So let`s say you are an aspiring American event rider who maybe has, maybe hasn`t just made the USET Winter Training list. And you want to know what it takes to make it in “The Bigs”, as they say in baseball. Well, good news, troops, because there are two riders who kicked (almost) everybody`s butt in London this summer, and I haven`t read one single word about how they got where they got. How they came along as younger riders, who trained them, where they found their horses, what they look for in a horse, what their conditioning and training procedures are, NOT A WORD.

I`m obviously talking about silver medalist Sara Olgotsson Ostholt, riding Wega, and bronze medalist Sandra Auffarth, riding Opgun Louvo. Sara is from Sweden, married to a German, and Sandra is German. They were born in 1974 and 1986. Their horses are a fairly small percentage thoroughbred and a fairly large percentage Warmblood.

It`s interesting to me that, as far as I know, nobody in America has interviewed them, invited them to the USA to teach a clinic, “picked their brains” to derive insights about, as Butch Cassidy wanted to know, “Why can they do it?”

So if I were an enterprising American eventer, I`d try to be the first to find out more. What do these women know that I don`t know about horse training, horse selection, horse conditioning, all of the pieces of the big puzzle that allowed them to prevail where American riders failed to prevail?

I would pull up the pedigrees of Opgun Louvo and Wega on All Breed Database, and I would study them. I want to know what ACTUALLY works, not what my hunch tells me should theoretically work. I`d be interested to see that Wega, who lost the gold medal by the slightest whisker, is a homebred, and that her dam, La Fair, completed the same Olympics with Sara`s sister, Linda Algotsson. That family is onto something—aren`t you curious what that is?

There`s an old saying, “know your competition”, and to date, I don`t think American eventers have sufficiently considered what this means. So here`s a Christmas/New Years tip, fellow Americans. Go find out.

So forget all that. Stop making yourselves crazy with impossible dreams and start dreaming an impossible dream that actually can come true for the best of you. That possible impossible dream is called Rolex.

There are, what, 25,000 of you out there who event at some level in North America, from pre minnow/guppy/trot rail/ all the way to Four Star? And how many of you ride around Rolex on a very good year for North American riders, maybe 50, which is really pushing it. So 50 out of 25,000 is one out of 500, or 1/5th of 1%. Math whiz I`m not, but a very tiny minority, right?

So don`t think you have to be a USET Star (Or a Canadian Team Star) to be a Superstar, but you DO have to be good enough to go to Rolex, that`s the bad news. But the good news vastly outweighs the bad news. Here are some of the things you DO NOT have to have or be to get to Rolex:

You don`t have to be born rich. You don`t have to have some mega rich sponsor. You don`t have to travel outside of the USA, except maybe to Canada, which is like the USA in every respect except that they speak French, say “Eh” (In English), and fight at hockey games. You don`t have to spend a gazillion dollars for a Mr. Medicott or an Otis Barbotiere, or a Land Vision, or a Biosthetique Sam. You don`t have to ride like William, or Mark or Michael, or Mary or even like a German. You don`t need to travel from the east coast on an airplane to ride in Montana. You don`t need a string of fabulous horses.

Here`s what you DO need. Talent. At least some talent, not maybe Mary King talent, and you don`t have to be Bill Steinkraus/Kathy Kusner reincarnated over the jumps, Mike Plumb/Bruce Davidson on cross country, or Reiner Klimke in dressage. But you can`t be hopeless!! You don`t have to win dressage, but they shouldn`t actually, you know, laugh at you. And you can have a rail or two (or three), on a bad day.

You DO need fierce resolve. Why are there so many African American boxers, Hispanic jockeys, kids from the “wrong side of the tracks” at the top of so many sports? They are HUNGRY, that`s why. You need to be that fierce and hungry, too.

You DO need a tough, brave, sound good jumper, but he/she can be a $5,000. off the track thoroughbred, or the product of a good North American breeder who raises great babies in her “back yard” so to speak. Those horses are out there, and you need to start hunting. You absolutely need MILEAGE, but it can be North American mileage, or even  local mileage, not overseas mileage, despite what you hear. (“To ride your best, it is necessary to move to Europe, and test yourself against the highest possible standard.” ) The hell with that BS. It`s too expensive, and you can get it done right here at home. BUT—-You DO have to ride lots of horses, (but they can be just ok horses), you DO have to be a tough, fit, buffed athlete, you DO have to not `effin bounce at the sitting trot, you DO have to be gutsy, you DO have to see some semblance of a distance to a fence, and you DO have to have already struggled your way through preliminary, at least, and maybe also have some mileage at the intermediate level.

Then start grinding your way toward going advanced. You can do this, many of you. I know this. I watch you. You DO HAVE WHAT IT TAKES, but you have to start believing that you do.

I am convinced that the riders who will put the USA (and Canada)  back on the podium, most of them, are kids from 18-30, not yet in the league where they hope to be, but hungry and driven enough to start thinking that Rolex might be in their gun- sights, maybe not now, but out there waiting. And on North American horses, trained in North America. THEN—-Once you can nail down Rolex, and only then, should you start thinking USET. Make a priority list that ends with galloping through the finish flags at Rolex. This can then be a glorious ending, or a starting point. Either way, go there first.

In those days the New Zealanders seemed to be winning everything in sight, and the topic turned to the question of how a tiny and geographically remote country like New Zealand could be so internationally dominant.

Later that summer our discussion proved prophetic, as the New Zealand 3-Day Team absolutely owned those Italian  Games. They won Team gold. Blyth Tait won individual gold on Ready Teddy, Mark Todd won silver on Broadcast News, Vaughan was 4th on Bounce, and Andrew Nicholson was 5th on New York.

A couple of weeks after the Games were over, and all the various countries had journeyed home, I got a letter from Peter. I wish I`d not misplaced that letter, because Peter`s own words are more eloquent than my memory of them, but several phrases have remained stuck in my memory for 14 years. Peter said that he`d thought about our conversation at Bromont over the couple of weeks in Italy leading to the Games, where  he`d had the chance to closely observe the New Zealanders in their training sessions, and, of course, as they slaughtered all opposition at the actual competition.

Peter said that “the New Zealanders are basically cowboys at heart, very comfortable galloping at high speeds on bad terrain, but cowboys who`d gone on to embrace upper level dressage and show jumping.”

So there`s a winning 3-day formula if I`ve ever heard one. Cowboys with finely crafted technical skills.

One word from Peter`s letter that resonates as we approach the London Olympics is the word “embrace”, so very much stronger than “tolerate” or “learn.” And with dressage and show jumping even more critical in short format eventing than back in the long format days of 1998,  I suspect that we will see that the riders who will be standing on that podium in a few weeks will be dressage and show jumping technicians who love to gallop. Cowboys in tights! Cowboys with skills so finely crafted that there won`t be a single “chink in their armor” in any of the three phases. Or, more to the point of the analogy, cowboys with no runs in their breeches!

But if I had to choose one—a supremely gifted rider with a modest work ethic, or a fanatically hard worker, possessed of moderate talent, I`d bet on the worker. Thomas Edison said that “genius is 1 per cent inspiration, 99 per cent perspiration.” Workers create talent, through relentless practice, where talent didn`t formerly exist.  Hang around any barn, and watch. There are those who could hustle, and get in another horse or two before lunch, but who have an amazing ability to stall around. They head off for leisurely lunch hours, that turn into two hours, and when the day is done, the hustler back at the barn has ridden six or seven horses to the two or three of the leisure lover.

Now multiply that out by a month, a year, a decade, and the hard worker is well on the way to that ten thousand hours postulated by Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers” as the magical entry requirement to huge success.

When I wrote the book “How Good Riders Get Good”, and Sandra Cooke interviewed 24 of the world`s best riders and drivers, I actually expected that “hard work” would be an integral piece of what they thought had enabled them to “get good” But it wasn`t an integral piece, it was the biggest piece. There are thousands and thousands of riders who weekly spend $50.00 and more for riding lessons, to, presumably, either “get good”, or at least get better, but not many of them have bothered to work hard enough to actually read what those great riders had to say.

It`s not just my book they haven`t read, it`s any book about riding—–I`d say it`s the intellectual STUDY of riding that so many avoid. There is physical laziness, but there is also intellectual laziness, and either one is a dream wrecker.

Many barn owners will tell the same sad tale. They tell the riders at their barn that if they will help out, especially on weekends, that they can ride extra horses. Now very often, these riders will look you right in the eye and passionately declare “how much I want it!” But given the choice of working off extra riding hours, or doing something else, most barn owners know the choice they make.

Hard work is hard. It`s often unpleasant. It`s tiring physically and mentally and emotionally. There`s just that one thing, though. It so often pays off. In the fifty years I`ve taught riding, it`s almost always been the relentless workers (who also had talent) who are the ones that got it done. Which leads to this final point—

If someone really has passion, then working toward that passion may not really be work at all. It`s just what they want to do anyway, and how lucky for them is that?

Political parties, religions, nationalities, hobbies, brands of cars, all have their champions and their detractors, and often there isn`t much logic or analytical thinking, or empirical evidence upon which those obsessions have been based.

It`s no different in the large world of horses. Try telling a devotee of some particular breed that some other breed is better, and you are right there arguing with that ten year old about the relative merits of the Yankees versus the Red Sox, with no hope of either party convincing the other in ten thousand years. You may be a fanatically obsessed dressage rider, but you`l be highly unlikely to ever convince a barrel racer to switch disciplines.

Most of the horse breeds and the horse disciplines have entire sub cultures surrounding them, with associations, magazines, websites, blogs, registries, and competitive venues in interlocking webs of support. Once you have decided to become—- Pick One: a show jumper, an eventer, a trail rider, riding—-Pick One: a thoroughbred, a Morgan, a Paint, there is an entire network created and designed to make you feel comfortable and part of something special and larger and more important than yourself.

There are enormous gulfs separating these segments of the equestrian world. Arabian lovers will not be found at an Appaloosa show, nor reiners at the Grand Prix of Aachen. Drivers drive, steeplechase jockeys steeplechase, western riders ride in saddles with saddle horns, race horse people live at the racetrack, and on and on it goes. There are a few areas of commonality, like the quest for veterinary advances, or the need for good hay, or trailers, but basically, there`s little to bind the disparate elements together.

The main problem with blind devotion to anything is that it`s blind, and tends to rule out all kinds of opportunities that are available to those with vision. Here`s just one example. Take a young event rider. Let her spend a few years developing her eventing base. Then let her spend a year in Germany working at a dressage training center. Then let her gallop timber horses for an entire year for Jonathan Sheppard. Then she should spend a year with Valarie Kanavy riding endurance horses. The next year she`s back in Europe with a grand prix jumper stable.

Now send her back into eventing, and if she isn`t wildly more proficient than when she left four years earlier, she must have spent those opportunities in a drug induced coma.

Now nobody I know has done that “total immersion thing” to the extent of my hypothetical example, but there are pieces of that puzzle available to those who are enterprising enough to seek them out. Basically, it`s a big, diverse world out there, and if you allow your fandom mindset to limit you, you can bet you`ll be surpassed by those more open minded. Hey, we know you`re basically whacked, just as most of us can admit that we are similarly “out there”. Don`t worry. You can crawl back to the secure little nest of the Patriots and the Yankees, and live there happily ever after, but maybe just try some other brands of ice cream before you eat just maple walnut for the rest of your life!

This “jump into hyperspace” seems a perfect analogy for the really good but struggling rider who catches the break of attracting the attention, and the subsequent sponsorship, of someone who can afford to buy the kinds of horses that can blast that rider into a new plane of existence. Think Kim Severson BEFORE Winsome Adante, or for that matter, AFTER Winsome Adante, compared to WITH Winsome Adante.

The riders I teach aren`t from families who can scour the globe for those elite horses, who have huge farms, personal trainers, none of that. They work hard for what they get, and, because it`s hard and slow, they measure out their small triumphs in coffee spoons rather than in silver buckets. None is a charming boy with the requisite beaming smile or foreign accent. They may not understand networking, or working a crowd. They don`t have “champions” to pave their way.

The eventing world is full of these good, talented, driven, hard working, brave riders, as are the other various disciplines, but the stern reality is that catching that break can seem very random, and elusive.

The question that they must ask themselves in their reflective moments is how long can they keep grinding away when there`s nothing on the horizon that looks much like land in sight. If they keep plugging, there`s no assurance that they will get access to wonderful horses, but if they quit plugging, it`s a virtual guarantee that they won`t. So what to do, and how long to do it?

The biggest key is becoming very, very good, so good that they win consistently on whatever they sit on. And learning to be friendly to everybody. Nobody wants to sponsor even a talented grouch. But it`s still pretty random, and I sometimes think back to the Le Goff and De Nemethy USET days when the Team could talent search and dole out elite horse to those identified as having elite potential. But those days are gone, and sponsors these days don`t sponsor “The Team”, they sponsor a rider who is trying to make “the Team.”

So what should they do? No magic answers from me, just a personal thought. Try and try to become the best rider in America. Sit the trot until you and the horse become one entity. See your distances. Be tough and brave and fit, and turn yourself into such an elite and athletic rider that you force yourselves onto the radar screens of those you need to reach. MAKE them want to help you, because you are just that good.

Adult amateurs, and some kids as well, aren`t strong enough, or fit enough, to safely and competently ride the cross country phase of an event, because, as the saying goes, “they run out of gas.”

I know that there are 1001 reasons and excuses that we all make about why we aren`t better athletes. We are parents of time absorbing kids. We have full time sedentary jobs. We commute two hours a day to work. We are so tired when we get home at night we have no energy left over. We are old. We are recovering from injury or illness. We just don`t have the time or the energy or the whatever to do any more than we already do.

But that`s not really true, except, insofar as we make it true. What IS true is that we have made inactivity a habit, and the only way to break out of one habit is to create a different habit. I call this “A Very Modest Idea”, because my idea isn`t to join a gym to pump iron, or to need special equipment, or to do sit ups or push ups, or to gallop racehorses, or any of that. No, it`s to start, today, by adding 15 minutes of WALKING to what we normally would do. That`s it, nothing more. You absolutely do have, somewhere in the next 24 hours an available 15 minutes that you would normally have spent sitting, to walk instead.

Walking means that you go for a walk, or climb the stairs in your office building instead of using the elevator, or walk down the corridor at the airport between flights, or walk around  your house, or park farther away from where you work, or SOMETHING to get you started on a new routine. Make yourself do this every day for a few weeks, just 15 little minutes out of the 1,440 per day. Then add 5 minutes. Then add 5 more, at some point. See where it goes. Maybe you`ll walk faster, at some point. Or walk up some inclines, or add more minutes, but the point is to do something more physical than you do now.

Sitting is a treacherous habit. It ruins our athletic abilities.  It ruins our health. It`s not easy to change a habit. (“Habits begin as cobwebs, and end up as cables.”) So don`t try anything so dramatic that you know there`s no way you`ll keep it up. Fifteen minutes every day, that`s it, for now. Three five minute walks. Five three minute walks. You can do this.

Barn rats are the horse crazy kids who don`t want to be anywhere else. Not the mall, not the fast food joint, not even(sometimes) the Junior Prom, if there`s a horse show the next day.

Some barn rats get paid, but many trade work for the chance just to be in the general vicinity of horses. The parents of barn rats can`t be the obsessive kind who drag their kids from piano lessons to French lessons to figure skating lessons to soccer practice, because implicit in the definition of “barn rat” is is that they spend most free moments after school, on weekends, and on vacations, at the barn.

Barn rats are not the kids who arrive at the stable, take their lessons or ride their horses, get back in the car and disappear. A kid doesn`t have to be “from the poor side of town” to be a card carrying barn rat, because it`s  state of mind more than  socio economic status that differentiates the real deal from the pretender. True barn rats would hang around the barn and do manual labor even if they won the lottery, because that`s what taking care of horses really means.

What barn rats get in return, although they may not put a name to the concept, is that they learn by osmosis. By spending so much time with horses, and not just on their horses backs, they gradually learn what makes horses tick. They learn what horses eat. They learn what constitutes a clean stall. They learn about turn out, blanketing, and how to do it without getting kicked, about grooming, braiding, hoof care, supplements, medicines, tack care, types of bits, helping the farrier, the vet, the myriad small and large details that make up “horsemanship.”

Some, not all, get the chance to ride. The avid riders, especially those who show some natural skill, may get to ride lots of horses that the less obsessive customers don`t want to do for themselves. Some of the top USET riders in all the disciplines got their basic skills by the barn rat route.

In 2012 there are many pressures against barn rat-ism, a big one being the fear of the barn owner against litigation if the child should get injured. Parents may not think that it`s a good avenue toward college acceptance, letting their kids hang out all hours at the barn. But still,  for all the pressures against, being a barn rat is probably the surest way to gain the necessary skills that those we admire as “real horsemen and real horsewomen” all possess.

That quote above is a Facebook post I put out there  a day ago, and it must have resonated with people, because 170 of them “liked” it. But “JUST DO IT”, while it has a basic, somewhat mindless appeal, is too simplistic and too “easy”, because it avoids the nuances and subtleties of the lives we actually lead.

There`s a quotation that goes something like this: “How sad to grow old, and to look back, and to realize that one has never really lived.”  Which means, I think, that if we`ve had dreams, and we`ve avoided struggling to realize them, then we haven`t failed in the struggle, (because we never took the chance), but we also never had the chance to reach them. Which leads to another quotation, which some agree with, and some reject: “Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.”

Having dreams isn`t like a Walt Disney movie, where, against all odds, the heroes and heroines always win. Dreams don`t always come true, so maybe it really is safer not to try, because this lets us avoid the heartache of failure. But then we have still another quotation to ponder, this one by Theodore Roosevelt:

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dirt and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the thrill of high achievement, and if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

I guess, as another way of looking at this, we need to individually decide whether the certain avoidance of failure, (which means don`t try) is worth the equal certainty of being a cold and timid soul, at least as defined by Theodore Roosevelt.

If you are pretty sure that trying, and possibly failing, is better than not trying at all, then the next piece of the sequence is don`t dither. “Dithering” is such an easy trap. “I really want to—-ride in a preliminary event—-ride in a 100 mile ride—breed my own foal—-learn to jump—-get fit—-yougetthepoint—-and I certainly will do it soon.” But soon so readily turns into later, and later into later still, and do you want to look back some day and ask, : “Why, oh why, didn`t I just do it?”

So it`s Saturday, April 28th, 2012, 4:30 AM. By 7:30, we need to be on the GMHA grounds to be vetted in for the Mud Ride, and it`s 27 miles of bad road between South Woodstock, VT and Strafford, VT, and the three mares we are taking are outside, and need to be caught, brought in, fed, loaded, and hauled to the ride. I note that it`s pitch black outside, I hear the wind moaning off the hill, and I check the thermometer. Twenty four Farenheit, a heat wave compared to the predicted 22. Outside, in the yard, I note tendrils of fine snow caught in the windshield wipers, and  in the overhead lights, I can see random white flakes blowing horizontally against the black bulk of the barn. I think to myself: “This could be a long day!”

Flick back twenty years to late April, 1992, Rolex, Kentucky,  The Kentucky Horse Park, Lexington, Kentucky. I wake up at 5:00 AM, and hear heavy rain pelting against my window. Munching hay, warm and dry in stalls, neither Epic Win nor Griffin are aware that in a few hours they will be galloping around in that slop with, unfortunately, me on top telling them, more or less, where they are supposed to go.

Later, as I walk around the collecting ring on my first ride, Griffin, with cold rain finding it`s way through the minute flaws in my rain gear, and trickling down my back, I look up to see Ralph Hill, looking like some deranged pirate, walking beside me. Rain is dripping off both points of his moustache, off his pony tail, and glistens off his gold earing. He gives me that manic grin, and announces, “Another day at the office!” And I think, “This is going to be a long day.”

The GMHA Mud Ride a couple of days ago was the start of my 59th consecutive season of competing in horse events, so I`ve had lots of those “This is gonna be a long day” mornings, and I have never learned to like them, and I`ve never missed a chance to whine and complain about the weather. Especially when it`s early morning bad weather. Before coffee bad weather. Wet, cold bad weather. Cold, windy bad weather. Cold, wet, windy, early morning, dark, before coffee with little hope of redemption bad weather.

Personally, I think it`s a mark of flawed character to be stoic and brave about adverse weather conditions. Can`t those people see that mud, all that white snow, that rain, the trees bending in the wind? Are they oblivious to the cold, the feeling of soaked breeches, the water in their boots? Were they born, like, you know, brain dead?

“Whimps of the world, unite”, is my motto. Why fight it? If it`s too hot, too wet, too dusty, too cold, too muddy, too rainy, too snowy, too windy, at least have the good grace to whine about it. Let others be brave and feel all superior—-I prefer to snivel.