how we got here

Am I going to become that person who titles all of my posts in lowercase letters? Eh, maybe. We’ll see.

I know I have an about page, but it seems wrong to start this off without giving a little bit more detail on both my own riding journey and just how exactly Cooper came into my life, as context is often everything, so here goes:

Like it says on my about page, I’ve been riding since I was eight years old. Like it also says on my about page, there have been a few gaps in that riding journey – one when I was thirteen which lasted until a few weeks before my seventeenth birthday (more on this one later, I’m sure, as I’m rather immune to not talking about it since its circumstances underpin pretty much everything that’s happened to me since where horses are concerned), one for ~seven months starting halfway through my freshman year of college, and one for ~eight months in 2018. Consequently, I’ve got about eleven years of consistent riding experience, even though it’s been just over fifteen years since my first real lesson.

For the first two years after I started taking lessons (approximately, I really don’t remember the specifics since I was a literal child), I rode with an instructor who could do a little bit of everything, but whose primary discipline was dressage. She had actually also been the student teacher in my kindergarten class, but it took us a few lessons to figure that bit out (it’s a small world around here). It was a long, slow process training under her and it is one that I am endlessly grateful for, because I wouldn’t be the rider that I am if it wasn’t for those early years with her (again, more on that later, since it’s a post in and of itself). She eventually moved on, once she found a job that combined her love of horses and her degree in child psychology, and I had a mini-break for a few weeks before my next instructor came along.

Things moved much more quickly from that point on. She had me cantering off the lunge line within a few lessons (again, more on the philosophy behind my early riding trajectory at a later date) and jumping not long after that. I moved up from the first horse I rode to another lesson horse who was larger and much more crochety, and then I met Nugget and everything sort of snowballed from there. I showed up to the barn for my lesson, like always, and checked the board in the aisle, like always, and his name was on it alongside mine. I had no idea which horse he was, so I asked my trainer, and she told me “He’s the palomino in the long aisle. I put his stuff out for you in front of his stall.”

I went and tacked him up, which was a process and a half because he wouldn’t stand still in the cross ties, and my dad had to do his girth up for me because he was so fat at the time that I couldn’t even get it up, and then I went and got on, and that was it. He was so out of shape that we couldn’t even pick up a canter, let alone hold it, and he was green despite being eleven years old, but my trainer had told me the week before that my parents were talking about half-leasing a horse for me, and I knew from that very first ride that he was the horse that I wanted to lease. Maybe I was just blinded by the fact that I wanted a palomino, but something in my gut told me that he was the one, and by the end of that week, he was mine for three days out of every seven (Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday).

We worked on his fitness and our canter, and then we started jumping, and then we went out to school cross country, and I was hooked. I didn’t really know what eventing was back then, but I loved cross country, and whatever it was that would let me do it in competition, that was the discipline that I wanted. I did my first mini trial at the age of twelve, just under a year and a half after I started leasing Nugget. It wasn’t perfect, but we came in third, and that was arguably the best day of my very young life up until that point.

We had a freak accident five months later, one that put me in the hospital with a concussion and resulted in me leaving that barn. It was nobody’s fault (though it took a while for that to really sink in, since I was a kid who was suddenly being forced to grapple with experiences that I honestly think a lot of adults would struggle with, and it took me a long time to work through everything and actually process all of it), but so many things had happened and it was the middle of the recession, so I had to stop riding.

(As an aside – Nugget was fine after that accident. I learned in the fall of 2019 that he’s still at that first barn, now under the ownership of a longtime boarder, enjoying his twenties and being spoiled rotten and showered with love. It’s exactly what he deserves and it was so wonderful and such a relief to hear that I may or may not have cried in the car afterward on my way home – you can’t prove anything.)

Not riding was extremely difficult for me, especially given the psychological impacts from my accident, so I started a tumblr when I was fifteen (well, I say started. I had already been on tumblr for a while, but then I started an equestrian blog to go along with the fandom one). It was a way for me to put myself closer to horses when I had no other options, and while I never really joined any of the groups of bloggers that formed, it was still a platform that I loved and it gave me a place to voice all of those feelings that I’d been keeping to myself for two and a half years (and I still have it going now, although it’s a lot quieter these days than it was five or six years ago).

When I was sixteen, towards the end of my junior year of high school, I was sitting in US History when I got a text from my brother. We weren’t supposed to check our phones in class, but I had it face-up in the little top pocket of my backpack and I could see it when it lit up, and it took everything in me to not get up and run out of the room when I saw the message – our mom had gotten a new job, which meant that I would be able to ride again after three and a half years of no horses, save for one visit with my cousin’s retired mare at my aunt and uncle’s farm and a trip down to Rolex with them ~six months after my accident (they made jewelry, once upon a time, and always had a booth at the trade fair with the equestrian-themed stuff way back when and knew absolutely everyone, so it was really cool to be able to go around with them and have them show me the right way to do Rolex, developed from years of experience as exhibitors – it’s still how I do it now, when I’m down there for the three-day, and I love it).

I did a lot of searching for a couple of months until I found my next trainer, who coached hunter/jumper. It seemed fine to start with, that I wasn’t doing my discipline, because I had it in my head that I would be all right as long as I was jumping, even if I wasn’t out doing cross country regularly (spoiler alert: it was not all right).

I was with that trainer for four and a half years. I rode a lot of horses and spent a little while half-leasing an ex-Grand Prix show jumper, who had the most buttons of any horse I’d ever sat on, and finally made some adjustments and improvements to my equitation over fences (which had suffered a lot when I was leasing Nugget, because we were always so focused on making him better that a lot of the particulars fell by the wayside where I was concerned). I also met my best friend during that time, so of course I’m thankful for that and all of our many rides together.

In the end, it just wasn’t the right fit for me, training-wise – the part of me that wanted to ride at high speeds under open sky over solid fences won out – and we parted ways. I was also only a few months out from my college graduation, and was grappling with the fact that I wasn’t sure if I even wanted horses as I moved on to the next phase of my life, so I took a break.

I took a break, and I got really into watching figure skating, and I finished school and spent the summer studying and sitting for the CPA exam and working part-time in my mom’s office helping her with the accounts payable and administrative work, and then I started to get that itch again. You know, that one that you get when you’ve been out of the saddle for a long time and you just really, really, really want to go for a good canter?

An acquaintance saw a post that I made on Instagram about missing riding and sent me a DM inviting me to come and ride at her farm. I didn’t think much of it – she wasn’t the first person to offer to let me come ride their horses, but it had never panned out – but it actually wound up happening, and then we were riding together every weekend through the winter, and I was starting to feel settled again. I was ridiculously busy – with the job that I had at the time (and currently still have), we have to work Saturdays from January til April – but we carved out that time and it made me realize that I really did still want horses.

I was clicking around on CANTER one day, about five months after she and I started doing the regular weekend thing, when I saw a listing for this leggy bay gelding at Penn National. He wasn’t even three yet (well, he was by Jockey Club standards, but he had a couple more months to go before his real birthday), and he definitely looked like a baby, but there were no glaringly obvious conformation flaws aside from some slightly long pasterns, he had a sweet face, and the more I looked at his ad, the more I got that feeling in my gut.

I didn’t have enough money set aside to buy him, though, and it wasn’t the right time anyway – it was March, it was the middle of busy season, I wasn’t even supposed to be looking for a horse until June or July and there were no open stalls in the barn at that point – but I just kept going back to his ad. I watched the videos of them trotting him up over and over again, and kept texting my best friend and my barn owner and messaging a friend on Twitter about how much I liked him, and eventually I decided that I needed to at least try to get in touch with his trainer or I would regret it.

It took almost a month and several back-and-forths with CANTER, complete with me finally saying that, as much as I liked him, if I didn’t hear back I would have to move my search elsewhere (this isn’t CANTER’s fault, they were so helpful and I would absolutely buy another horse listed through them), before I finally got a response to my inquiries. I was sent a few more videos and I knew it was probably a ridiculous move to buy him off of nothing more than those short clips and that gut feeling, but my barn owner said she would find a way to open a stall for me and I had rearranged the contents of my bank account enough to afford him, so I set up a vet check.

He passed with no trouble, and then came the stumbling block of how to get him home. It was Easter, and then I was going down to Kentucky for the three-day, and could a commercial hauler even get up our barn driveway, and I’d have to arrange for a health certificate, and it all seemed impossible until my barn owner offered to go pick him up for me while I was down at the event. It wasn’t ideal – I would’ve preferred to be able to go with her – but it was a thousand times better than trying to arrange a different shipper, and so she went and got him while I was out wandering around the LRK3DE cross country course.

He was off in the hind end when he got home, so I let him sit for about a month aside from doing some basic groundwork before I got on him. At that point, he was still a bit off, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been when he got home, and our vet had thrown out stifle as a suggestion for what could be causing the lameness when she was out to deworm and pull a Coggins, so that’s how I targeted it. We walked, and we did poles, and then we trotted the long sides, and then we trotted the whole arena, and then we started trotting the poles, and one day about a month into that process, I got on him and he felt totally fine. I called my barn owner in to watch him go to make sure that I hadn’t just gotten used to him being not quite right, and she agreed that he was moving without any hitch in his step whatsoever.

(As an aside – obviously, had he not gotten better, I would’ve had our vet do a full lameness workup on him, but the more I read online the more it seemed like it was just stifle weakness, and between that, our vet’s suggestion, the chiropractor finding nothing wrong with him other than some general track soreness, and our farrier saying that there was nothing wrong with his feet, I figured I would give the targeted rehab thing a shot before I dropped several hundred dollars on a workup.)

I kept doing poles, and started working on lateral work, and he kept getting stronger and finding his balance a little bit more. He got a little bit more energetic once he really settled in, but for the most part, he was taking everything in stride and was more curious than spooky, and then fall rolled around and the rain rot came.

I spent the better part of a month fighting it – it was all over his back and hindquarters, despite the fact that I always groomed him well, and he was so uncomfortable that he would drop his back if you so much as laid a finger on him – but eventually (thanks to some Microtek baths and a bottle of Equiderma) it went away, and we got in a couple of rides before my current trainer came out to give us all lessons. It was something I had been waiting literally ten years for, because she was the trainer I had been riding with when I had the accident, I had been wanting to ride with her again pretty much ever since, and the opportunity arose ten years and four days after that night when I wound up in the emergency room.

She liked him – thankfully, because it was her approval that I was most nervous for – and we talked a bit about my goals with him, and she agreed with me that this is really the time to focus on ingraining him with the fundamentals (without drilling him, since he’s still so young and needs time to just be a horse) and that it was a good idea to let him tell me when he was ready to have the next concept introduced, rather than overloading him with one new thing after another before he really had time to process.

We’ve been following that ethos since that lesson. It’s been almost three months, now, but between my job and the glorious Pennsylvania weather, it’s hard to schedule a time that works for everyone. Hopefully, once the winter grossness breaks, we’ll be able to have her out more frequently, and maybe even haul over to her farm (she’s only ~ten minutes from our barn, and I would love to ride in her giant outdoor). Until then, I’m riding Cooper on the weekends and he’s spending the week being a horse. I’m aiming him toward some walk/trot ground pole classes at a local farm’s schooling series throughout the spring, just to get him out (since we’re not really cantering under saddle yet, let alone jumping, because growing baby is unbalanced and I’m not pushing it), and then he’ll turn four at the beginning of May and we’ll start ramping up his program a little bit (just a little, though. He won’t really be in a true program until he’s on the latter side of five, if not later).

I’ve been meaning to make this blog since that weekend he came home, almost ten months ago now, so that I could chronicle our journey and the progress he made, but life got in the way and I didn’t do it. Now that we’re starting to consistently do more, though, and now that I’m in the process of trying to make some big life changes to give me more time for him and everything else that I love to do, it seemed like the right time to do it.

It’s not about hits, or an audience, or me thinking that I’m a professional equestrian – I’m really not, at all, and I will never claim to be – or any of the other things that are tossed around about ~horse girls with blogs.~ It’s about the fact that almost eight years ago, I made a blog to get me closer to horses and on it I chronicled my journey back to them, and now I’m dedicating a space to my thoughts about the last fifteen years and my journey moving forward with the horse that I waited literally twenty years for (seriously, ask my parents. I’ve been begging them for a pony for as long as I can remember). This blog is for him – it’s named for him – and it lets me put all those writing skills that I developed during the years I wasn’t riding to good use.

(Also, Instagram captions just aren’t quite long enough to capture everything I’d like to say about Cooper and what we do, and let’s be real, no one actually reads all of my Twitter threads anyway.)