BLOG: Rider, Interrupted

At some stage during our shared existence with our equine pals, we may experience an “interruption”.

By Ally Doumany

Odds are, if you have anything to do with horses, you know that they live their lives under Murphy’s Law.

Electric Fence turned off for 30 seconds? Of course they will get through. Small broken branch on the only tree in the paddock? Goodbye new rugs. Haven’t seen your vet for a while? Don’t speak too soon.

So it only goes, that at some stage during our shared existence with our equine pals, we may experience an “interruption”. A little, unintended sabbatical to the sidelines. Maybe our dearest horse has injured themselves and we are evicted from the saddle. Perhaps their erratic behaviour has for once not led to their own harm…but instead has led to yours. Or maybe, for some reason or another, you are completely sans equus. Whatever the cause, you will become, for a window in time, a “Rider, Interrupted”.

As a current “Rider, Interrupted”, I am out of the saddle, and instead riding the rollercoaster of emotion that is ‘horselessness’. After the initial period of eating my feelings and watching Black Beauty on repeat, I realised that I could try to re-assimilate into society. It was through this assimilation process that I made a few major discoveries.

People who don’t have horses have a lot of time on their hands. And by a lot of time, I mean many extra hours in their days. They do not have extensive feeding regimes multiple times a day to keep their horse from tearing down the door to the feed shed. They do not spend great chunks of time cleaning up after an animal who can create enough excrement to rival an elephant. And what they do with these large chunks of time is incredible. They meet other horseless people at shops that sell coffee and human-food, and have conversations at a small table instead of while standing in aisle three at the feed store. They go shopping at shops that sell clothes. Human clothes. Not rugs. Clothes for wearing when not on the horse.

When suddenly horseless, you are likely to have a lot of time on your hands.

Which leads me to my next discovery. While ‘active wear’ is an acceptable form of everyday fashion when you are not at the gym, riding wear is not an acceptable form of fashion when you are not on the horse. It turns out that coffee-shop owners are not impressed when your long boots (which incidentally probably cost more than the shoes of all the other customers in the shop combined) leave sawdust and stable dirt on the floor. And while your show jacket has a flattering waistline and is colour-matched perfectly to off-set your gloves, you will just get funny looks if you wear them with a cocktail dress on a night out.

But most importantly, I realised that being out of the saddle, instead of diluting the horsiness in my system, has actually only doubled it. While I sit at the coffee shop sipping my espresso, my nose is stuck in horse mags, not fashion mags. And I have been spending some time shopping. By shopping I mean wandering the aisles of my local saddlery store and madly trawling through the for sale ads of as many horses as I can find. But most importantly, I have been using my spare time to think and plan. Think about what it is that I love about horses and riding, and plan for how I am going to get back in the saddle.

So if you find yourself in a predicament like this, don’t wear your top-boots to a coffee shop, keep them polished and at the ready, because even if you are sidelined or without a horse, you are never not a rider, you are just a Rider, Interrupted.