing I absolutely know is better now than back when I was a hungry, driven competitor.

I have hugely more patience. I can putter and have a horse stick its head this way and that way, lean in or lean out, and it never ticks me off, and I can quite serenely play softly until the horse starts to get the picture.

So, here’s the deal. Don’t wait, for decades, to become more patient. It is the better way to create the calmer, softer, more elastic horse. Be a good trainer. Do it with horsemanship, not with the frenzy we see too often from grubby little competitors. There are ever so many horses I look back on and wish I could have a “do-over.” Be better than that.

It’s key to train your mind to be a methodical trainer, because the best way to wreck a horse is to rush it before it’s ready.

It took me 40 years before I actually felt as though I sort of knew what I was doing, in terms of riding and training a horse, despite all my blue ribbons and various championships. Those only make other people think you can ride.

Why such a long time? Well, maybe because I am just slow, but that isn’t the real reason. The real reason was because I was building a riding and training career based upon too many incorrect basics. And it took me 40 years, give or take a few, to realize just how and why they were wrong, and then to undo the wrong things and replace them with better methods and techniques. And it continues today.

 


About the Author

Named “One of the 50 most influential horsemen of the Twentieth Century” byThe Chronicle of the Horse, Denny Emerson was elected to the USEA Hall of Fame in 2005. He is the only rider to have ever won both a gold medal in eventing and a Tevis Buckle in endurance. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and author of How Good Riders Get Good, and continues to ride and train from his Tamarack Hill Farm in Vermont and Southern Pines, NC.