Setting the Conditions

A letter on the three things I do before I ride: setting aside the to-do-list me, reading whether I am buzzing or flat, and choosing one intention.

The training concept that has stuck with me most in recent weeks is not a movement or an exercise. It is the idea that my job is to set the conditions so the horse can execute. I cannot make him carry himself. I can put him in a balance, a rhythm, and a frame of mind where carrying himself is the easiest thing available to him, and then I can get out of the way.

Sadly, it took me decades to notice that the same thing is true of me.

I used to show up at the barn in whatever state the day handed me, swing a leg over, and expect to ride well. Then I was surprised when I didn't. I hadn't set any conditions. I had just arrived, hoping that being at the barn would do the trick. Some days it did. Others, not so much.

Here are three things I now do before I ride: set aside the to-do-list me, adjust my breathing, and set one intention. They don't take long, and they don't require any equipment or gadgets. Each one sets up the next. The first clears out the noise, the second gets the body ready, and the third points all of it somewhere useful.

Switch Yous

I bet you do this: stare out the window at work and silently count down the hours until you can leave for the barn. Maybe, like me, you've also been guilty of the next part: bringing a head full of tasks, deadlines, and half-drafted emails into the barn and along for the ride.

You don't actually get any of those tasks done while you're riding. Your ride suffers, and so does your horse. None of us is especially good at letting it go. It is genuinely hard to compartmentalize, and because we ride for fun, a lot of us carry a low hum of guilt about spending a few hours on a leisure activity when so much else is undone. That guilt tends to keep the list open in the background.

With everything you have going on, you are unlikely to walk through the barn door and be magically relieved of the noise in your head. Hoping certainly didn't work for me. I had to make the shift on purpose, and the way I found to do that was a ritual that marks the change from one me to another. Here is the version I use.

Before I walk in, I take the to-do list, the unsent emails, the deadlines, all of it, and set it aside. I'm not locking it away or pretending it doesn't exist. I've learned that trying to shove it out of my mind only brings it back louder. I'm simply agreeing to put it down for ninety minutes, with a promise to myself that it will all still be there when I'm finished. That is a promise your brain will actually accept, and accepting it buys you a little space.

As for the guilt, I've come to realize that ninety minutes with my horse is not time stolen from what "needs to be done." What actually gets stolen is the ride, when I can't let go of the list. So I make the time count by giving myself permission to see it for what it is: the break I need so I can come back to the list refreshed.

Then I let grooming do the rest. Each brush stroke sheds a little of what I carried in, so that by the last one I have something closer to a clear mind and a new persona.

When I'm done tacking up, I pull on my gloves, gather the reins, and walk to the mounting block. This is the moment I become a rider. Everything before it was somebody else's job. My job now is to ride and to feel what my horse is telling me, unencumbered by the things I set aside for later, including the guilt.

This is the ritual that moves me from the to-do-list me to the rider me. The specific ritual you adopt matters much less than doing the same one every time. It will feel forced at first. Give it a solid month of rides before you decide whether it is working, and expect it to take longer to feel natural than you want it to. Eventually you stop performing it and just do it, and you arrive at the mounting block as the rider you.

Breathe

Before you reach for any breathing technique, ask yourself one question while you are picking feet: Am I buzzing, or am I flat?

The answer changes what you do. Almost everything you have read about pre-ride nerves assumes you need to calm down. Most days, arriving from a full workday, you probably do. But some days you arrive empty: distracted, going through the motions, not really there. On those days, breathing yourself further into a fog is exactly the wrong move.

So check first. Then choose a direction.

When you are buzzing, slow your breathing while you groom. Sixty to ninety seconds is plenty. Aim for roughly six breaths a minute, and make the exhale longer than the inhale, something like four counts in and six or seven out. Don't get precious about the counting. The long exhale is the part that does the work.

Here is what won't happen: you won't become serene. You will still feel keyed up, and that is fine. That leftover energy is your body getting ready, and telling yourself so is not a trick you are playing. Athletes who read their nerves as helpful tend to perform better than those who read the identical feeling as a problem. The intensity is the same in both groups. The relationship to it is not. You are not trying to become calm. You are trying to become ride-ready, which is a different and more useful thing.

When you are flat, skip the long exhale. Wake your system up instead with a few quicker, sharper breaths. Walk briskly to the tack room. Roll your shoulders out. Pick up the pace of your warm-up. Give yourself something to react to.

There is a reason this matters more in our sport than in most.

Researchers in Sweden told riders and handlers that an umbrella would be opened as they passed a particular point in the arena. The umbrella was never opened. The humans' heart rates went up, and so did the horses', both when led and when ridden. There was no external trigger. The only thing that had changed was what the humans expected, and the horses picked it up anyway.

Your horse is reading a signal you didn't know you were sending. Your nervous system is not private. It is an input. Make sure the input is the right one for the moment. Your breath is the regulator.

Be Intentional

An intention is not a goal for the ride. It is one thing you have decided in advance, so that when the moment arrives you are not deciding. Two things make one stick.

Make it if-then. Not "ride better transitions," but "if he feels behind the leg, then a quick, light aid." The research on this is unusually clean. Phrasing a goal as a specific cue paired with a specific response makes you far more likely to follow through, because the cue triggers the response without requiring you to stop and decide. In the saddle, you don't have spare capacity to decide.

Point it outward. This one runs against how most of us were taught. We are trained to fix ourselves: heels down, shoulders back, quiet hands. But focusing on the effect of a movement reliably beats focusing on your own body. "Keep the energy flowing into the outside rein" works better than "close your outside fingers." Watching yourself from the inside interferes with the automatic parts of riding that you have already trained. Trust that they are in there, and put your attention on the horse and the movement.

Stop at one. Two if the second one is small. Three intentions is a to-do list, and you just spent twenty minutes putting one of those down.

The Half-Halt Before the Ride

You would never ask your horse for a movement you had not set him up to give. You would rebalance first. You would prepare him.

Give yourself the same courtesy. The moment at the barn door, the brush strokes, the breath, the one clear intention: that is your half-halt before the ride begins.

Set the conditions, and then get out of your own way.