Day 01 – 30 Day Horse Challenge – When and Why You Started Riding

I started riding when I was 11, after what felt like a million years of begging and explaining to my dad that riding wasn't dangerous or that expensive. Ha. Unfortunately for my dad, my first lessons at J-Mar Stables in Monkton, MD infected me with the horse bug, and there is no cure.

We chose that farm because lessons were cheap--only $30 for a group lesson. That may have been because it was literally in the middle of nowhere--with driving, grooming, tacking and untacking, the whole thing would take the better part of a Saturday. So after just a handful of lessons, we switched to a farm closer to where we lived, Patapsco Horse Center in Catonsville, MD.

 
In hindsight, this was a lesson factory, but I leased a lesson horse for a month here (the first horse I ever showed, SoCo) and I was in heaven. We left when they switched to an instructor who wasn't as good and increased the price of lessons. Fun fact--the Blair Witch Project was filmed in the extensive trails behind the farm. I'm glad I didn't know that when we would go on hacks after lessons.

Riding did NOT come naturally to me. I was convinced I would fall off every time I trotted at first since I was terrible at both posting and sitting, so it took many years to undo my "hunter crouch" AKA fetal position equitation. I would like to erase the years of flopping around like a sack of potatoes from my memory. But I think that the outward competitiveness that I lacked in other sports (most notably, basketball, when I threw a crying fit the day of my elementary school team's first game and never played again) turned itself inward when it came to riding, and I always wanted to improve. I couldn't give up after having whined and pleaded for lessons for so long!

Screen cap from video of Midnight

And funnily enough, I feel the same way still. Why give up now?