OPINING ABOUT EQUINES
This week, I’m ruminating about equines and how riding improved my tennis game and falling down results.
When I was a young girl, I read every Black Stallion and Island Stallion book I could get my hands on. Growing up during the golden years of Triple Crown winners Secretariat, Seattle Slew, and Affirmed, I longed to go to the racetrack and ride thoroughbreds. Robyn Smith, Diane Crump, and Steve Cauthen were my heroes. Oh, how I wanted to be Alec Ramsey and dreamed of running away to Kentucky when I was older, so I could muck out the stalls. Somehow, I’d make my way to Calumet Farms and ingratiate myself into their ranks. Over time, I would advance to groom, and a few years later to exercise girl. Hopefully, by the time I was sixteen or so, I could apply to be an apprentice jockey. I devised this plan at the age of eight, figuring that by the time I was ten years old, I’d be mature enough to be on my own.
The only problem was that I was a city girl who lived in a state where horse racing occurred on rural tracks associated with rodeos or county fairs. Racing tack included saddles with a control stick attached that didn’t work the way you’d think it would, and races were quarter mile long sprints where jockeys desperately hung onto their ten-gallons as their long stirrups dangled in the dust between the ground and the horse’s belly.
Fortunately, growing up in the section of Salt Lake City known as “Snob Hill,” I had a few friends and neighbors who owned cabins or ranches with horses, so I got to ride a bit growing up and eventually learned not to cling to the control stick. Later, I learned the stick was called a horn, which didn’t enlighten me one bit.
One spring, my piano teacher with the wonderfully Dickensian name of Thelma Thurman passed away. One of the upshots of this development, besides not having to practice playing piano for an hour every day, was that I finally convinced my parents to let me take riding lessons. For one glorious summer, my mother drove me to the other side of Salt Lake Valley for riding lessons. Even though the instruction was for western riding, I didn’t care, ‘cuz I was riding a horse every single week!
Sadly, my summer of riding coincided with the energy crisis of ’75, mixed with double-digit inflation, so I had to quit. I never ran away to Kentucky, because even at the age of twelve, I was aware that the glory days of hitchhiking across the USA as a teenager were gone; particularly, now that Ted Bundy and others of his ilk were out and about.
It was another decade before I took riding lessons, and this time, I took English riding lessons from an eccentric Indonesian-Dutch woman who was holding onto a patch of land that was surrounded by newly-built subdivisions in the center of the Valley. After several weeks of instruction concerning horse anatomy, feeding, care, tack, and watching other people ride, I finally got up on the horse where I was given extensive instructions on how to fall off it.
I practiced falling off a horse for the next few weeks and, being the natural trippy, clutz I am, I firmly believe that deliberately launching myself from the saddle several dozen times, has kept me from breaking my leg and neck. Sure, I’ve had many sprained ankles and bruised knees and elbows over the years, mostly when engaged in the exotic act of walking; but I so easily could’ve been hurt worse if I hadn’t learned how to adjust my body and retract my extremities when falling, kinda’ like a clumsy possum who can slowly morph into a nerf ball when tipping over. It ain’t pretty or graceful when I fall, but I can minimize the damage done.
Once I was finally deemed worthy enough to stay put in the saddle, I learned the philosophy of riding based on the “centered seat” which was my riding teacher’s interpretation of the “hunt seat,” and I slowly started learning dressage and show jumping techniques. Nowadays, one would recognize that the centered seat was an excellent core workout, and one of the unexpected side effects of training my body to be centered was that my tennis game improved immensely while I was taking riding lessons. Lowering my center of gravity, leaning forward, balancing on the balls of my feet while keeping my shoulders and arms open worked wonders – physically, in that I could more easily adjust my movements without tripping over myself – and psychologically, because opponents underestimated my tennis prowess since I looked like Quasimodo dressed in a tennis skirt, who was on the verge of tipping over onto my nose any second.
I rode for three years, and even though I lacked the natural talent and grace for it, I loved every minute. Of course, later I discovered that most of the other pupils were only required to fall off their horse for a week or two before moving on to the centered seat. But for me, toppling off a horse for weeks on end was worth the wait.
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