I mean there are professional jockeys and show riders who must be doing *something* at a very high level, but I honestly don’t understand what. Like if I’m riding a horse that’s jumping over a fence, isn’t that all the horse? And I just need to not fall off?
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Very, very amateur rider here.
I grew up with horses, on a farm, and could ride them fairly well. Not fast, not fancy, no jumping, never practiced anything like that and didn’t train the horses for it either. What we did was ride in the mountains, rough terrain, more or less cowboy style.We also used them as pack horses.
Fast forward thirty years, and my wife suggested we should rent some horses and go for a nice ride along a trail. Should be simple.
No way, no how, could I communicate to that rental horse which way I wanted it to go. It was used to having all sorts of strangers riding it, that wasn’t the problem. It was simply trained for a completely different set of commands than what our old horses were. It was like being in a strange land where nobody spoke any language I could understand. I had never learned the “proper” way of riding, and neither had our old horses.
Riding is not just about not falling off. It’s about somehow convincing an animal that’s big enough to easily kill you that it really wants to do this strenuous and difficult running and jumping stuff instead of relaxing and eating grass. While not falling off.
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