04/12/2025
Groundwork is not what you do when you’re afraid to ride. Groundwork is a deeper connection to the horse, and CSI so to speak. It’s like being a detective and figuring out what is going on in the horses head. But you have to put your goals and ego aside to listen. Slow is fast- when you take the time to go slow and let the horse figure things out, things go quicker.
“My horse wouldn’t hurt a fly!” said his owner, yet the tension at the mounting block was palpable. It was so thick that I could barely breathe.
While she and her horse were here for a mounted lesson, I stopped them from going ahead. I realized that we had to take it back a notch, to do something else, entirely. Before that horse and rider could ever learn, we had to go back to the place where things went wrong.
While she seemed disappointed that this was going to start out an unmounted lesson on the value of meaningful ground work, I was intrigued. The rider was sending me an unspoken message that she was frightened… but that unless she was riding, she wasn’t going to be learning. She was wasting her time and money. That by stopping at her horse’s ‘mounting block issue’, she was backing down.
This disconnect between basic c**t starting and achieving goals is actually quite common in riders who want to compete. The discipline is of no consequence; they just have their eye fixed upon the prize. Over and over, we've been told that higher horsemanship means setting goals. Thing is, a faraway goal can blind us to fundamental skills that are shaky to the point of crumbling, entirely.
“What does ground work mean to you?” I remember asking. Her reply was telling, though I had to give her credit for being truthful.
“It’s what you do when you’re scared to get on!”
Fair enough. The best I could probably hope for was to convince her that ground work might be what we do when our horse was scared, or otherwise concerned, about US getting on, too. That if not for us, let’s do it for them.
I explained that we were about to do some unmounted work with her horse, to find out what was really going on inside. Rather than ‘run the horse around in circles until it became tired’, a phrase used by so many people to deride any sort of unmounted work, especially lungeing, I wanted to get an idea of where the horse’s brace and worry lived.
You see, her horse had been quietly coming apart, long before he was failing to stand still at the mounting block.
He’d been feeling the pressure long before she’d struggled with his saddling and bridling. She’d been witness to his meltdown once she’d managed to load him into the trailer by herself, for I’d heard his pawing and stamping as their truck and trailer came up our lane. I rather suspect his ‘mounting block problem’ began the minute the horse was caught and brought from his herd. Riding, to him—no, to both of them—was underlined with dread.
While she absolutely needed to do all these things—to travel and ride and build resilience and usefulness in her horse—she needed to go back to the last place the horse was ‘fine’ and go on from there.
I explained that it was more about waiting and digging around in the dirt, until we could see the truth. That soon everything would feel fine, or that the rider might say it’s not a good day to ride, or that the horse might say something similar. That even though this was a paid lesson, this was actually the perfect time and place to wait for an answer, without any attachment as to what the horse’s answer might be.
To ignore the frayed part was like knitting a sweater and wearing it, despite the fact that we'd seen that we'd dropped a stitch. Yes, it's still a sweater. It will keep us warm, for a while. But we've ignored the fact that we could have made it better by fixing the weak link. You know, making sure that all our good work doesn't come undone.
Once we made the decision to treat the lesson as a detective might piece together a crime scene, the horse very quickly came around and got into the spirit of the thing. I do remember his rider feeling surprised that the minute she let go her intention to mount up and ride at dawn, so to speak, he relaxed!
Despite their shaky start, both began to feel the other out. There was a lot of blowing and head shaking, as we encouraged the horse to walk and trot around us on the lunge. We changed direction quite a bit, did a lot of in-hand bendy work, then made a big deal of standing together for a puff.
Soon, the horse said that he was ready for the responsibility of riding in this strange place and doing his best for us. He very generously went on to stand at the mounting block. With a few pointers from me, regarding his rider's timing and helping him find his balance, along with settling very softly into the saddle, all was good.
The lesson went on as planned, because we’d taken the time to make things okay, first. We spent the majority of the lesson at the walk, which was another hard pill to swallow for our competitive-minded rider but I was seeing a need for her to slow things down and wait, until…
There is no judgement here because I was learning from this horse and rider, too.
There are many horses that I am afraid to step across; the difference being, I do not berate myself into riding them. I do not step on until the horse says, “OK. Sure.” Riding them is then something of an anticlimax. You know, we’ll tell ourselves that it is ridiculous to try lying to a horse and yet, we do it all the time.
“You’re fine, you’re fine,” we’ll mutter to the dancing horse, as we reach for the stirrup… when clearly, he is anything but.
There are still so many of us who are afraid of what our horses are telling us. We’ll resolutely ignore them, deny their truth, in the spirit of being brave. Why do we disregard the very real risk to our own personal safety? What is the reasoning here? Would we get into an elevator with a scary man? Would we sign up for friendship with someone who might hurt us, should we forget to walk on eggshells in their company?
Why do we choose to pursue relationship with another who puts that lump in our throat, that familiar heaviness in our chest, that hollow ache in our gut, every single time?
Do we honestly believe that it is in this horse’s best interests to be handled and ridden by someone who is afraid? Does he not deserve to get out from under that dark cloud? Don't we?
What is it all about? Why are we saying that our horse would never harm us and yet, it is obvious that he is not a pleasure to ride, or to be around?
What is the answer here? What is really going on?
