Trainers cont’d: Ashley Carr

Ironically, Ashley Carr, of Ashley Carr and Vicki Baker Eventing moved to the Ocala area from our area of Colorado. We have ridden with both Vicki and Ashley in Colorado and so we were thrilled that Ashley had availability for a lesson for us, AND lesson horses, while we were in Florida. Ashley is our favorite! She has two qualities as an instructor that are really effective. The first one is that she reassures us that the problems we have are problems that all riders have. We lament that we do this or do that in a tone of self-deprecation and frustration at our general riding fallibility, and Ashley says, “oh everyone does that,” making us feel like we struggle with things that even expert riders struggle with. This is an important mental perspective for women of advanced equestrian age whose time to perfect our craft is becoming more limited by the day. The second thing she does, as a follow up to the first, is to give us wonderful physical instructions to help us feel in our bodies the way we need to ride. An example: “turn your back to the inside of the circle, and pay attention to which seat bone gets weighted,” (the inside) “and now turn your shoulders to the inside”. So we are weighting the inside seatbone but turning the horse “with the tack.” It is all starting to fit together. The whole week of riding came together on this Saturday at Ashley’s place. Lisa rode Nemo, a lovely warm blood who Ashley acquired because he was intractably aggressive (not anymore!) and I rode “Blue” an OTTB who raced in Canada. Blue was green but not as green as my OTTB, so acted as a nice stand in for Teeno. Lisa had a brilliant ride on Nemo, learning to use her body to get him to use himself and to carry himself with her on him. I learned from Blue that if I held his pace by squeezing with my outside rein with each stride (as I was rising), I could rate his pace and eventually he would reach for the contact. The idea is that you just try for longer and longer periods when they can carry themselves. He also corrected his crookedness as soon as I held my body in the correct position, as described above. At one point during Lisa’s instruction she said, “look Christine I am doing it!” Luckily, I also got a video of that. It was so great to see Ashley and Vicki and see their lovely new place.