Understatement of the year: life in the horse business ain’t easy. The ups are terrific but the downs can be so, so down–achingly long days, dirt and sweat and blood and tears, life and death and crushed expectations and placing hopes and dreams in the hooves of 1200 pound prey animals on lean legs.

But those ups. The days where the horses go well. The days were the clients make progress. The big wins. Those are the good days, and the universe has this funny way of handing them to you exactly when you need them.

Read the rest at The Chronicle Of The Horse!

I’ve known Ella almost 10 years, so I think I probably know her better than anyone. And while she’s quietly confident in herself now, she’s terribly introverted, so she probably wouldn’t be all that excited about me sharing all of her wonderful little quirks with the world in a blog post.

But: I think she’s wonderful, brilliant, and should be shared with the world.

Plus, I have thumbs and she doesn’t. So world, meet Ellegria!

• Ella’s real name is Elly McBeal. I mean, really. So Ellegria she became, a play on “allegria,” the Spanish word for happiness, with the E because Westfalen foals’ names must start with the same first letter as their sires. Ella is also known as Ella-bella, Ella Ella Eh Eh Eh (from the Rhianna song “Umbrella”), Princess and Princess Ellegria Of The Mountain (which is what Michael calls her, and I have no idea why.)

Read the rest at The Chronicle Of The Horse!

I’ve made the decision to offer my phenomenal six-year-old, Johnny Road, up for syndication. Johnny’s always been one of my favorites, not just because he’s got freaky talented legs and a wonderful mind that takes pressure better than any horse I’ve owned at that age, but because he’s my kind of nerdy—he’s smart and clever and more than a little obnoxious, and I find that combination tremendously endearing (which probably explains why I’m still single.)

I’ve owned Johnny two years, since he was four, and at four his job was to go to shows at Training Level until he didn’t try and kill me. The first show, he spent a lot of time trying to kill me. The second show, he was a rockstar by Day Three, earning High Score Training Level for the show. And so I checked off that box, took him back home, and let him grow and develop and didn’t really freak out about what he was or wasn’t doing.

At five, I went to one more show, just to make sure the Dirtbag instinct was still dead. It was. High score First Level of the show. And I kept him home the rest of the year, where he grew almost a hand, sprouted this unreal topline from very little hard work, and proceeded to just generally be a pleasure and not keep me up at night.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse, and click here for more information on joining the Johnny Road Group!

Social media is funny. Every now and then I’ll write a blog that I think is AWESOME, really knocking it out of the park, and it’ll get almost no response. And every now and then, I’ll flippantly post a funny little photo on my Facebook orInstagram page, and it’ll go viral.

Such was the case with the photo of my Very Sophisticated Classical Dressage Training Technique to try and teach me how to ride Ella with my reins short and my hands down—a neck rope made of baling twine. I slip the twine under my finger holding the reins (which is why I prefer twine to a neck rope: less material in my hands) and, should I attempt to stick my hands up my nose, the twine will hit her neck and remind me to put them back down where they belong.

That photo blew up my Facebook page. TONS of comments, 200-and-counting “likes”… who knew that my redneckery was going to be such a hit?

The success of that picture got me thinking of all the other creative, and not-so-creative, ways that I help my students (and yes, sometimes myself) address bad equitation habits. Here are a few.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!

(*Before we begin, an author’s note: I came up with this blog’s clever title as a reference to the late 90s rom-com, but really, it should be called “How Lauren Got Her &#$! Together And Is, Slowly But Surely, Learning How To Ride Her Nice Horse.” But that has less of a ring to it. Carry on.)

Ella came home with me in January of 2006. She was 5. I was 21. Neither of us had any idea what we were doing.

I got incredible help from lots of people—Lendon Gray, with whom I trained while in college; Roz Kinstler, my wonderful friend who helped me my first winter in Florida when I was trying to figure out what the heck I was doing; Pam Goodrich, the first person to drive it home to me that riding horses and training horses are different skills; Scott Hassler, the first person to tell me Ella was really special.

Read the rest of this blog at the Chronicle of the Horse!

With future FEI horses, the six years of dreaming of how good they’ll be is spent doing boring but crucial development work. Photo by Sara Lieser.

As my students all can attest, I’ve been geeking out all week about an article featuring nuggets of wisdom from Carl Hester. I’ve been so stoked about it because a) he’s awesome, and b) so, so many of the things he highlights in the article are things that I believe in, and preach to my own students.

He’s also got a great way of putting some really wonderful but complicated things about horse training. One of my favorites from the piece is that when it comes to training a young horse from the beginning of his career to Grand Prix, you’ve got six years of dreams.

Read the rest of this blog on the Chronicle of the Horse!