“It is not enough for a man to know how to ride; he must know how to fall”
Whenever a person makes the commitment to ride a horse, there are risks involved. As an instructor even if we don’t say it verbally, our number one goal is that all our riders stay on their horse.
But horses are unpredictable.
And sometimes, things are just beyond our control as instructors.
I had my first rider fall off his horse in one of my lessons recently and it was…in word…
Horrible.
Let me start by saying, my rider is absolutely fine, just a bit sore.
We have a relatively new horse at the barn and she is learning the ropes. Sometimes our riders don’t alway sknow to keep their legs loose upon getting their horse into an upward transition, say from a walk to a trot. This is exactly what we were doing. In this particular lesson I have 4 independant riders who are really working on perfecting the trot collectively.
After my rider came out of the trot and I had the entire ride at a walk, I think something mental took over and as he rounded the corner by “M” where we had previously trotted, his body language (along with his tense legs) told his horse “were trotting again”, even though we weren’t.
From there it snowballed, he tensed more, the horse didn’t know what to do, so she went faster, he pulled back on the bit more, she didn’t like it and she was soon into a fast canter around our small little arena.
I tried to grab her, but she was just going too fast. The rest of the riders came to a halt at one end of the arena and did such a great job, being still and keeping their horses calm.
Its all we could do.
Everything was happening so fast, and in slow motion at the same time.
But he stayed on until the very end.
If it weren’t for the horse coming to a very abrupt stop, I really think he could have “ridden it out”, but she slid to a stop and he flew to the ground, hitting our temporary fence with his shoulder.
He got up quickly, was a bit in shock but after walking around a while, he gave us all the thumbs up.
It took me a while to get my heart back into its place.
There’s never a moment as an instructor that you don’t wonder if there was something you could have done differently, or better to keep something unfortunate from happening.
I know it wasn’t my fault, but I wish I could have kept him from falling off.
This has definately got me thinking about emergency dismounts and practicing them! You talk about them, you know how to do them, but you really don’t get many opportunities to practice them…..
Thank God!
