There have been so many. A working student’s horse on whom I made it about 20 feet. A homebred 3-year-old on whom I made it half a 20-meter circle. The time my OTTB dropped me into a wall, and I broke my collarbone (though I got back on AND went to school for a few days before seeing a doctor. Ain’t nobody got time for that.) My Young Riders horse, L’Etoile, put me in the dirt recreationally, at least three times in our two-year partnership. Danny’s a repeat offender as well, and once I bit it off Midge while swimming in the pond, learning a valuable lesson that falling off IN the pond is painless, but falling off on the BANK of the pond gets you three days of Vicodin.

But there was That One Time.

Every trainer I know has That One Time, at least one, sometimes more. A fall that really rattled. For some of my friends, That One Time resulted in a big hairy injury. But I know lots more, and I fall into this category, where That One was more about a reminder of our own mortality.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!

So you came in eighth or 12th or 24th. You made mistakes, or you got in the ring and panicked, or you got cocky or you just got straight up outhorsed. Or maybe you didn’t score high enough in qualifying to get named to a team. Maybe your horse got hurt or sick or the money to travel across the country was too great. Maybe you don’t even have access to a horse to teach you that level of work at all.

You are one lucky duck.

Statistically speaking, the winners of Young Riders aren’t the ones we see in senior competition down the road. To wit: Ali Brock and Courtney King Dye placed in the 20s. Adrienne Lyle placed 12th one year. (I remember; I was 11th, and it was nice to stand next to someone tall.) And neither Kasey Perry-Glass nor Laura Graves went to the NAYRC, as it was known when they were of age, at all.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!

Last weekend we attended our last show of our summer season. The competition season here in Virginia starts in April, revs up through May and June and culminates in one big show mid-July, after which it gets beastly hot and unpleasant, and it’s terrific to be able to give the horses the rest of July and all of August to basically flop around and have a breather.

I also taught my last get-on-a-plane clinic for a while, which means that other than a few events on the farm, and a one-day show about 15 miles from my farm, I get to be HOME, with a NORMAL SCHEDULE, until September.

This. Is. Awesome.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!

Summer has hit us like a freight train, with heat indexes over 100* and high humidity here in Virginia. Summer is long and unrelenting here in the South, so it’s acclimate or don’t ride. Of course on the really hot days we use good sense and will adjust our riding plan accordingly, but my team and I have a few tricks up our sleeves to keep our horses—and ourselves!—happy and healthy when the weather gets hot.

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The Mayo Clinic is one of the finest hospitals in the world and uses a creative approach to patient care: each patient has a team of specialists to treat not only the patient’s primary condition but also to use diet, exercise, wellness, alternative therapies and more together to support a patient’s whole health. Each patient has a team, and that team sees a problem through their own unique lens.

When Puck arrived in my life, he twisted his neck a bit in the bend to the right. And over the last year, I’ve made my own Mayo Clinic approach to solving it.

Read more at The Chronicle of the Horse!

It’s been more than 500 entries and almost nine years since I started this blog. I think I had about 12 readers in the beginning; the last one logged more than 150,000 views in just a few days. That is AMAZING. I am so touched!

But that means I’m getting lots of new readers, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to introduce myself again. Hi! I’m Lauren. My last name is spelled SprIEser, and pronounced SPRY-zer. I’m a Libra, which allegedly means I’m well balanced, which is hilarious. And I’m a September Libra, which is apparently a thing, though I have no idea what it means.

I grew up outside Chicago to non-horsey parents, and while I’d ridden horses at summer camp and on family trips, I got serious about it at age 11, after a football accident left me with a broken femur. My football and figure skating careers over (lol), I started taking dressage lessons. As a kid I’d ride my bike from home to the public library, where I had a job putting covers on books, then pedal to the barn for my lessons, and then head home.

The book thing stuck too, because I went to college in New York to pursue a degree in Writing And Reading Stuff. While there I had the great joy of riding with Lendon Gray, going to three NAYRCs, and taking a semester to work in Germany with the late George Theodorescu. I graduated and taught freelance for a bit, then was a working student for Carol Lavell and Pam Goodrich before moving to northern Virginia to run my own facility about 50 miles west of Washington, D.C., in the heart of Horse Country.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!

We’re down to the last few weeks in Florida, and my horses are humming along. The best thing is that nothing interesting is happening with any of them, and that’s more than could be said for really the last 10 months! It’s business as usual, and I love it.

For Puck, “usual” means that he finally decided I was in charge about six weeks ago, and he’s been an absolute joy to ride. There’s no amazing capital-D Dressage going on, but the fact that I can just get on and close my leg and my hand and get to work is a huge, huge deal.

In the last two weeks or so, he’s let me open up another gear in the trot. I don’t get it consistently, but it’s accessible now, whereas in August he’d lock into this big floaty trot with tension in his back and use it as a means of resistance. The trot he offers me now has some expression, which is neat, but more importantly has tremendous swing. It’s pretty fun, and I can imagine what a blast it’ll be two years from now when there is strength and capacity behind it.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!

I was a working student for Carol Lavell when I graduated from college. For those who don’t know Carol, not only is she a member of that very elite club of American riders who’ve placed fourth individually at the Olympic Games, but she also studied chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To say that Carol is brilliant would be a colossal understatement.

That brilliance carries over into her teaching and in the way she thinks about riding. I remember feeling so overwhelmed in my lessons with her back then—she sees everything and asks for a reason behind every aid I apply. Why did I take back on the left rein just there? What effect should it have had? Did it have that effect? Now what are you going to do about it? She operates at an incredible level.

At the time that level of instruction was wasted on me. I couldn’t appreciate that level of precision, didn’t yet realize the level of finesse required to ride at the international Grand Prix level. I’ve trained and shown several horses up the levels since, and each one has made me more subtle, more sophisticated in my approach.

Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!