Their partnership began shortly after Powlick graduated from Trinity College in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in biology. Fresh off earning 10th place in the prestigious Cacchione Cup at the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association Nationals, she suddenly found herself horseless. Determined to stay in the show ring, she reached out to SWS Training and Sales, where she had previously catch-ridden for Kaitlin Campbell and Alex Wilson: Did they have a horse, she asked, that she could take to a few shows and have a little fun with?

“They gave me Beans,” Powlick said. “I fell in love with him immediately. I have a bad back, and he was the first horse in a long time who didn’t hurt it. That alone was huge for me.” 

Even though Powlick was in no position to purchase a horse fresh out of college, she made it happen with help from friends and family, and took Beans home to Park City, Utah, where she works remotely in biotech.

But the now-10-year-old gelding (Chellsini Z—Royalty, Rockwell) arrived with complications. Freshly imported, he had shown signs of headshaking in Europe, and as spring progressed in Utah’s high elevation, his symptoms worsened. Powlick experimented with a nose net, adjusted his management, and then, based on a hunch from another horse in her barn with light sensitivity, tried a pair of goggles. The transformation was dramatic.

“Within the first week it made a world of difference,” she said. “With the nose net and the goggles, he’s 98% improved. It lets him go comfortably, and that’s the most important thing.”

Just as that issue settled, another emerged: Beans had been going in a hackamore since Powlick first began riding him in 2023, successfully showing up to 1.25 meters. But showing in Thermal, California, in early 2024, something shifted.

 “He was just not himself,” she said. “He started having rails that didn’t make sense, and then he started stopping in the warm-up ring. That was really hard.”

Back home, the stops continued, even over small fences. Powlick made the decision to give him a full mental and physical reset.

That break became an unexpected turning point.

During their first winter together, she had discovered by accident that Beans went beautifully bridleless, something they’d tried for fun. Now, she turned it into the foundation of his restart: two months of mostly bridleless riding. When they began jumping again, the difference was unmistakable.

“I didn’t know how much tension he had before until I could compare it to how he feels now,” she said. “It’s like night and day.”

With the guidance of her trainer, Hillary Howe, and coach Jay Duke, the bridleless experiment solidified into a long-term plan. In a lesson with Duke prior to their first show back, he immediately saw the change, proclaiming, “That horse is never jumping in a bridle again.”

In fact, Duke himself rode Beans bridleless several times over the next week, which sealed the deal for him, and gave Howe more confidence that Powlick could succeed in the show ring with the unorthodox set up. 

Powlick showed Beans bridleless for the first time in July at The Oaks National 1 (California), where he won a ribbon the first day and grew more confident with each round. The results in the show ring, though, came along with a variety of questions from curious onlookers.

“People always ask me how I steer,” Powlick said with a laugh. “I use a guidewire from Unbridled Wings, but really, you ride with both hands and both legs. He just… does it. The funny thing is I hear a lot that I have more control in the warm-up ring than most.”

The goggles draw attention too, especially since USEF only recently approved their use with a veterinary letter. 

“Stewards stop me a lot,” she said. “They’re great about it, and I’m always prepared with my paperwork. I just think people don’t realize goggles can be a solution for headshaking.”

When they took him to Las Vegas for the USHJA National Championships, they weren’t sure what to expect with the heightened atmosphere and limited riding space, but Beans proved once again that their trust in him and his unique set-up was well placed. Powlick earned a second and third in her first two classes, and clinched fourth in the $10,000 1.15-meter Amateur Jumper Grand Prix, ultimately securing the reserve championship. 

At home in Park City, Beans enjoys long turnout and a simple, relaxing routine. “He’s a really sweet horse,” she said. “He always wants to cuddle and be a good boy.”

Looking ahead, Powlick is keeping expectations low and gratitude high. Beans will stay in the setup that makes him happiest, and she plans to remain focused on the 1.10/1.15-meter adults for now. 

“We’ll move up if he wants to,” she said. “For now, it’s one show at a time, and that’s been good for both of us.”

Balancing a demanding career with riding means organization is everything. Powlick works in biotech in regulatory affairs for a pathogen detection company, often adjusting her schedule to make room for riding. Between remote work, barn management responsibilities and weekend training sessions, she rides four days a week and structures her work hours around barn time.

“I don’t have much of a social life outside the barn,” she said, smiling. “But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The post With Goggles And A Guidewire, Amateur Unlocks Her Jumping ‘Beans’ Potential appeared first on The Chronicle of the Horse.

As one of 68 riders entered in the largest class at the USDF/GAIG Region 8 Championships—the adult amateur first level championship—in Saugerties, New York, Vickie Kahn-Sinclair harbored no delusions of grandeur in advance of the competition. Being a licensed psychotherapist has taught the adult amateur the importance of realistic expectations, which, with a 6-year-old mare she just met seven months ago, generally should not include winning competitive championship titles.

Nevertheless, Kahn-Sinclair and her Danish Warmblood De La Vie Bang (D’Avie–Brammings Pari-Zackia, Blue Hors Zack) emerged victorious, earning top honors with a 74.23%. One day later, the pair finished third in the adult amateur second level championship. They will contest both levels at the U.S. Dressage Finals, taking place Oct. 30-Nov. 2 at the World Equestrian Center—Ohio.

“I was just focused on having good rides, setting her up for success, and giving her a good experience,” said Kahn-Sinclair, 61, East Kingston, New Hampshire. “So it was icing on the cake to end up placing so well. She just keeps getting better and better.” 

Though her practice is based in Amesbury, Massachusetts, and she works full time, Kahn-Sinclair is able to see “Vie” at Longfellow Dressage in Nottingham, New Hampshire, every day. Riding at least five days per week makes her a better therapist, she said, as it helps her stave off burnout, a common issue among her colleagues. Riding and therapeutic counseling, moreover, are not wholly unrelated. Whether in the barn or in the office, she finds herself drawing on the same set of skills. 

“There is a connection. They both require having a good feel for things, intuition, patience and the ability to be curious and open-minded,” she said “More than anything, the mindset that you take into both [dressage and psychotherapy] is very similar.”  

Kahn-Sinclair found Vie in Denmark earlier this year, after her longtime partner, Lotus, whom she had raised and trained from age 3, had to be retired. She had hoped to make it to the Grand Prix with the 12-year-old, but just as they were about to make their Intermediaire II debut, the Westphalian gelding developed laminitis. 

“He told me the work was a little bit too much,” she said. “And he gave me a lot over the years—a wonderful, wonderful horse. So I had to let him step down.”  

Looking for a trained horse to pick up where Lotus left off, Kahn-Sinclair went to Europe with a clear idea of what she was looking for in her next mount. 

“I wasn’t looking for a young horse. I wasn’t looking for a big horse. And I wasn’t looking for a mare,” she recalled. “I came back with Vie—who is all three of those things—but I couldn’t be happier. It’s funny how finding horses happens.” 

While she didn’t find a suitable schoolmaster, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. 

“None of them were the right fit,” she said “I probably could have kept looking for a long time and eventually bought an older horse that was already doing the Grand Prix and had been doing it for a couple of years. I kept saying I was too old, and I wasn’t going to do the young horse thing again. And then I saw Vie, and I fell in love, and I said, ‘OK, one more young horse.’ I decided I would give it one more go.”

The young bay mare currently stands 17.2 hands and is growing like a weed. But Kahn-Sinclair, who is 5’4”, is not worried about the mare’s size. 

“She is so sensitive, sensible and easy to ride for a 6-year-old,” she said. “When I first sat on her, that’s why I fell in love with her. With how she feels, nothing else—even horses that are well-schooled—compares.”

Growing up as an eventer in Massachusetts, Kahn-Sinclair has ridden more than her fair share of airs above the ground, and she’s developed a seat to match. The blame lies with her mother, also a horse person, who made the fatal error of keeping a horse in their backyard until Kahn-Sinclair was in kindergarten. She was hooked. 

“ I begged for lessons until I was 9, when she finally gave in and started taking me to them,” she said. “I kept hoping and wishing for a horse of my own, which I got when I was 11. From then on, I would ride my bike down to the barn and take care of him.”

Kahn-Sinclair continued to event until her mid-30s, when the height of the cross-country fences began to dwarf her enthusiasm for the sport. 

“Honestly, I was always probably a little bit better at dressage than I was at the jumping, anyway,” she said. 

Riding is still a family affair for Kahn-Sinclair, although more indirectly, as she relies on the support of her husband, Bruce Sinclair, both at home and at shows. Flexible work hours and remote counselling sessions, COVID-era adaptations that have continued, allow her to travel to Florida to train with her coach, Susanne Hamilton, every winter. 

Long-term, Vickie hopes that with Vie, who will head to Florida for the first time this winter, she will finally be able to finish a horse to the Grand Prix level. Nothing else—competing at the USDF Finals included—is as important to the adult amateur, who has competed at finals multiple times before. As such, she initially wasn’t sure whether they should make the trek to Ohio this year. 

“I really, really wrestled with the decision, because my goal is to get her to Grand Prix,” she said. “And I had to ask myself, ‘Is it fair to her? Is it too much?’ I asked a lot of people for their opinion, and I was really on the fence. So I waited to see how she was going to feel.”

Vie was ready with her answer. 

“I got on her after giving her a couple of well-deserved days off, and she felt pretty strong and happy,” Vickie said. “So, I decided we’re going to go for it. It is really fun to be there in that competitive environment.” 

The post Psychotherapist Scores First Level Feat In Competitive Region 8 Championship  appeared first on The Chronicle of the Horse.

Emily Chiles grew up on horseback, participating as a young rider in a wide variety of disciplines and programs, from U.S. Pony Club to the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association, and dressage to spending a year as a working student under a five-star eventer Ashley Adams. 

But her true passion in the equestrian world has always been foxhunting, a sport she’s enjoyed since childhood when her parents, John and Whitney Digney, took her into the fields. 

And it’s the love and knowledge of the hunt that Chiles credits for her most recent success in the show ring: winning the inaugural Five Points Horse Trials Classic Series Novice Three-Day at the Carolina Horse Park (North Carolina). 

While Chiles enjoys the challenge of competition, there’s something special, she said, about the sport of foxhunting. 

“I love the thrill and the adrenaline,” she said. “You never know what each hunt is going to look like, and between weather and footing and location, no two are the same.”

“But more than that, I love the non-competitive aspect,” she continued. “Now, I’m a competitive person, and I do love to show, but hunting is different. It’s such a range. There are people out there in $800 hunt coats. And there are kids out there in hand-me-downs. There are fancy horses and not-so-fancy horses. There are 80-year-old women riding alongside teenagers. Everyone is out there because they love the horses, and they love being outside, and they love watching the hounds work and riding across the territory and the open land. It’s just … magical.”

Chiles has been a part of Virginia’s Farmington Hunt Club since childhood. In high school, she even participated in a Pony Club hunting exchange to England, rearranging her high school course load and enrolling in some online classes to make the trip possible. 

“It was an incredible experience,” she said. “We hunted five or six times, rode out just about every day with our host families, toured kennels and racecourses and a vet hospital. Horses are just so engrained in the culture there.”

As an adult, Chiles is still a hunting regular. She whips in on Saturdays, helping the huntsmen secure borders and roads and keeping an eye on the hounds.

“It’s been a really fun change,” she said. “It’s different from riding in the fields. But I’ve really enjoyed it.”

Chiles sees clear similarities between the skills needed for foxhunting and the classic long-format three-day event, for both horse and rider. 

“There’s definitely crossover between the two,” Chiles said. “Most people’s average rides are say, an hour. But for me, being in the saddle for two hours out hunting, or even three, it’s not unheard of. So the saddle time of the roads and tracks and steeplechase, and going fast, and then doing a longer trot … that definitely doesn’t feel as foreign to me as maybe it does to somebody else.”

The long-format division debuted at the Five Points series this year with beginner novice and novice divisions. Organizer Max Corcoran, a former president of the U.S. Eventing Association and longtime groom for Olympic eventer Karen O’Connor, pushed to add the classic format to the event.

“The long-format teaches you so much more than just riding,” Corcoran said when the new divisions were announced. “It’s about horsemanship, fitness, care, preparation, and planning.”

In addition to dressage and stadium, each held on a separate day, classic events expand cross-country into the entire, four-phase “speed and endurance day” from the long-format era, which was replaced by the modern short-format in international competition in the early 2000s: Phases A and C are roads and tracks—long trots that help prepare the horse for the cross-country test—Phase B is steeplechase—a higher-speed gallop across a course of simple brush fences—then a 10-minute vet check and recovery phase before Phase D, cross-country. 

It’s a long few days for horse and rider, and it tests each pair’s fitness and conditioning. Chiles spent the summer prepping for the event around her work as senior development manager for the Shenandoah National Park Trust.

“Once a week we did a longer, maybe two-hour trail ride,” she said. “And we worked up to 30-minute trot sets, and canter sets. We were doing maybe two or three conditioning rides a week. I’m really lucky to have access to a world-class facility nearby that has over a thousand acres, an aerated track, trot fields, a gallop hill. When it was hot this summer, I actually did a lot of riding before work. It was a good way to start the day, and it guaranteed that the ride happened, so if I needed to stay late at the office or run errands, I wasn’t sacrificing that riding time.”

It takes a special horse to thrive in this particular format. Luckily for Chiles, a darling pinto named Puzzle Master who was her mother’s former mount, was up for the challenge. 

The 12-year-old gelding, who the family calls “Bing,” DNA tests as having Percheron, Holsteiner and Welsh in his bloodlines but has no recorded breeding. Chiles’ mother Whitney bought him locally in 2018, the same year that she bought a yearling Oldenburg filly she hoped would become her dream horse, Dark Angel d’Avalon. Bing, Whitney thought, would be something fun to play with while she waited for Bella to be old enough to ride. 

While her mother was playing with Bing in the backyard, Chiles was completing a business degree at Randolph-Macon College then teaching English in rural Spain for a year. Chiles returned to Virginia in the fall of 2019, taking a position working at a private barn owned by a family she met foxhunting while she hunted for her first “real job.” She wanted to use her degree and spend some time in “big-city corporate America.” 

But then COVID-19 hit. No one was hiring. Chiles stayed on at that private farm through the pandemic. 

“I’m grateful for the job,” she said. “I got to ride, I had every resource that I could ask for in caring for the horses, and the job was fairly uninterrupted.”

In June 2020, Chiles met her future husband, Henry Chiles, at a socially distanced backyard birthday party. While Henry wasn’t a horse guy, his family is in agriculture, and the two bonded quickly over the love of the outdoors and local land. 

Their relationship was very new when just months later, Emily’s younger brother died suddenly in a car accident.

“John’s death was devastating for my whole family,” she said, “and Henry was an absolute rock through that time. I knew the relationship was worth seeing through, and because of both things, I decided to stop looking for that big-city job and instead to stay closer to home.”

She took a job in Virginia with the Shenandoah National Park Trust, a nonprofit partner to Shenandoah National Park. She finds great satisfaction working for an organization that she believes in, and the flexibility she has in the position has allowed her to enjoy more time in the saddle. 

While Chiles was settling into a new relationship and new job, Whitney was competing Bing locally through beginner novice and novice while Bella spent several seasons under eventer Gabby Dickerson’s tutelage. When Bella was finally ready to come home, Whitney, who was still working full time as a nurse educator, realized quickly that she didn’t have time for both horses. 

Luckily, her daughter now did. Emily took over the ride on Bing, and the rest is history. 

“He is the absolute perfect horse for me right now,” she said. “He’s just such a fun little guy. He doesn’t necessarily always know what he’s doing—and he has no buttons installed—but he is very careful, willing, and just so easygoing.”

“I can ride him seven days a week or two, and he just doesn’t care,” she continued. “And he’s up for doing it all. We foxhunt, he whips in, he’s outridden at local steeplechases, we’ve done Hunt Night at [the Pennsylvania National Horse Show]. He’s so much fun because he can be competitive, but we can also ride bareback around the barn.”

“As an ammy, I need a horse like him,” she said. “I can load him on the trailer by myself. I know if I ride him at dusk he’s not going to be stupid. If I have a lot of work events, I know he’ll be the same horse if he has to sit for a few days.”

Their recent success at the Five Points three-day was a family affair. Emily and Bing took home the blue; her mother and Bella came in fourth. 

“This particular competition was actually my mom’s idea,” Chiles said. “I’d done a long-format over 10 years ago, and it was really fun.”

She and her mother first tried to do a long-format together last fall at the Hagyard Mid-South Three-Day Event (Kentucky), but after trailering from Virginia, Bing wasn’t feeling well, so Chiles scratched. Whitney and Bella, however, competed in the novice three-day and finished third, having led after cross-country but getting knocked out of the top spot by rails in show jumping.

“So, really, doing the novice three-day again this fall was her redemption, and when she suggested it, I thought it would be fun to go along,” Chiles said. “I love the Carolina Horse Park. It’s a great venue.

“And competing alongside my mom is always just so much fun,” she continued. “Most of the events we do are one day, and we just had so much more downtime to be together and hang around the horses in the barn. This is such a unique hobby, and it’s so much fun to share with her.”

As the days get shorter, Emily and Bing will transition back to the foxhunting fields. As for any future plans: maybe they’ll move up to training level next year, but maybe they won’t. 

“I only have one horse to ride and jump,” she said, “and just because we are doing well doesn’t mean we’re necessarily ready to move up. We’re both comfortable and having fun at novice, and the long format has been a fun added element, so we’ll see where the off-season takes us.”

For now, Emily is just ready to have some fun outside in the fields with her favorite horse. 

The post After A Lifetime Of Foxhunting, Amateur Takes On The Long-Format Challenge appeared first on The Chronicle of the Horse.

In late May 2016, Margo Goldfarb stopped at Greenwood Farm in Middlebrook, Virginia, for a quick visit. Home to her grandparents Walter and Marynell Eyles and their Ridgetop Connemaras breeding program, the farm has produced generations of successful sport horses. In fact, Goldfarb was competing Twobits, a mare by one of her grandparents’ stallions, in their first CCI2* at the Virginia Horse Center that weekend.

While visiting, Goldfarb, of Franklin, Tennessee, was introduced to a quirky month-old foal named Ridgetop Pirate Blue. The Connemara-Thoroughbred cross (Landgate Bluebeard—Queen Daisy, Prenup) was left an orphan when his dam succumbed to a postpartum hemorrhage not long after foaling. While another mare on the farm accepted him as her own just days later, Pirate remained a bit skeptical of human interaction.

That day, Walter looked at his granddaughter and proclaimed that “Pirate” would be her next horse.

“At the time, I just kind of laughed,” Goldfarb, 28, remembered. “He was just a baby, and he was adorable, obviously. But I honestly didn’t really pay much attention to him.”

If someone had told her then that the sensitive youngster would one day not only be hers, but would also become her first advanced event horse, Goldfarb would never have believed them. But in their mutual first attempt at the level at the Kentucky Classique, held Aug. 28-31 in Lexington, Kentucky, Pirate and Goldfarb finished as the best-placed amateur and 10th overall—and she thinks she is just starting to tap into the 9-year-old gelding’s potential.

“I always had goals of reaching the highest levels of the sport, but when you don’t necessarily have unlimited resources, you have to be realistic,” Goldfarb said. “I always said if I had a horse to do it, I’ll absolutely aim for that, but I’m not going to force it.

“When I got Pirate, that’s not what I thought he would be doing, and I don’t think anyone else thought that either,” she continued. “He’s been a bit of an underdog, in that he just kept stepping up. He has so much heart.”

A Slow, Careful Start

After their initial meeting, Goldfarb didn’t give Pirate much thought, instead concentrating on developing Twobits, whom she eventually produced through the intermediate level. When a career-ending injury sidelined the mare just before they were set to tackle their first three-star, Goldfarb found herself without anything to ride. But she was in college at the time, so she decided to breed Twobits and catch ride as she could.

The next time Goldfarb interacted with Pirate, he was 3, and she was between her junior and senior years of college. During the summer, Goldfarb and her younger sister Nora often helped their grandparents by gently starting their young stock. In 2019, the Eyleses sent Pirate and another homebred to Tennessee for the sisters to work with. Margo took on Pirate, and she quickly realized that nothing with the quirky youngster was going to happen according to plan.

“I don’t think I can fully describe how much easier Nora’s experience was than mine,” Margo said with a laugh. “They were both [by the same stallion], but Nora’s was much more like an average Connemara. Connemaras are kind of born broke and make your job very easy. Pirate was not like that.

“He was just a bit overreactive, a bit sharp, and not really like the Connemara breed,” she continued, adding that his sensitivity was why her grandparents hadn’t sold him, despite interest. “He was a bit unusual in that way, and they knew he needed to be in the right hands.”

For months, Margo patiently worked with Pirate, quietly increasing his acceptance of everyday activities. Despite the repetition, his progress was frustratingly slow.

“His reactions are always very genuine,” Margo said. “He has never done anything naughty—that’s just not who he is. He was scared; he also had no reason in his life to be scared of anything. It was just how he saw the world.

“He wasn’t that people-oriented,” she continued. “He has become people-oriented, and has adapted to the people-centric world he lives in. But he much prefers his natural environment.”

By the end of the summer, Margo had yet to even sit on Pirate; with his return to Greenwood Farm on the horizon, she decided she was just going to try it and see what happened.

“Maybe that wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but I did it,” Margo said, laughing. “And he was surprisingly so much better. It was almost harder to do stuff on the ground with him. We did a little bit under saddle, just the basics you would want them to do at 3.”

When summer ended, Pirate returned to her grandparents, and Margo headed back to Kenyon College (Ohio) for her senior year. When she graduated in spring 2020 with a degree in chemistry, she received a note of congratulations from them—and it included a special surprise.

“They gave Pirate to me as a graduation gift,” Margo said. “I can’t remember the exact phrasing, but the tone was apologetic—like, ‘here is this barely broke 4-year-old.’ But they’ve been dedicated to the Connemara breed, and have bred some very wonderful horses. I’ve been lucky in that that’s what I grew up riding, and I was very, very grateful.”

Onward And Upward

Pre-pandemic, Margo was accepted to a doctoral program in the pharmacology department at Vanderbilt University (Tennessee). But she described her research—which involves studying proteins and carbohydrates at the molecular level that may serve as biomarkers for cancer—as being impossible to conduct virtually. With the onset of the pandemic, she ultimately deferred her enrollment for two years, and instead she focused on working with Pirate.

“When he was 4, we didn’t go to any shows—I don’t even think we took him off property until December,” Margo said. “It was just about making slow, slow progress. But he was all I had, so I was dedicated to that, with no real pressure put on to anything.”

Since high school, Margo has worked off and on with the Virginia-based five-star eventer Meghan O’Donoghue. With graduate school on hold, Margo returned to work for O’Donoghue full time—and brought the ultra-green Pirate along with her. In one of their first sessions together, O’Donoghue put out some trot poles. 

“Honestly, poles on the ground are still something we can barely do,” Margo laughed. “But we couldn’t even go over a pole, and she was like, ‘Oh, he’s really green.’ She was so wonderful, and so helpful. She knew that Pirate was what I had to work with, and she was going to help me with that.”

In the months to come, Margo spent countless hours with Pirate both on the ground and in the saddle. Through a technique she calls “roping”—essentially longeing over fences in a rope halter and long lead—she introduced Pirate to both show jumping and cross-country obstacles. 

“Meghan would say, ‘Oh Margo, this week you’re just going to rope him over some show jumps,’ and that was our task,” Margo said. “For the young horses, they get a little bit of self-sufficiency. They figure it out on their own and get some independence.”

Often, Margo worked with Pirate at the end of the day, so she sometimes found herself hacking the youngster on his own. Despite his quirks in other settings, work in the open—whether jumping or simply riding out—has always proved to be within Pirate’s comfort zone.

“Most young horses, you would like a nice buddy to hack out with,” Margo said. “But Pirate was very independent and loves hacking. We’re off in the woods in Virginia, and deer are jumping up and running in front of us, and he was perfect.”

In March 2021, the pair completed their first beginner novice horse trials at Rocking Horse (Florida). 

“I think it was the first time I’ve ever scored in the 40s for dressage,” Margo said. “He was like an Energizer bunny. I just cantered him for 45 minutes in the warm-up—and that was my entire warm up. But in the jumping, he was just amazing.”

The event was a turning point. From there, Margo described his progress as “fairly linear.” Pirate spent the rest of his 5-year-old season competing at novice and training levels; as a 6-year-old, he gained mileage at modified and preliminary. In 2023, the pair contested their first CCI2*-L at the Virginia Horse Center; later in the season, they finished second at the Hagyard Midsouth CCI2*-L in Kentucky.

“He’s always been the best cross-country horse,” Margo said. “At that point, he just kept stepping up and rising to the occasion. He always gives 110%.”

After moving up to intermediate in 2024, Margo received a grant sponsored by the Maryland International Equestrian Foundation to compete at in the CCI3*-S held at Loch Moy in Adamstown, Maryland, where the pair finished ninth. The Eyleses drove up from Virginia to watch.

“That was really special,” Margo said. “My grandfather was probably the only one who predicted Pirate would be as good as he is now, from when he was a young horse. My grandfather would always say, ‘He is going to be great,’ but the rest of us would never have expected it.”

The pair finished the season with a completion in the CCI3*-L, held at Fair Hill in conjunction with the Maryland 5 Star.

“That was a huge test,” Margo said. “[Competing at Maryland] wasn’t even on my radar for the year; I thought it would be ambitious. But he stepped up to the two-star level, and that felt easy enough for him, and then he stepped up to the three-star level, and he did it quite easily, too. He kept doing everything so well, I felt it was reasonable to go there.”

Margo believes their relationship has evolved from “teacher-student” to more of a partnership.

“I felt very comfortable bringing him to the two-star level, but I had limited miles at intermediate,” Margo said. “At that point, it started to feel like we were doing it together. When he was younger, it felt like I was educating him, but at this point, he is an equal partner, and I can place so much trust in him.”

Taking On The Blue Numbers

Since 2022, when Margo began her graduate studies, she has had to carefully balance pursuing her equestrian goals with the requirements of a demanding degree program. She is up early most mornings to get her ride time in before heading to the lab, and she has to be strategic in coordinating training and competitive opportunities.

“Being in school, I’ll kind of bank up my time off, and then I’ll go back to Virginia to train with Meghan and compete,” Margo said. “I do appreciate her help, and I try to spend a couple weeks out of the year in Virginia. I try to be thoughtful about the events I go to and align my schedule with hers. But at this point, I’m self-sufficient enough I’ve gone to a three-star on my own.”

Even with careful planning, there are times when Margo must divide her focus. When she arrived in Kentucky to tackle their first advanced, after getting Pirate settled in, walking the cross-country course and braiding him for dressage the next morning, Margo returned to her hotel and spent the rest of the evening completing an application for a pre-doctoral fellowship with the American Heart Association.

“They only accept submissions once a year, and of course, the deadline falls on that week,” Margo said with a laugh. “I was emailing back and forth with my advisor, and I barely got any sleep before I had to do dressage and cross-country on the same day. It was probably better that way—I didn’t have time to worry about it.”

Margo admits walking the cross-country course, which includes fences used on the Kentucky Horse Park’s Cosequin Lexington CCI4*-S track each April, was a little intimidating. But once out on course, her nerves fell away.

“He was just amazing,” Margo said. “He just came out ready for it, and I don’t think he realized the jumps were any bigger. He’s maybe 15.2 with his shoes on, but he can make the distances. He is so confident, and I feel like every time I go out on him, I believe in him more and more, and believe in his potential.”

Crossing through the finish flags that day brought both a sense of relief and validation.

“I’d been telling myself, ‘We’ve made it around Maryland, he’s found it all so easy, surely we are both capable of doing this,” Margo said. “But to actually finally be able to demonstrate that, and prove we could do that, was really special.”

Margo hesitates to say for sure what is next for Pirate, and admits to having “a Plan A, B and C.” For now, she will acknowledge that she intends to take a second crack at the Maryland CCI3*-L this fall with the goal of being more competitive, and plans to return to advanced next spring. Beyond that, she isn’t willing to commit to much—but does hint at the possibility of a run in the Kentucky four-star in the future.

“I’ve always tried to be conservative, and he’s only 9 years old,” Margo said. “I do really believe in him, and he’s just continued to show his quality.

“When we did Maryland last year, that was almost a 10-minute course, and even though he didn’t have the fitness some of the other horses in the field did, he just kept going,” she continued. “He’s jumping the last fence with his little ears still pricked.”

And when she completes her Ph.D.—most likely in 2027—Margo hopes she can combine her scientific interests with promoting equine well-being through the research and development of pharmaceuticals, while continuing to breed and produce event horses from the ground up.

“I’d like to build that program for myself, and breed some younger horses to follow in Pirate’s footsteps to the top,” Margo said.

Margo has come to believe that Pirate’s quirkiness is part of what has made him so successful—even if trotting poles are still their nemesis.

“He will jump massive jumps, no problem, but he won’t go over a pole on the ground,” Margo said. “I honestly think the quirkiness—it’s a little bit what they need to make it to the top. It makes them a little special. 

“He really enjoys it, he’s well suited to it,” she continued. “He loves his job.”

The post All In The Family: Grandparents’ Orphan Foal Grows Into Amateur’s First Advanced Partner appeared first on The Chronicle of the Horse.

It’s not unusual for amateur dressage rider Erin Liedle to show up at The Pointe at Lifespring, an assisted living facility in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she works as a physical therapist, with one of her pets in tow. Her dogs are always welcome visitors, but it’s her Shetland pony Stewie who draws the biggest crowd.  

Her service work with her pets and her career as a physical therapist for geriatric patients are only some of the many ways that Liedle gives back. Outside her job and her passion for riding, she also helps run the East Tennessee nonprofit Down and Dirty Dogs, which provides training to shelter dogs, improving their well-being while sheltered and making them more adoptable pets. 

Bridging The Gap With Service Animals

Almost 15 years ago Liedle’s main riding horse was struggling with complex health issues and couldn’t be turned out with other horses. The mare grew depressed. When a vet suggested that a smaller, gentler companion might improve her mental health and physical recovery, Liedle jumped on the idea; she was open to anything that might help her horse.  

And as one does when they need a small pasture puff, Liedle immediately went to Craigslist.

“I found Stewie’s ad and asked to meet him,” she said. “When we got there, he was covered in mud. But he was the happiest little dude, and he had so much personality. He’s the best $300 I’ve ever spent!”

In the short-term, miniature horse Stewie was a definite boost to her mare’s quality of life, Liedle said. But when the mare eventually was diagnosed with a severe neurologic condition and had to be put down, there was no question that Stewie was staying put at Liedle’s farm in Knoxville, where he lives now with her retired eventer and her current dressage mount. 

While Liedle had purchased the mini as a cute companion, she thought Stewie had more to offer. 

Liedle had been a physical therapist at The Pointe at Lifespring for only a few years when she asked executive director Rebecca Mills if she could bring Stewie in to visit the residents. 

Bringing her animals to work was nothing new for Liedle: Her agility dogs, Border Collie Graham and Border Terriers Miley and Griffin, often accompany her, encouraging and motivating the residents during physical therapy sessions and visiting patients in their rooms.

Trips to The Pointe became another way for the dogs, who Liedle says “are fantastic but need direction,” beyond their regular agility training, to feel like they have a job. And the positive impact they have on Liedle’s patients was nothing short of extraordinary. 

“One of my patients was put into hospice care,” Liedle said, “and she specifically asked for Miley. So the next day I brought her in. The patient, bed-bound at that point, asked if I could put Miley on her bed. And I did, and Miley just gently crawled up and laid down on the patient’s chest and just sort of spread herself out and lay there for a long time. She just knew. I’ll never forget it.”

Knowing how much joy the dogs brought The Pointe’s seniors, when Liedle asked Mills about Stewie, the answer was a resounding yes. 

The Elevator Pony

“I was a little worried that he might, you know, do his business,” Mills said, laughing. “But then he showed up, and he was so beautifully groomed, and he smelled so good, and he had a better haircut than most of the men who work here…

“He’s so good that we can bring him inside,” she continued. “The fact that he’s so calm and accessible and approachable just allows him to reach everyone. He just brings so much joy. How can you be stressed or worried when you’re petting a miniature horse? Or is he a pony? I’m not a horse expert—I just know he’s cute!

“He’s become a celebrity here,” she added. “We have some residents who don’t attend a lot of activities and aren’t super social. They can be hard to reach, especially some of the residents in memory care. But then one of the dogs or Stewie comes for a visit, and it’s that animal who is able to bring that resident out of his or her shell. It’s just priceless.”

Liedle remembers a particular visit when a resident on the second floor wanted to meet Stewie but couldn’t come downstairs. 

“He grew up on a farm and really, really wanted to see the pony,” she recalled. “So my colleague asked if Stewie would ride on an elevator. I said, ‘We’re going to find out!’ and that little champion, he walked right on and went up to visit that patient. It was amazing.”

Liedle said that bringing her pets to work—especially Stewie—enables her to do her physical therapy work even better. 

“For so many of my harder-to-reach patients, he bridges the gap,” she said. “He has changed my relationship with so many patients because he opens something up in them that allows them to let us in. It’s just so special. I never could have imagined that my career would have turned out like this, that I could, in this incredible way, couple my love of animals with my love for the geriatric population and get to share one with the other.”

“Erin wears so many hats here,” Mills said. “She’s an incredible physical therapist, but she goes above and beyond that role daily in everything she does. What she does for everyone here goes so far beyond a job—it’s a passion and a calling.”

Equestrian Steward

While Stewie may be the biggest celebrity living in Liedle’s backyard, the company he keeps is rather impressive. Liedle’s mostly retired eventer, Fernhill Boodle, won the amateur training level championship at the 2019 USEA American Eventing Championships (Kentucky). When “Boodle” had some off-and-on lameness issues, Liedle decided to retire him to hacks around the farm while she shifted her focus solely to dressage. 

“Eventing is a really high-risk sport, she said. “And I’d found an incredible trainer and a great group of friends in Knoxville who were dressage riders. Making the switch from eventing, which I’d done since childhood, just made sense.

“I’d always loved dressage,” she continued. “But I didn’t understand the sport in its entirety because I’d never had a purpose-bred horse to do that specific job.”

She has been riding with dressage trainer Emily Brollier Curtis for almost a decade and said that Curtis’ guidance in the sport—and as a person—has been life-changing. Liedle also credits Curtis for finding her current dressage mount, a 7-year-old Dutch Warmblood gelding named No Limit (Just For You—Heriti, Vitalis). 

“Emily saw his ad and said, ‘You need to go sit on this horse,’ ” Liedle recalled. “I’m pretty calculated in my decision making, but I really trust Emily, and so I bought a ticket to Texas. I told my mom when I was at the airport, ‘I’m not going to buy this horse.’ Then I walked into the barn and realized that I was in trouble.

“Three years later, it’s the best decision I ever made,” she continued.  

And while “Rocky” has taken her to the U.S. Dressage Finals for the past three years and is beginning Prix St. Georges work, Liedle isn’t talking about their successes in the show ring. She’s more interested in what she’s learned from Rocky and the relationship that they’ve formed since their partnership began. 

“He was not the easiest young horse,” she said. “He was cut late, and he has very, very high opinions of himself. He refused to give to pressure; he couldn’t handle it. So we started off doing a lot of groundwork, and I taught him that he could trust that there would always be a release if he just kept looking for it. When he came to realize that I was never going to trap him, and that he just needed to work to figure out what I was asking for, we really started to become a team. And he has really improved my horsemanship and my riding; I have so many more tools in my toolbox now because of him.”

Once the pair sorted out those early kinks, they took to the show ring, which Rocky really enjoys. 

“His extra bravado is really working for us now,” she said. “It’s an unknown variable when you buy a young horse; you don’t know if they’ll even enjoy showing. But Rocky loves the show ring, especially the big shows. Like, he goes to finals, and he steps up.”

But she tries hard to keep her showing goals in perspective.

“I try to look at horse shows as litmus tests,” she said. “I love competing, but at the end of the day, if my horse is happy and content at the show, we’ve won already. The mental and physical health of the horse is always most important, and feedback from a show just lets me know what we need to keep working on.”

“It’s about the personal journey for her,” Curtis said. “I cannot tell you how many times she checks in with me on an ethical standard, asking if something is fair to the horse. She’s constantly coming back to that, being a steward for her horse. Her horsemanship is outstanding. She’s always questioning: Is this right? Is this fair? Am I asking the right questions? Is this too much or not enough? She’s always circling back to what is right. And because of that, her horse is so generous with her. Erin is as good as they come. The real deal.”

Liedle says that having her horses at home fosters the special relationship she has with each one of them. 

“It helps to remind me of what’s really important,” Liedle said. “I’m the person who asks Rocky to work, but I’m also the food lady and the stall cleaner, and we’re always just hanging out. It’s the absolute best when I walk out of the garage, not even going to the barn, and the horses start talking to me.

“What gets me up in the morning is knowing that these animals, whether the dogs or the horses, put their trust in me even though they don’t have to. That’s most important,” she added. “Rocky is by far the nicest horse I’ve ever had, and probably ever will have, and I just feel so blessed to be his person. God entrusts us with these animals to be stewards to them, to do right by them and take care of them the best that we can.”

But while Liedle is grateful for the animals and people in her own life, so many in Knoxville would say that they feel blessed, too, by her presence in their lives, whether it’s her colleagues and residents at The Pointe, or her friends at the barn, or the horses and dogs she loves. 

“She’s an amazing physical therapist,” Miller said. “But more than that, she’s a phenomenal human. She’s so humble. She cares so much about the people here. Really, she cares about all living things. She’s just a phenomenal person.”

The post Amateur Dressage Rider Erin Liedle Has A Mini And A Mission appeared first on The Chronicle of the Horse.

When she’s on the ground, Ekis’ life is dominated by horses. Whether she’s at the barn with her 25-year-old Arabian gelding MS Fires Comet, studying to become a dressage technical delegate, or driving her daughter to vaulting practice, hooves are never hard to find. But when she’s in the air, the Pittsburgh-based nurse puts everything else out of mind.

It’s what she would have wanted from medical personnel, if she hadn’t been alone with her stepfather when personal tragedy struck her family in 2002.

“I had a stepfather who passed away. I wasn’t a medical person at the time. My mom was, but she was at work that day. He had a massive heart attack, and I remember just feeling helpless, like I didn’t know what to do,” said Ekis, who was 25 at the time. “Now I know that no matter what I would have known then, or whatever equipment I had, or medicine I had, he was going to die. And now I feel like, if that happened again, or [happened to] someone close to me, I know I’m capable of doing everything I can, and if they still pass, then that’s what was always going to happen.”

Motivated by her experience, Ekis started in the trauma surgical intensive care unit before she got into a helicopter. 

“When I went into trauma medicine, I was like, ‘Who do they call when everything goes wrong?’ That’s who I want to be,” she said.

Some flights are much less intense than others. The Center for Emergency Medicine of Western Pennsylvania-owned STAT MedEvac helicopter crew transports all kinds of patients, from those experiencing routine health issues to life-threatening medical emergencies.

“Everyone’s like, ‘That’s so stressful!’ But I don’t feel like it is,” Ekis said. “To you it might be stressful, but for me … I like to know what’s going on. I guess that’s why becoming a technical delegate fits too, because you know what’s going on with everybody.”

Ekis started on the path to become a TD more than three years ago, when she found herself wanting more education than she could find online and listening to podcasts. 

“I wanted to get more involved,” she said. “I enjoyed dressage so much, and I wanted to get deeper into the education portion of it. Soaking up everything, reading everything, and listening to all the podcasts—it was still not enough. Becoming a TD was a way for me to have a bigger purpose in the sport, even if I couldn’t ride anymore, or couldn’t afford it.”

Not one to shy away from opportunities out of the saddle, Ekis also serves on the USDF Adult Programs Committee and was recently re-elected from Region 1 as a participating member delegate to the 2025 USDF Convention in December.  

Though she hasn’t been down the centerline in a couple of years, Ekis still gets to the barn regularly to ride “Comet.” The 14.1-hand Arabian (TA Prince Sharif—Galant MS Fire) joined the family eight years ago, after a career as an endurance and games pony, initially as a Pony Club and eventing mount for Ekis’ son Kai Ekis, now 15. Watching her son made Jill, who grew up dancing rather than riding horses, a little envious. 

“I didn’t think adults did this,” she said. “I knew about the Olympics, but I thought, like with dance, if you don’t become a professional by a certain age, there’s really nothing for you. I didn’t know about this whole adult amateur world out there. My son was riding, and I was with another adult and I said, ‘I wish I could ride.’ She was like, ‘Well, I ride.’ I thought it was just for the kids, but it’s not.” 

So, when her son lost interest in horses, Jill happily took over the ride on Comet. Though she followed in Kai’s eventing footsteps briefly, she soon decided both for her personal risk tolerance and her detail-oriented nature that dressage was a better fit.

“I said, ‘I don’t really care what anyone’s going to say about my old man to me. We’re going to do this,’ ” she said. “We got some pushback. There were people who said, ‘I can’t believe you’re going to recognized shows with him.’ But I was like, ‘I don’t really care if I go and get a 50. I just want to go see what it’s like.’ That’s the only way I was going to learn to just jump in.” 

The pair competed through third level together, earning four of the six scores for Jill’s U.S. Dressage Federation bronze medal. 

In his semi-retirement, the gray gelding has confidently stepped into the role of babysitter at Dark Horse Farm in Baden, Pennsylvania, expertly teaching younger horses how to munch grass quietly in turnout. 

While Comet’s life has begun to slow down, Jill cannot say the same of her own. One fateful trip to Dressage at Devon (Pennsylvania) with her daughter Imogen, now 8, four years ago resulted in one more horsewoman in the family. 

“I almost didn’t take her with me that year, because I thought she was too young to pay attention at that show,” Jill said. “But I took her, and they had a vaulting demonstration. She looked at me and she said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ She wouldn’t stop bothering me until we found the girls and she got to practice on their barrel. We found a team near us, and she’s been vaulting ever since.” 

Looking ahead, Jill plans to spend more time focused on horses. After spending years helping others through emergencies like the one she herself experienced with her stepfather, she is ready to prioritize other aspects of her life. Recently, she’s switched to working part-time. 

“That demon I used to carry around is quiet, so I’m going to just slowly start to back myself away and do things that are more fun,” she said. 

Among the more fun things: finishing her TD program, attending the 2025 USDF convention, and maybe even returning to the competition arena with Comet. 

“I’ve thought about pulling him out for a first level freestyle, for a reprise,” she said. “I have all these grand ideas that I want to do for a freestyle. We’ll see.” 

The post Helicopter Flight Nurse Finds Her Footing In Dressage Ring appeared first on The Chronicle of the Horse.

Amateur rider Sara Schulman graduated from college in May 2020 with neither pomp nor circumstance; the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic had shut down the nation so her graduation ceremony from the University of Virginia didn’t take place until the following year.  But her entrance into the workforce—virtually—in those early months of the pandemic provided her a unique opportunity to launch her career while simultaneously pursuing her dream of climbing to the top levels of eventing. 

The journey hasn’t always been easy, but the successes she’s had with her equine partner Cooley Chromatic over the past few seasons have made that quest for balance more than worth its challenges. They are now competing successfully at the advanced level around her full-time job for mortgage giant Fannie Mae.

Back when she was an incoming college freshman, Schulman lasted just one horseless week at the University of Virginia before driving a few hours home to bring back a relatively green off-track Thoroughbred she’d purchased at the end of high school. Her parents—not horse people—hadn’t wanted their daughter to worry about either the time or the expense of a horse while adjusting to college life, but she assured them she could find balance between school and “Snip.” 

A variety of part-time jobs enabled her to make equestrian ends meet.

“I did the afternoon feeding and chores at Kim Severson’s barn to work off board,” she said. “And I house-sat, rode a horse for a professor, and worked at Dover Saddlery, though it was easy to just spend my paycheck right there!”

Throughout college she rode on UVA’s eventing team but said it was relatively small, and they only competed together a few times each year. So Schulman focused on Snip’s training, starting out at novice. By her senior year they were competing successfully at the CCI2* level. 

Snip, who was then 13, was maxing out, and Schulman knew her own ambitions were too big to ask of him. So she made the tough decision after a successful season to sell him, knowing those funds would help her buy her next partner. 

During the first semester of her senior year, Schulman received a job offer. She signed on with Fannie Mae in the housing mortgage industry; she’d begin working in July 2020, shortly after graduating with her economics degree. 

But then COVID hit, and Schulman learned that she’d start her new job remotely—with a significant amount of flexibility.

She took the funds from Snip’s sale and went to Ireland. She knew she couldn’t afford a made horse; her budget would allow, instead, for her to invest in a quality young prospect. 

She took a chance on a leggy, red 3-year-old Oldenburg gelding named Cooley Chromatic (Thorgal—Castrade, Sandreo).

“It was a risk,” she said. “Getting a horse that young, I didn’t know if he would actually have the desire to be an upper-level event horse as I hopefully intended him to be, so I had to make sure he was marketable in general if I brought him back and he didn’t want to be an eventer.

“I watched him free jump over there [in Ireland] and while it’s hard to see a lot at that age, I could get a general sense of his natural athleticism. He was a beautiful mover,” she continued.

Working remotely allowed her to spend nearly every day of the week with her new partner, “Caden,” as well as continue to work as an assistant trainer to Jan Byyny, with whom she’d been riding and training. 

During those early years post-graduation, Schulman juggled her full-time, real-world career with long hours spent at the barn. She’d visit the barn twice a day to do chores and ride multiple horses around her day job.

“There were some jam-packed days and early mornings and late nights,” she said. “But I think that period of time was really instrumental for my own riding, Caden’s development, and in my relationship with him.”

For an amateur wanting to make it to the top levels of the sport, having just one horse was hindering her own progress as a rider—especially in the early years when Caden was still growing and his training had to be careful and slow. 

“At first, he could really only flat for like 20 minutes at a time,” she said. “I had to curb my ambitions and not push him too much.”

But it’s hard to progress as an upper-level rider with a one-horse string. 

Schulman credits Byyny for allowing her to ride and compete horses for Byyny and her clients, which gave her the additional saddle time she needed to develop her own skills. She still catch-rides when she can and appreciates the trust Byyny has in her to ride relatively unfamiliar horses in new environments.

Schulman realized Caden was a keeper at one of their first preliminary-level events. 

“He’d always been super nervous over water jumps; he didn’t understand the question he was being asked,” she recalled. “I’d always had to school him through the water at every horse trial. But I have this picture of us jumping into the water, and I have a giant smile on my face because he’d popped in confidently.”

As they moved up the levels, it became clear that Caden was really enjoying his job and had the talent and drive to take the pair to the top levels of the sport. 

“I started to noticed a change in him at the start box,” she said. “When we moved up to intermediate, he started to get really excited. He felt ambitious, and I hadn’t really felt that from him before.”

It’s Schulman’s boyfriend, Mike Dewhirst, who leads the bouncing duo most often to the start. 

They’ve been dating for about a year and a half, and it seems like he might be a keeper, too. He’s an avid supporter of Schulman’s passion—a key, she says, for being able to balance a relationship with high-level riding. 

“He was not a horse guy, but he’s turned into one,” she said. “He comes out to the barn with me often and thinks of Caden as ‘his friend.’ Two months into dating, I was in Florida for the season. We’d only been on a handful of dates, but he flew down to spend time with me. Six months in, he came with me to Bromont [(Quebec)].”

“He does just about everything now,” she continued. “He observes everything and just learns what the next step is. He grooms and helps bathe. He jogs horses out for people. He volunteers on his own to pick up poop, and he wipes snot out of Caden’s white nose. Often, I think he knows a course better than I do, and he’ll walk courses with me and suggest the lines I should take.”

It’s not just Dewhirst’s understanding and flexibility that helps Schulman find some sense of balance in her life.

“You can’t do this unless you have people around you who understand the limitations of your schedule,” she said.

That includes Dewhirst but also Schulman’s trainers, who will meet her for lessons as early as 6 a.m., or the barn staff who may help with fitness rides if she can’t make it to the barn due to work, or her managers at Fannie Mae who allow her flexibility around competitions. 

Her support system has been particularly helpful recently; in December, after more than four years of fully remote work, Schulman was offered a new position at Fannie Mae. It was great offer, she said, that would challenge and teach her. But the caveat was that it required in-person work in the Washington, D.C., office several days a week. 

She weighed her options. She was scheduled to leave for the season in Florida just two weeks later. But the opportunities it offered her career were too great, and she decided to take the job. 

“I was all ready [for Florida] and was on a riding high since 2024 with some great three-star results,” she said. “We were fourth in our first three-star long at Bromont in June [of 2024], then third in the intermediate division in that [USEA American Eventing Championships] in Kentucky, then second at the Maryland CCI3*-L.

“I was planning our move up to advanced,” she continued. “Then I had a job offer in my hands, a completely new job role in a more challenging area that I knew was going to be interesting and rewarding. I knew it was a privileged position to be in, to have a great job offer and an amazing horse. But it was hard at the time to make the decision.”

For Schulman, there was a bigger adjustment than a new role within the company: This was the first time in her career that she would have to report regularly to an office or navigate a commute. 

“I actually had to move and find an apartment on the Metro line,” she said. “I have a pickup truck, and knew I’d never fit into any D.C. parking garages!”

She’s continuing to navigate the balance between the new job and the horse world. 

On days when she works from home, she fights her self-proclaimed “non-morning-person” nature and often rides before work. On days that she makes the 75-minute commute by Metro train from Herndon, Virginia, to her downtown office, she rides in the evening, usually not making it to the barn before 7 p.m. 

“I try to make it to the barn six days a week,” she said. “But I’m also trying to be better about socializing, whether it’s with friends or Mike.

“And when I accepted the offer in December, I made it really clear to my new manager that I ride competitively, and it’s a priority,” she added. “He’s really supportive, and I still have flexibility in the job.”

Despite the new job and new obligations, Schulman and Caden made their advanced debut—just in Maryland instead of Florida. After moving up at the Fair Hill International April Horse Trials, they notched their first advanced-level win in June, topping the division at the Maryland International and Horse Trials, held June 27-29 in Adamstown. 

“I love the job I’m in now,” she said, “but it’s always going to be a challenge to balance my career and my riding. I got a lot of exposure and spent a lot of time in the horse world. I have an amazing horse, and if I have a season where I’m a little behind [due to work], we have lots more seasons ahead of us. It’s never going to truly be 50/50, but I’ll keep trying to find that balance.”

The post Early Mornings, Late Nights Have Helped Amateur Sara Schulman Reach Advanced appeared first on The Chronicle of the Horse.

Riding Grand Prix dressage is challenging. Riding side-saddle is challenging. Doing both at the same time? That’s a job for … an academic and her spotted mare.

Abbey Dondanville, a longtime university professor and administrator who now teaches high school, is used to drawing attention whenever she rides her pinto mare, Alter Ego, down centerline in FEI tests. The 17-year-old Friesian Sporthorse isn’t just flashy, she’s also notable for her unique physique—by a Friesian stallion and out of a Percheron-Spotted Saddle Horse mare, “Glory” simply does not look like a typical FEI mount.

In April, they upped the head-turning ante at the Tryon Spring 1 Dressage Show (North Carolina) by performing two Grand Prix freestyles—competing side-saddle at the level for the first time.

In their 15 years together, Dondanville and Glory have done everything from eventing to foxhunting to dressage, the sport in which the mare truly found her niche. Not only did Glory help Dondanville earn her U.S. Dressage Federation bronze, silver, and gold medals, but also the corresponding freestyle bar at each level—making them one of just a handful of USDF Diamond Award recipients in the country. After achieving that milestone in 2022, Dondanville was looking for new ways to learn from and enjoy her special equine partner.

“Side-saddle has always seemed really cool and challenging, and ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to try it,” Dondanville, 52, of Easley, South Carolina, said. “I love my mare, but she is not [CDI] small tour material. I like having fun with her, and she seems to be having fun too. She loves to work. 

“My mare has answered every single request I’ve ever asked of her, from the time she was 2 until now,” she continued. “I thought, ‘What can we do that is fun and different for us?’ So even though I didn’t know what I was doing, I decided we’d start at the beginning and see what we can do with side-saddle.”

From acquiring the proper equipment to learning modified aids to working with officials to resurrect retired rules, the pair have come a long way riding aside in just a short period of time. But their two Tryon Grand Prix freestyle performances marked two special milestones—not only was it Dondanville’s official side-saddle Grand Prix debut, it was also the pair’s first time back at the level since 2021.

“I wanted to do the regular Grand Prix [test], but I could not get the canter zig-zag riding aside,” Dondanville admitted with a laugh. “But we were qualified for the freestyle, so I decided that’s what we’ll do. 

“I have not been so nervous as I was on Friday in a long time,” she continued. “Obviously, riding Grand Prix is hard—it just is—and riding side-saddle is hard. And you get those doubts. It doesn’t matter how many times you do the test at home, it is different when you are doing it in front of other people.”

An Unexpected Equine Partner

When Dondanville purchased Glory as a long yearling, sight unseen off a sales video, it was with the intention of training her for resale. She thought the filly’s three clear gaits and steady temperament would make her an easy horse to develop while Dondanville’s main mount recovered from an injury. At the time, Dondanville was mostly eventing (she has competed through preliminary level), and she thought Glory might make a nice low-level “all-rounder.”

She was in for an unexpected surprise when her new project arrived at the farm.

“The stallion was 17.1, and the dam was 16.3,” Dondanville remembered. “The breeder told me that as a coming 2-year-old, Glory was 15.3, and I thought that sounded about right. Then she comes off the trailer at 13 hands. I didn’t even know if she was going to get out of pony size.”

Fortunately, Glory did end up growing—both taller (she finished at 15.2 hands) and broader—and even though Dondanville is 5’9”, she has never felt overly large on the mare. 

Dondanville evented Glory through novice, but it was a judge’s fortuitous comment at a Young Event Horse competition when the mare was 4 that ultimately changed the course of her career.

“Sue Smithson said to me, ‘Abbey, I love your horse, she is doing all the things, but she’s a dressage horse, not an event horse,’ ” Dondanville recalled with a laugh. “I knew at that point she was right. But I had never competed more than first level dressage. She and I had to learn together, all the way up.”

Just before she turned 5, Glory was kicked in turnout and fractured her right hock. Veterinarians were unsure of her long-term prognosis; Dondanville opted to give the mare six months of complete rest in a small turnout and hoped for the best outcome.

When Glory came sound after her layup, Dondanville was relieved. But she knew her soundness wasn’t guaranteed, and the damage was still visible on X-ray. That, combined with the extensive external scarring on her hock, meant the mare would never pass a pre-purchase exam. Instead of reselling her, Dondanville decided to see what they could accomplish in the dressage court. As it turned out, the sport proved to be a perfect fit.

“We were schooling Prix St. Georges when she was 6,” Dondanville said. “If we had our [one tempi changes], she would have been able to do the developing Grand Prix at 8. It took us three years to get the ones, and then she was like, ‘Oh, is this what you wanted?’ And then, she did the ones. She has the best brain ever. Just totally willing to try anything I put forth.”

When it came to heading down centerline, Dondanville found that striving to achieve the scores necessary to earn her USDF medals was a good motivator—but even more important was to have fun while doing so.

“I like to challenge myself, and I like to challenge my horses,” Dondanville said. “I didn’t care if I finished last in the class, as long as I got my qualifying score. It’s about me having fun, and learning things, and about my horses using themselves well, so they are happy and their brains are engaged.”

Initially, Dondanville still dabbled in lower-level eventing with Glory while also pursuing her dressage goals. 

“She’s an amateur’s horse, and amateurs like to do all the things,” Dondanville said with a laugh. “But once I moved her up to FEI, my dressage trainer was like, ‘Please, stop eventing this horse.’ ”

Before training Glory, Dondanville had never before taken a youngster from halter breaking to under saddle work and beyond. She credits her longtime coach, USDF certified instructor Julie Cochran, for helping her to bring Glory up through the levels.

“She is realistic,” Dondanville said of Cochran. “And she doesn’t back away from the off breeds; she embraces them. Like, this horse may not have the greatest extension, for example, so where can we earn other points in the test to make up for that?”

Although Cochran has since moved to Georgia, Dondanville still seeks her advice and guidance, including when she and Glory began their side-saddle journey.

“Julie has seen all of the trials and tribulations,” Dondanville said with a laugh. “She has been with Glory from second level all the way through Grand Prix. She is a super, fantastic individual.”

Learning To Ride Aside

When she decided to try side-saddle, Dondanville reached out to the International Sidesaddle Organization for advice. Although she found their resources helpful, she also learned there were no instructors focusing on sidesaddle dressage in the southeast—so she began to teach herself. She found a century-old side-saddle and an equally aged “cane,” made of bamboo, which is used to replace the rider’s right leg when it is hooked over the saddle’s horn. Then, she started showing up at traditional dressage clinics in her new equipment.

“I’d walk in the ring, and they’d be convinced they wouldn’t be able to teach me anything,” Dondanville said. “But a good instructor is a good instructor. They might not be able to tell me to put my cane in a certain spot, but they can tell me my horse is dropping her outside shoulder.”

Dondanville admits that at first, she found it harder to stay in the middle of the side-saddle than a traditional one, and she was nervous about leaving the fenced arena in case an unexpected spook caused her to lose her balance. But with practice, she soon learned that many familiar aids were equally effective aside as astride.

“For example, for the one tempis, I do tap her slightly with my heel or my cane, but it is mostly moving the hips, like you would in an astride saddle,” Dondanville explained. “Obviously you don’t have a right leg on the side of the horse, so you have to use your cane. She has to be good about being sensitive to that light pressure, instead of my whole leg.

“I had to get control of myself before I could even think about asking her to understand what I want,” she continued. “Because when I’m all over the place, she’s like, ‘What are you doing?’ ”

Dondanville discovered that the U.S. Equestrian Federation had removed most of the rules related to side-saddle from the dressage rulebook about a decade ago, because its practice had become so obsolete. As she prepared to make her side-saddle show ring debut, Dondanville worked with the USEF Rules Committee to put together a letter that she now shares with the technical delegate at each show. Specifically, it states that her cane is legal equipment, as is her side-saddle apron, which is the same color as the breeches she wears. Dondanville also learned that, according to the rules, spurs must be worn in pairs—but they do not need to match; the letter stipulates this as well.

“I still have to wear a spur on the leg that is crossed, so I use a dummy spur with no shank,” Dondanville explained. “That way, the spur isn’t digging into my shin.”

Dondanville and Glory debuted riding side-saddle at third and fourth levels before moving up to Intermediaire last season. She admits that at first, certain movements—including the travers and the left lead canter depart—were more difficult to perform while riding aside, so initially she strategically chose tests whose movements best matched their side-saddle skills.

Working through challenges like this is nothing new for Dondanville, who has always juggled two jobs in order to support the pursuit of her equestrian goals. After three decades as a professor of exercise and sports science and a college dean, most recently for the University of Louisville in Kentucky, Dondanville recently returned to South Carolina to be closer to family. There, she has been teaching health sciences at Carolina Academy, a magnet high school in Greenville, as well as online courses for American Military University.

“I’m a single person, an only-income kind of household,” Dondanville said with a laugh. “So having a second job is the only way I can afford to have horses.”

On To The Next Adventure

Last fall, Dondanville welcomed a new equine partner to her life, Doubting Thomas. She hopes that the 4-year-old buckskin pinto, whom she purchased at an Amish auction, will one day step into Glory’s hoofprints. His largely unknown background has already led to at least one unexpected discovery.

“They told me he was a Shire cross, but in order to do any of the age restricted classes, horses have to be registered,” Dondanville said. “We had to do DNA testing for the American Warmblood Society and Sporthorse Registry, and he came back as an Argentinian Criollo, which is an offshoot of an Andalusian. If you pull up Argentinian Criollo on Wikipedia, it is my horse.”

While she continues to develop “Sundance” under saddle, Dondanville also plans to keep her side-saddle skills tuned up with Glory this summer, with the goal of returning to the freestyle ring in the fall. When not preparing for a competition, Dondanville only rides side-saddle about once a week; the side-saddle is longer than a traditional one, and because she can’t post or get off Glory’s back, she thinks it is hard work for her longtime partner. But she is still enjoying the journey.

“I think the biggest thing now is to show people it’s OK to have fun,” Dondanville said. “There are too many amateurs who feel like we have to squish everything into that five minutes of time we have allotted for our horses, and we sometimes lose sight that we probably all started riding for fun. Absolutely have goals and aspirations, but don’t lose sight of the fact that you should be having fun.

“We want to do well, and we want to hit our goals, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t,” she continued. “When I finished my first test last weekend, there were some bobbles. But the mare doesn’t know that. I gave her cookies, I gave her love, and I enjoyed spending time with her. That, to me, is more important than anything else.”

The post Professor And Her Spotted Mare Tackle Grand Prix—Aside appeared first on The Chronicle of the Horse.

“At various times of my life, I’ve had many, ‘What am I doing?’ moments,” Nilan said. “But I think doing horses really got me ready [for creating Stable Secretary]. You make a plan, and then you just do what you need to do to get the job done, regardless of that plan. When I want to do something, I really want to do it as well as it can be done, for better or for worse.”

Nilan got her start with horses ate age 5 at a local saddle seat barn, and she kept riding even as her family moved several times, training with the likes of Nona Garson, Nancy Ciesluk and Peter Wylde. She attended USEF Pony Finals before graduating to horses, when she rode her own Redsox in the small junior hunter division.

She kept riding through her time at Dartmouth College (New Hampshire), showing at indoors with Wylde her first year and then riding on the school’s Intercollegiate Horse Shows Association team.

“I had no idea what I wanted to do—I was still thinking I was going to be a horse trainer,” Nilan said. “I wanted to do horses for the rest of my life; for me, the college thing was just an unfortunate veer-off, so to speak.”

Going Pro

Nilan continued working with horses as much as she could throughout her time at Dartmouth, even taking the winter trimester of her sophomore year off to help trainer Rodney Bross at the Winter Equestrian Festival (Florida). At the time, Bross had the legendary Rox Dene in his barn, with Elizabeth Solter showing her. 

After graduating from college in 1998, Nilan took a temporary job at a software company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She worked half the time as a receptionist and mail sorter and half as an assistant to the systems engineering department. She learned computer programming in that role, a skill that would come in handy in the future. Nilan did a stint at another software company before moving back to the Boston area, where she entered graduate school to earn her master’s in teaching, while working at a barn to pay the bills.

“Then it became time for me to actually get a job as a teacher, and I was like, ‘Huh, I guess I could do that,’ ” Nilan said. “I did interview for some teaching jobs; I really was going to do it. Then I ended up living [back in] D.C. again, so I decided to look for another riding job.”

Nilan was in luck: Trainer Ginny Edwards needed an assistant at her farm in Upperville, Virginia. Nilan worked there for a year and a half, and then in 2005, she took a job teaching high school French and Spanish in Arlington, Virginia. But after two years horses pulled again; Nilan found herself teaching lessons under Miranda Scott at Meadowbrook Stables in Silver Spring, Maryland.

In the fall of 2008, Nilan decided she wanted to try being a professional rider, and she convinced her father to help her purchase an investment horse: Fenway, a 4-year-old chestnut Zangershiede gelding that looked almost identical to Redsox.

“Somehow my dad was OK with this,” Rice recalled with a laugh. “I worked like 19 hours a day for almost three years to afford ‘Christiano.’ I took care of him on my own. He was more like my pet, honestly. He was my life.”

With the help of trainers Sandy Ferrell and Wylde, Rice campaigned Christiano from the baby greens through the first year green hunters before selling him.

“I didn’t buy another horse,” she said. “I was grateful to finally be able to breathe again, because I had zero free time with him. Then I started freelancing locally; I taught lessons, rode other people’s horses, et cetera. It was great.”

Fixing A Problem

While freelancing, Nilan found herself struggling to keep up with horses’ records and health papers.

“I was like, ‘Oh dear, how do I organize any of this?’” she said. “I had papers and binders everywhere. I knew there had to be a better way to organize everything—after all, I had been a computer programmer, and there’s a thing called a database. You could put everything in there and then pull the reports as needed—it would be so easy. I really wanted to make my own solution.”

In the summer of 2012, Nilan found out she was pregnant, which left her with a decision to make.

“I realized that I wasn’t going to be a horse trainer anymore,” she said. “I was about to have a new role in life as a mom, so I decided to focus on creating the barn management software.”

She started asking friends and colleagues at horse shows if a program like this would help them, and she mentally logged their feedback and suggestions.

“My original idea was just to deal with the health documents and Coggins papers, which I personally found frustrating to chase down,” said Nilan. “But with other people who had normal-sized operations with many clients, it became clear that the invoicing was a massive problem for them.”

Taking money she’d socked away from her investment horse, Nilan started shopping around for a developer who would meet her needs and build the first version of the Stable Secretary online software and mobile app to fulfill her requirements. In February 2013, Stable Secretary was finally ready to be launched.

“Honestly, not many people knew what I had been doing,” Nilan said. “At the time, I just wanted some of my horse friends to start using it to tell me what was good, what was bad, what needed to be changed and what didn’t work. And then almost immediately, people started signing up for it. It was clear that there was a need there. I had to hit the ground running with the business, and then I also had to give birth to my oldest daughter, Emma, at the same time. It was a lot all at once.”

Nilan had a steady stream of customers from the start, eventually growing to the over 1,000 subscribers she has today.

Making A Comeback

Nowadays, Nilan works from her home in Natick, Massachusetts, with her two daughters, Emma, 11, and Nora, 10, and her husband, Jay Nilan, who is a financial trader. Kate is also now a member of the Dartmouth equestrian team’s advisory board.

Although Kate had put her own riding career on the backburner for the past decade, she’s recently made a comeback as Nora fell in love with ponies. In fall of 2023, StableSecretary served as a sponsor for the New England Equitation Championships in Springfield, Massachusetts, so Kate attended the show to watch.

“A friend encouraged me and said, ‘You could do this next year,’ ” Kate said. “And I was like, ‘OK, but how?’ ”

With childhood friend Annie Dotoli helping her, Kate qualified for the 2024 New England Equitation Championships with Calvorno WP Z, owned by Madeline Papitto. She and “Calvin” went on to finish sixth in the NEHC Adult Medal, 46 And Over, Final.

“Calvin is an amazing horse; he is truly a unicorn,” said Kate, 49. “It was so fun to do this again. I was nervous though; it’s a whole new experience, after doing it as a junior and a professional years ago. You just hope everything works out now. If I could practice more, I think I would feel less nervous, but I can’t right now with my schedule. I would love to do [New England Equitation Championships] again this year, but Nora has a pony now, so we will see.

“If everything could go exactly my way, I would love to have a fun, kind, scopey gentle horse to do a low derby on,” she added. “When I’m alone in the car now, I say out loud, ‘I would like a fun horse to ride and show’ over and over and over again. Maybe—you never know. You’re not going to get it unless you ask, right?”

Out Of Survival Mode

Juggling career and parental responsibilities has been a shifting challenge as Kate’s daughters have grown.

“I can’t just decide what I want to focus on because I have two other humans that I also have to focus on, and they have needs and wants, too,” she said. “I think the hardest thing about being a working mom is feeling like you’re not giving either thing a hundred percent because your attention is split. But I do think it’s good for my kids to see their mom working hard at something she is passionate about.

“When [my daughters] were little, it was like survival mode: They needed so much, and my business needed so much, that I felt like the need and the adrenaline had to keep me going a hundred percent of the time,” she added. “But I really wanted to do both things, work and have the kids, so I just did both as best as I could, which left zero room for much else.”

Throughout most of her daughters’ younger years, Kate would wake up at 5:30 a.m. to fit in 30 minutes of exercise before starting her day.

“I function badly if I don’t exercise daily, but on most days, I was either working or doing something for the kids for all waking hours of my day,” she said. “The tricky part was having a start-up business and therefore no extra money. So I basically needed to work on my business and take care of my kids, because I couldn’t afford to pay someone to do my job or pay for someone to take care of the girls.”

Now that her daughters are older, Kate’s been able to find more flexibility in her schedule.

“I am their driver to and from their activities after school,” she said. “I accomplish a lot of work from my phone or laptop while waiting for them. So even though it can be hard and stressful, I just try to do all the things I want: family time, work success, and some bits of horse time. The hours spent on each thing change day to day, month to month, year to year, but life is short, and all of those things feel rewarding and joyful. If they are present in my life in some combination, then it’s a win for me.” 

The post Life Is A Balancing Act For Kate Rice Nilan appeared first on The Chronicle of the Horse.

“Had you asked how I got into horses prior to that trip, I’d have told you I was just drawn to them,” she said. “But discovering this legacy confirmed what I’ve always felt: They’re in my DNA.”

And perhaps it’s her equine heritage that has kept Said fighting her way back into the saddle over the decades. 

Said grew up in Norfolk, Massachusetts, a first-generation American with a rich Japanese and Pakistani heritage. But as one of only two non-white students in elementary school, she often felt like an outsider. 

From the time she learned to talk, she was asking for “horse” and begging to ride. By 5 she was taking up-down lessons at a local farm. Horses, as they do for so many of us, gave her a safe space to be herself.

Her desire to do more quickly outgrew basic instruction. She idolized Karen O’Connor, Bruce Davidson and Phillip Dutton and wanted to be an eventer, but there weren’t any eventing programs in her area. So she began riding at Woodlock Farm, a competitive hunter/jumper and dressage barn where she could improve her skills and start competing. 

But without owning a horse, which simply wasn’t in the cards, she felt her riding plateau. She knew she needed to find a way to spend more time in the saddle, so she negotiated to lease a horse at the barn in exchange for mucking stalls, tacking and turning out five days a week.

But as Said entered high school, she began to realize that her small town couldn’t match her desire to expand her boundaries and set herself up for future success. She convinced her parents to let her investigate prep schools, and she secured admission to the prestigious Deerfield Academy. There weren’t many stables near her school, so Said put her riding on hold during the academic year and picked it back up on summer breaks at home.

During those formative high school years, while she was at home academically, she felt like a fish out of water with her classmates. At a school of 600, she was one of only four South Asian students, and most of her classmates were from an entirely different level of privilege and access. She was determined to find her place—on her terms. 

Around the same time, Said started to notice increasing discomfort in her upper back, but she chalked it up to a combination of hours spent studying and being a three-season athlete. 

During the summers, she reconnected with horses by taking jobs grooming and teaching beginner lessons at local farms. 

“Even when I wasn’t riding regularly, I was still very much in love with horses,” she said. “They’ve always been my happiest place on earth.”

But in college at Brown University (Rhode Island), as she threw herself into rowing and her finance degree, juggling multiple part-time jobs while working toward a 4.0 GPA, she realized something about the horses she loved so much.

“It was too hard to be around horses on a limited basis but not be able to totally devote myself to it,” she said. She decided to step away from horses until she had the time and money to go all-in.

After graduation, she entered the world of finance, looking for work that offered the greatest intellectual challenge for the biggest paycheck. When colleagues asked why she chose to work in hedge funds, her answer was simple: She wanted to make a positive impact, and she wanted to be able to afford returning to the horse world.

As an outdoor enthusiast, she found New York’s “concrete jungle” challenging. Almost daily she biked from her Upper West Side apartment through Central Park, stopping to feed treats—sometimes sugar cubes she’d surreptitiously pocket at meetings—to the carriage horses. She wished, on those days, that there was a way she could pursue horses and her career simultaneously.

In New York, she promised herself that she’d put her nose to the grindstone to reach financial independence as fast as possible so that she could ride again in the way that she longed to. When she traveled, she’d allow herself to dip her toes back into horses, resulting in riding experiences that ranged from galloping across a beach in Bali to doing passage on a Lusitano at a classical dressage school in Portugal. 

After four years in the city, the neck and back discomfort she’d begun noticing in high school had escalated into near-constant pain. She saw multiple orthopedic specialists but none could identify anything physically wrong. Most doctors believed that her pain was caused by a combination of job stress and sitting at a desk 10-12 hours a day. 

Said decided to leave her job and move back to Boston, thinking she could spend some time with her family while focusing on finding the source of her undiagnosed pain. She tackled her next chapter with purpose: She spent little time at a desk, exercised daily, did physical therapy, yoga, meditation and Pilates. She saw multiple specialists and researched heavily. But orthopedists, rheumatologists, neurologists, endocrinologists, and even psychiatrists all told her they couldn’t see a reason for her pain; it was probably just stress, they said. 

At age 29, after a year in Boston focused on her health, Said accepted the fact that she needed to find a way to move forward. Pain and suffering, she came to conclude, were not one and the same, and she refused to let pain define her. She decided to return to the business world and created a plan to network all over Boston. Although her job search was significantly challenged by the 2008 financial crisis, which had frozen Boston’s traditional investment jobs, she eventually found her way into the city’s booming biotech industry.

She secured a position at a biotech family office. Over the next four years she helped launch their biotech fund, and was responsible for building its U.S. venture capital group and digital health strategy. At 33, she helped launch a growth equity fund.

“Although I took a pay cut to get that job, that was the first time I felt I was finally on my way to achieving true financial independence,” Said said. “I was learning that sometimes if I’m patient enough, the exact right thing presents itself. But at that point, I was still waiting for horses to come back in my life.”

In 2019 she joined LetsGetChecked, a company she had invested in because she strongly believed that at-home diagnostics would play a huge role in making health care more accessible for all patients. She was leading the company’s commercial team when the coronavirus pandemic hit, and overnight the company’s test became a necessity for industries, health care professionals and patients everywhere. 

But her pain was growing worse than ever before, and she struggled sometimes even to sleep or breathe. So she called in a work favor and eventually ended up seeing Dr. Dean Donahue, who—after nine months of specialized diagnostics—diagnosed her with thoracic outlet syndrome, a condition where compression of the blood vessels and nerves between the neck and shoulder causes a variety of muscle pains and weaknesses.

She’d need a series of major surgeries, she learned, to make space in the thoracic outlet: Surgeons would remove two muscles on each side of her neck, her first ribs, both attachments to her pec minor, and part of her C7 transverse process in a vertebrae in her neck.

All surgery comes with risk, and Said was understandably anxious. She began reading and researching about the procedure and recovery. One source suggested meditating on what you believe is your life’s greater purpose before going in to surgery.

Despite being out of the saddle for over two decades at that point, horses were the first thing that came to mind.

“I’d put this block in my brain that I don’t have money or time to ride,” she said. “But it’s what I’d been working toward my whole life.”

She made a promise to herself: If I survive this surgery, I’m going to ride.

So she researched barns in her area and eventually set up a visit Orchard Hill Equestrian Center, where trainer Caroline Teich ran an eventing program. Said’s surgeries were successful, and after almost a year of recovery, she was ready to schedule her first lesson at Orchard Hill.

“Caroline had me start on a Thoroughbred named Smartie, and I fell in love with him immediately,” she said. “He was 23, but he loved to go. He brought me back to riding, and I still tear up thinking about him.”

Because of her increased strength and body control post-surgery, she felt like a stronger and more effective rider in her early 40s than she had been in her teens.

After six months, Said was ready to take on novice, and it was time to move on from Smartie. Said didn’t want to let him go, but a horse named I DunNo was coming up for lease, and Teich thought they’d be a good match. 

Said wasn’t sold on dun “Dudley” right away. At 40, and having recently undergone two major surgeries, she didn’t want to get hurt. And Dudley was spooky.

But she decided to give him a chance, and that first winter, Said took Dudley to Florida with her trainer. They took it slow, getting to know each other, and Dudley learned to trust his new rider.

“Over time I recognized the potential beneath his fear,” Said said. “He wasn’t genuinely naughty, just legitimately afraid of everything. I like to think I had the right amount of empathy and compassion to work through his fears and be his source of confidence.”

Within their first year together, they were competing at training level. By the next year, they advanced to modified—an achievement no one expected from Dudley.

“We’ve had tremendous success together, but there were steps forward and steps back,” Said said. “It took time to figure out his quirks. He threw me so many times, but thankfully an air vest is like landing on a cloud!”

In the winter of 2025, Dudley needed some time off; their Florida season was over before it started. He’s expected to come back to full work soon, but his owner, who recently graduated from college, is ready to sell him. And while Said loves him dearly, she has dreams that are bigger than what’s fair to ask Dudley to do.

“Our last show together was Waredaca in October, and we couldn’t have ended on a higher note,” Said said of the Waredaca Classic Three-Day Event (Maryland), which offers beginner novice through preliminary level horses and riders a rare opportunity to compete in a traditional long-format three-day event, including dressage, roads and tracks, cross-country and show jumping—and two formal horse inspections. “Those modified cross-country jumps were the most challenging we’ve faced, and he ate them up. I’m bonded to this horse for life, and I’m so thankful for that.”

The pair also earned a special long-format accolade: best dressed at the horse inspection. Said had Dudley groomed so his dun coat shone like precious metal, and herself wore a beautiful Indian kurta for the jog.

“Representation matters,” she said. “And I feel strongly that there’s not enough diversity in the horse world. Having my cousin and my mom there to see me ride for the first time ever while honoring our shared heritage was particularly meaningful.”

The post ‘In My DNA’: Sasha Said Leveraged A Health Care Career To Reconnect With Horses appeared first on The Chronicle of the Horse.