I was in the Netherlands with my friend Belinda Nairn looking at horses for two clients. We’d found what we were looking for for the first, and we had some extra time to kill, so off we went to preview horses for the second client, who was arriving the next day. One was a 7-year-old gelding—younger than I wanted for a kid with NAYC ambitions—but with a kind eye and a business-like manner. The owner rode him first and did a fine job, and while he wasn’t really lighting my hair on fire, he looked quality enough, so I hopped on.

And it was like coming home.

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Photo by Tylir Penton Photography.

School is back in session, and the leaves are starting to turn. It’s fall, which means it’s officially been a year since both Puck and Swagger entered their working lives with me. I’ve always believed it takes a year to get to really know any new horse, trained or prospect; then add in to the mix the fact that young horses are constantly evolving, and really knowing them as individuals is an ongoing proposition.

But I’m very confident in my lay of Puck’s land now. In the beginning, he was a pretty colossal jerk, with a teenage anger management issue combined with 17.2 hands of enthusiasm that moved and accepted the aids (or not) like a bull in a china shop. Puck’s approach to life was to just power through everything, usually by grabbing the bit and bearing down on it with all his might, and if I was successful in getting a word in edgewise, he’d get mad and hit the brakes.

It made for an exciting first few months. And with any new horse, you don’t really know how far they’ll take their disruptive behavior until you’ve lived with it a while. I had a horse screw up my confidence pretty badly a while back, and I’m not a kid anymore either, so I didn’t totally trust him for a while.

Over the winter, he started to let me in. And then we went to a few shows this spring as a non-compete, where he really reverted to his bad boy ways off property, and I started to worry. But in late May, something changed; all of a sudden he wasn’t so angry. He’d let me apply and remove pressure. He became willing to try life just outside of his comfort zone, and more than that he became able to make a mistake and not get pissed as a result.

I’m envious of Ravi’s ability to sleep.

Partially that’s because I’m a lifelong non-sleeper. I come from a long line of neurotic people who’ve carpe diem’d their way through life. I can fall asleep anywhere, but staying asleep is a challenge, and even on my most raucous of youthful nights it was a rare thing for me to be able to make it past 7. These days, I get excited when I sleep to my alarm at 5:10.

I’m writing this at 8:30 on a Sunday morning. I awoke at 4:30, read for a bit, went to the barn for our usual 6 a.m. start (having brought my staff Starbucks), helped with chores, organized some things, and now I’m home, because Ravi, my boyfriend, has a fantastic weekend planned for us to celebrate my upcoming birthday. I’ve already been to work and come home. And he’s still asleep.

There’s no judgment in this: I’m delighted that at least one of us is a normal human, because I think if we were both annoying morning people we’d probably kill each other. I just sit back in awe of it. I wonder what it would be like? Because the other part of my envy of his ability to sleep is my occasional wondering what could have been, had my path taken me somewhere else, had I chosen another road.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!