Do you get show nerves? Sometimes my stomach gets butterflies, my skin starts to tingle and I feel like I have a sharpened awareness of my surroundings.

What if I told you that this happens to me on random days when I am driving to the barn? The first time I recognized that this feeling was identical to how I felt at horse shows, it got me thinking. There was no reason I felt nervous about riding. I trust my horse, he never misbehaves. Our training program was on-track and no one was even at the barn to watch me. So, why was I nervous?

All I had to do was find the energy to get through it all and I would be fine. That was the key: finding the energy. After an exhausting show weekend, I was tired. So my body was kicking in the adrenaline I needed to ride my horse to the best of my ability. Hold the phone! I felt like this because my body was preparing to work hard?!?!

Cut to the next horse show. With butterflies in my stomach, I got on my horse without a care in the world.

Understanding that humans are wired to get boosts of adrenaline for “fight or flight” has been really important to understanding show nerves. When I first heard elite riders say that they didn’t get nervous at shows, I could not understand it. Now I appreciate that they might feel the same as a person riding in their first show season, but they don’t recognize the same feeling as show nerves. They recognize it as excitement, being “on their game” and/or positive energy. The key is to turn your response from flight into fight. By fight, I mean a positive energy that allows you to approach your dressage competition head-on with strength, stamina, confidence and clarity.

This will also help you realize that having the necessary level of preparation and fitness to pack/unpack, ride in multiple classes, wake up early, etc. are very important in lowering the likelihood that you are actually nervous (unprepared?) and cutting down on the amount of adrenaline you might need to complete your competition.

So, the next time you get butterflies in your stomach, thank your body for recognizing the extra energy you will need to perform the best sitting trot of your life, canter pirouette or square halt. With adrenaline pumping, go out and ride!

When New Year’s rolls around, so many of us are ready to hit the gym and get fit. In our sharp exercise outfits, we pop out of bed for our 5 a.m. “boot camp” and arrive early for warm-up. Despite the winter weather, we love it. Cut to five weeks in. Where did this darkness come from when the alarm goes off? Why do I feel so stiff and cold? Suddenly, you realize that it takes effort to get to the gym. You were so good about going in the beginning, it wouldn’t hurt if you just skipped one day. It will be warmer next week. Like any relationship, fitness goals take work and as time goes on, it can become harder to find the motivation to do it.

The same holds true for dressage. However, I don’t think we talk about it in our sport as much as people discuss it in other circles. There is a stigma that comes with saying you don’t love your dressage every day. It somehow suggests that you don’t love your horse, that you don’t want to spend time with him. In a sport where “you have to love the every day aspect of it all,” it is hard to admit that on some days you don’t. Somehow it suggests that you aren’t committed or cut out to be a good rider.

Like any relationship, there are days where things feel like work. It is in accepting this that we become better. Whether you recognize that you are not in the right mindset to ride or push through and get yourself out to the barn, working through the bumps in the road are what make us stronger riders. Giving up without a plan, because it is too overwhelming, is the only thing that will slow you down in your goals.

So accept the fact that we don’t have to love every day as dressage riders. Day after day in the saddle is a huge commitment. Training and showing are exhausting. The key is to understand that you are doing this all because you love it the majority of the time and that is what will get you through the hard parts. So suck it up, get going and enjoy the ride … or don’t!

I came upon an amazing image on Facebook today that explains just how crazy horse people can be. I thought it would be darkly humorous to come up with a list of the most common horse-related injuries I have experienced to make light of how horse people seem to shrug off the fact that we are working with a massive animal that goes fast, is very tall and has metal-tipped mallets for feet.

This list reminds me that, KNOCK ON WOOD!!!!!, it has been a while since I have hurt myself around horses … OK, so maybe it has only been a year.

1. Eating dirt fall: I think these are the most memorable because you aren’t hurt enough to focus on anything besides the feel of the oh-so-hard ground as your body hits like a ton of bricks. Whether you land mostly on our shoulder or hip, this type of fall tends to end with only a bruised ego and side–nothing a long soak in an Epsom salt bath won’t take care of (note that I am not a doctor and you should not be listening to me for actual medical treatments from an injury).

2. The modified eating dirt (aka, the head slam) fall: This fall is a modification of the straightforward saddle-to-ground fall. In this “dismount” your body lands before your head and then brings your skull with it. Welcome to the world of concussions. The first pony I rode as a kid would dump me (usually just eating dirt) on a very regular basis, so I have been fortunate enough to have developed an early habit of wearing a helmet during every ride. This has worked out well for me, especially when I came off a horse during gymkhana and cracked my helmet in half on a rock (in retrospect, putting your forehead on a bat and spinning a dozen times before mounting a horse and cantering off might not be the safest game).

3. The unusual dismount: This way of injuring yourself is usually the story you tell everyone–whether it is your dismount or someone else’s. It is also cause for some pretty weird injuries. I saw someone mount her horse with so much force that she overshot the saddle and landed on the ground, on the other side. It seemed funny, until the ambulance had to be called in.

I had my own unusual dismount last year, when I was cantering up a hill and got unseated. Having evented for most of my life, I casually decided that an emergency dismount would be easier than the arm strength it would take me to push myself back into the saddle. I landed on my feet and went to get back on, only to realize I had bumped my side on the pommel while dismounting. Once the adrenaline wore off, it became very clear that I had broken more than one rib. I know because this isn’t the first time I have done it from an unusual dismount. Ouch.

Another unusual dismount I had was after mounting a new horse outside the barn. As I got my foot over the saddle, he took off with me and proceeded to jump the massive pile of hay waiting to get loaded into the loft. He immediately spun and headed for the manure truck and barn, so I decided to let go (because the 30 bales of hay weren’t scary?!?). A pommel to the chin, a stirrup to the face and a seat on the stone driveway left me looking and feeling like I had been in a cage fight.

4. The foot stomp: You know you are an equestrian when your horse can step on your foot and you can continue a conversation without skipping more than the breath it takes to ask them to lift their leg off you. Everyone has been stepped on. Sometimes it doesn’t hurt, other times your horse jumps off a ledge and takes out the back of your foot when he lands. Other times, as in my case, you get yourself into a situation that could have ended in a major hospital visit but instead “thankfully” only results in your leg being used as a spring board for a small horse. Nothing says “equestrian” like a summer with horseshoe-shaped bruise on the back of your leg.

5. The bite: A grey mare named Tabitha taught me that a horse’s front is not always the safer end. After I tightened her girth too quickly, she returned the favor by having a go at my side. Getting a horse bite on your rib cage is the exterior equivalent of breaking ribs. I would say that I have never felt such pain from a horse, had I not had another horse bite me on the shoulder. I say on, but I really mean she took my entire shoulder muscle in her mouth and clamped down. I don’t think Winston Churchill had a horse’s teeth in mind when he said that the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man, because every time a horse has bitten me I have cried like a baby. I am not talking about just tears, I have to sit down and sob.

So I have shared my list. Do you have your own? Post them in the comments below!

In case you missed the first two, here’s a recap.

Our first column ran in the May issue and focused on “A Better Sitting Trot.” Master Pilates Instructor and author Janice Dulak provided us with three exercises to help loosen your hips, including the Backward Walk—an exercise that Janice says is a good first step toward loosening the front musculature of your hips. You can see the full exercise on page 25 of the May issue, and find more from Janice in her book Pilates for the Dressage Rider and her DVD “Nine Pilates Essentials for the Balanced Rider” (both can be found at HorseBooksEtc.com).

The second column (“Unmounted Show Warm-Up”) ran in April, our Annual Show Issue. Pilates instructor and British Horse Society-trained riding instructor Rebecca Ashton gave us five exercises to help get you mentally focused and physically aware before you ride. One of the exercises was the Flat Back—an exercise that tests the strength of your back extensors and abdominals. Ashton points out that this particular exercise will help you stay tall and elegant in the saddle for longer periods of time. Now who doesn’t want that? Check out her article on page 16 of the April issue, or her video demonstrating each movement at dressagetoday.com (http://www.equisearch.com/horses_riding_training/english/dressage/rider-fitness-unmounted-show-warm-up/).

It’s been a fantastic column to work on, and all of us at DT are excited to bring you more. Keep an eye out for upper body conditioning exercises for posture, balance and independent hands by Australian Pilates instructor Helen Fletcher. And another upcoming column, written by freelance writer Debra Rankin, will introduce us to BioRider Fitness, an at home fitness training program used by Olympian Steffen Peters and his student Brandi Roenick.

Let us know what you think!

As I unpacked the last of the boxes from our move to the farm two years ago, I found a bunch of horse show ribbons in the bottom. As I tossed them to the side, it gave me pause. What year and class were these from? I couldn’t remember. Reflecting back on when I could have earned them, I recalled my first blue. Back then, I wouldn’t have tossed ribbons to the side. When someone handed me a trophy, it might as well have been a winning lottery ticket.

Somewhere along the way I stopped minding if my horse chewed on the odd rosette. When I moved to college, my ribbons came off my wall and now just get stuffed into one of the many glass vases I use for display in my barn office.

You could say that the win doesn’t mean as much to me now, but I see it as something else. My ribbons, so many I lose them in moving boxes, just mean something different. When I started to show, a ribbon was more a result of luck than hard work. Since then, I have received as many green and brown ribbons as faces full of mud and grass from hard falls. For all of the blood, sweat and tears, I have a matching collections of red, yellow and white satin.

As I stare at the countless ribbons in my display, I see the story of my riding career–the necessary struggles and the lucky successes. Individually and together, they stand for everything that has made me the horsewoman I am today and prove to me that along the way, I learned how to truly ride.