November 11, 2026 
Five years ago, hunter/jumper professional Katie Gardner was feeling burnt out. After a lifetime in the industry, her passion for showing had waned, and she was no longer sure about her place in the sport.
So she hung up her show coat and took a break.
For two years, the Encinitas, CA, native rode a bit for a friend at home, immersed herself in yoga, and spent time reflecting on what she wanted. Gardner eventually trained as a yoga teacher, a decision she says helped her become stronger and more centered. She also leaned into therapy to help combat the burnout and improve her mental health.
When she returned to the sport in 2024 as a trainer with Michael and Christa Endicott’s Pegasus Show Stables she felt stronger physically and mentally, with a renewed joy for the sport and more balance in her life.
In spring 2026, Gardiner started a mentorship program called The Pathway, created with the Endicotts’ blessing, to pass on her hard-earned wellness lessons to junior riders at Pegasus Show Stables.
With support from the students’ parents, Gardner works one-on-one and in groups to help improve their students’ holistic health and help them become more mentally and physically resilient.
“There’s a crew every week that will come do the 9:15 Monday morning [yoga] class,” said Gardner, 41. “They come with me and afterward we’ll debrief about the [previous] week.”
Some students want to focus on mental skills, and others want to work on nutrition, exercise or all of the above. Gardner, a graduate of University of Southern California with a psychology degree and a minor in nutrition and health promotion, isn’t shy about sharing her own experiences with them, from struggling with disordered eating as a junior to how her strict sleep schedule helps her face each day with a better attitude.
“I think that vulnerability is one of the most important pillars of my program,” she said. “That I am open and I am honest, and they see me and see that I’m not perfect and that I’ve worked really hard on this stuff and I’m still working on it.”
As part of the program, she schedules unmounted check-ins to see how her students are feeling and progressing. At various moments when students need to regulate their emotions they’ll do breathwork together. At Capital Challenge this fall, Gardner asked students to pick a word to embody for the day, and she returned to that word at various points during the day.
Gardner knows from experience that this self-improvement work can pay off. Early last spring, when The Pathway was in its infancy, Gardner won the $100,000 Desert International Horse Park 3’3” Pro Equitation Challenge aboard Dark Harbor, an emotional win that she viewed as proof that her approach was working.
That two-year hiatus also changed Gardner’s coaching style. After taking yoga teacher training, where unemotional and precise cues guide the practice, Gardner wanted to coach differently from the strict-disciplinarian model.
“You can’t belittle people to get them to do what you want,” she said. “I always say, no one’s actively waking up in the morning to try to do a bad job. There are a lot of factors that lead to their performance not being peak. Yes, there has to be discipline, but berating them is a problem.”
Through The Pathway, she tries to help her students make their own connections between how they look after themselves and their performance. For example, she asks them to notice how their riding changes when they skip breakfast versus fuel up in the morning, or how hours of social media scrolling makes them feel versus spending time offline with friends. On show days, she checks in with her riders in the morning to ask how they’re feeling and what challenges they’re facing, whether a bad night of sleep or a fight with a parent, so they can adjust expectations. To motivate her riders, Gardner and her students rewatch rounds from a year earlier to see their progress.
Gardner’s still on her own path of self-improvement. She takes yoga classes four or five days a week, sees a therapist every two weeks (“whether I want to or not”), listens to motivational podcasts, and has recently added running to her cardio routine.
As it stands now, she is working exclusively with her own students, but hopes to helping more riders.
“That’s kind of my goal,” she said. “It’s the dream to work with riders and have seminars and make mental health and wellness more prominent in the industry.”
