Bella Barr shares how spending time with trainer Sean Coleman helped her find the fun in riding.
It was no longer personal, him against me - it was merely a game we'd chosen to play that day to see if we could both win.
I ride horses because I love them. I love everything about them… the smell, the size, the power, and I love that jumping feels like flying! It has been nearly 40 years since my poor Dad, desperate for a bit of peace, fed up and worn down by my begging on the hour every hour, dragged me to the local riding school and pleaded with them to put me on a pony.
I often joke that it is an addiction. How else do I explain; why I get up at 5 a.m. to ride before putting in a full day at the office with an hour's commute each way. Or that all my annual leave is spent on horse training courses. Or that even though horse-related 'incidents' have resulted in a metal plate in my arm, two pretty busted shoulders, scars on both legs and a horse hoof-shaped mark on the back of my skull, I still readily trust my life to the will of a 500+ kilo prey animal? However, like every addiction, there is a payoff that justifies the pain. I crave the immersion of riding and how everything else in my life melts away for that moment because riding demands that my full attention is entirely absorbed by the horse.
I love the sense of achievement when something I have been working on finally feels effortless or when the horse puts in a monumental try with something he's been struggling with. However, don't for a second be under any illusion that I'm one of those people who was born with the ability to be amazing on a horse. For me, any progress takes a lot of hard work. I have lessons, and then more lessons, and then different types of lessons - dressage, jumping, biomechanics and horsemanship. The contents of my bookshelf range from horse psychology and human leadership to human biomechanics and equitation science and many books on horse training across different disciplines; my DVD collection tells a similar story.
So, you can imagine my surprise, or more like shock, when not long before lunch on the first day of a four-day clinic in the New Forest with Sean Colman, it became clear that he actually thought riding and horse training were about fun. Yes, that's what I said… fun!? Like laugh out loud, let's get excited, this is a game… FUN! I don't think it was anything he precisely said, but it just slowly dawned on me over those first few hours as I listened to him speak about horse training and watched how he addressed and rode his horse. I'm older than Sean and have more life experience, but I'd signed up to do his course, and I was here now, so the least I could do was have the courtesy to keep my opinion to myself and just nod and go along with it.
My horse is pretty easygoing in most situations; take him to a showground or a big open space, and he's more likely to creep along tentatively than wind himself up and explode. Unless that situation involves a ditch - then the gloves come off! Ditches are his nemesis. And from first-hand experience, I can vouch that there is nothing more intimidating than a 17.2hh warmblood working through his 'breakdancing’ repertoire whilst running backwards. In the middle of a particularly bad episode of breakdancing in the forest on the 2nd day, Sean had the audacity to start explaining to me that the solution to the issue with the ditch was the 'hot and cold' game you played as a kid. When my horse was backing away from the ditch, throwing himself in every direction at once, he was simply 'getting colder'; when he stood still or moved forward, he was 'getting warmer.
Hot and Cold? HOT and COLD? Hadn't we just witnessed the survival of a 'life and death situation? That is, my survival!
Then I noticed that listening to Sean's advice, yelled from the other side of the ditch, had abruptly halted the dialogue in my head:
"he's going to throw us both into that bush"
"I think he slipped there; we're basically in a bog; he's going to injure himself"
“if he keeps running backwards blind, we're going to take out that horse behind me",…. and so on.
I realised that as I was listening to Sean's explanation, my horse's feet had also got quiet. So, when I took up the reins again and asked for forward, and my horse took two steps backwards, Sean simply said, "He's ice cold", and my horse's feet stopped moving. I asked him forward again, and he shifted his weight forward but didn't move his feet, "he's getting warmer, tell him that's good"…. so it went on… and one step at a time, we crossed the ditch - no breakdancing and no histrionics, from either of us.
Of course, it's not the first time I've tried to tackle the 'ditch issue'. I've taken us off to a cross-country course hire several times under guidance. Still, it mostly turned into a battle of wills that usually ended with me getting him either blasting across blind or just about sidling around the edge of the ditch before our allocated time slot ran out. What was so transformational about turning it into a game was that all the fight was immediately dropped on both sides. It was no longer personal, him against me - it was merely a game we'd chosen to play that day to see if we could both win.
The magic of being in the New Forest for four days is there are ditches and stream crossings everywhere. Sean set it up so we could spend some time on ditches, then go off fast across flat open country to work on opening up his stride, or weave in and out of trees in a wooded area working on isolating leg and hand aids, and then cross another few ditches as we went on to the next thing.
On the last day, Sean had us trotting in and out all along a little stream, jumping a log and then back into the stream - you'd have thought my horse had been born a water baby. Alongside 'games’, over the four days, Sean also talked a lot about 'puzzles’ and that horses are good puzzle solvers. I've often heard elements of cross-country courses referred to as 'asking questions of the horse', but what I like about puzzles is that there's no wrong answer; you can't lose at a puzzle - you just keep going until it's complete, which is the win.
I took home a lot to think about, and I was fortunate to go back with my horse this weekend to observe the last two days of the Advanced Course. The difference in my horse's confidence was immeasurable. While we were meant to simply tag along to keep up with the rest of the horses, mine seemed to have reflected on ditch work in his two weeks back home. Now he decided they were primarily for drinking out of (whether the water was clear or murky). He took to striding straight into the middle of them and abruptly throwing his head down to drink - which usually ended up with a quarter horse or 2 being forced to scramble backwards out of his 17.2hh butt cheeks!
It was inspiring to watch a group of riders much further down the line who have ridden with Sean for many years; they practised their lateral work in the woods, in the rain and on a wide open plain littered with cows, wild horses and tourists. They took their horses swimming in a lake, building up to it over a couple of days, getting the horses confident as they braved deeper water. They practised galloping as fast as they could go and stopping without picking up the reins. It was definitely about playing the game to the best of their abilities on the day in that environment and clocking up a win, and the empowerment that it gave horse and rider was written on their faces in big grins. I guess it might just be about fun after all!
