By Emily Esterson
WHEN I'M RIDING my horse, I’m 100 percent absorbed in the task at hand. I’m not thinking about magazine deadlines or advertising sales or whether I made this or that client mad. Those who practice yoga might have a similar experience, when they quit worrying about that feeling behind their knee that signals a potential hamstring tear in the making, and start “moving into the pain.” But even when I practiced yoga more regularly, I was never really good at ignoring my screaming muscles. I was never in the moment.
After five or six years, I realized that I didn’t really need to pay anyone for the experience of being present in my body. It was happening every day, while I was riding my horses.
I have a lot of horses. They are about the only thing that makes me truly happy (okay, chocolate, too). Just about everything about them, from their gear (I love tack in the way that many women love purses and shoes) to their manure (so much more pleasant than dog crap). I never get tired of them. Annoyed at them when they don’t want to be caught or load in the trailer, but never really sick of them, the way I can be sick of, say, my day job. I love my horse friends (most are horsey); the way my hair smells when I take my helmet off. My husband loves that smell, too, which is kind of astonishing sometimes. He sticks his nose in my hair and says, “You smell like the barn.” I have chosen well.
At the cusp of middle age, I started working out. I mean really working out. Forget standing on one leg while some former Type A enlightened person goes on about breathing into the discomfort for the longest five seconds of my life. At the gym, with the weights and heart-pounding music, I can grunt and curse and call my trainer Luis all kinds of names.
“I need a count, Luis. Goddammit.”
“Five more,” he says.
“I’m going to take you out when I finish this set,” I say.
“Bring it,” he says.
Five days a week: two with Luis, three at the sad, dirty (free), South Valley’s Los Padillas Community Center, little white me and my Vato brothers, with their 200-pound weights and tattooed arms the width of tree trunks.
I
did it because of my horses. I did it because I felt like a blimp on
horseback, a weebly-wobbly. I did it because I have one special horse
who moves like a ballerina, and my blobbiness wasn’t helping her float
across the arena. So I hit the gym. Then I hired a personal trainer.
Then I lost 18 pounds. I rock.
Now I can sit the trot. I can lengthen my horse’s stride by just doing
something (I don’t quite know what it is) with my abs. So now I’m
evangelizing to all my students that they’d better be doing a million
crunches every single day. Those abs better be screaming. Because that’s
the only way to really sit the trot and have quiet hands. It really is.
Great riders know this. Recently I came across a video of dressage
Olympian Guenter Seidel kneeling on a physio ball. I promptly emailed
the link off to Luis. And guess what? Now I can kneel on the ball too.
Not for 30 seconds, like Guenter, but for 10 seconds. And sometimes
while Luis is throwing a ball to me. Now that takes some yogic
concentration. Tree pose? Pshaw!
There’s something wildly satisfying about being in the best shape of
your life at 50. As a younger person, I thought being thin and fit would
equal success—you know, if I was just prettier and thinner, every
torturous moment of self-doubt would evaporate. I’d find the right man
and the right job and life would be rosy. My novel would be a bestseller
if I lost 20 pounds.
The self-doubt is still there, but now I can throw it across the room
and stick it to the wall, at least temporarily, with my newfound biceps.
Above all, it’s helping me achieve the one thing I care about most,
which is a being a good horsewoman, which means having the physical
ability to help my horses realize their own potential.
Emily Esterson is the author of The Ultimate Book of Bits and The Adult Longeing Guide.
She has been writing about horses, business, and the business of horses
for two decades. She runs a small private eventing and dressage barn in
Albuquerque’s South Valley: www.emilyesterson.com