Cob Jockey

There's a lot you get out of riding with MW.  There's the obvious - thighs of steel and being in better harmony with your horse's movement - and the less obvious - the communication framework, and learning how to learn.

Part of what makes Mary's methods so successful is that she not only uses images and language that make sense to the rider, she also makes that communication structure standardized and repeatable, because unlike most clinicians, she also has a series of clinics in which she teaches trainers how to teach.


A lot of her images are designed to build on each other.  So for example, in my first clinic with her last May, I heard "weight in your thighs, make a wall with your stomach and push your guts against the wall, lean into my push" and several other things on repeat over three days.

Last weekend, I heard simple phrases that combined the first clinic's images together, like "remember your laces", which stood for "imagine there's a string zig zagging from side to side starting at your abs and going down past your bikini line to 2/3rds of the way down your thighs, like a corset, and you can pull on the string to tighten it".  The "laces" trigger reminds me to do several things she taught me in May with a single phrase, because I've internalized the first set of images.

This is how you learn - you internalize the A-F concepts, and then you get a G and an H to work on, and you keep internalizing and learning down the alphabet.  She had a good metaphor about how people learn riding that made me feel better about myself and I suspect I'm not the only one, so I'll share it here.

Mary telling Connor the Cincinnati geography isn't his scene, and asking him if he misses the mountains of Wales 😂

A naturally talented rider (let's call her Charlotte for no reason at all 😁) might be born innately knowing the A-G skills - the second she sits on a horse she accidentally does the basics correctly, so she never had to struggle through learning them.  So by age 15 or 16 Charlotte's already working on K and L, and then quickly she gets to Y.

But when a less naturally talented rider (let's call her Jen) asks Charlotte how to do X, Charlotte can't break it down as deeply as Jen needs her to in order to understand it, because half of Charlotte's recipe for X is "be born knowing A-G", which is a recipe ingredient Jen will never possess.

So Jen thinks X is this mysterious movement that she'll never master because she's a bad rider/not smart/a slow learner/etc, when at least part of the problem is that Charlotte isn't explaining X in a way that someone at Jen's point in the alphabet would understand.  (And side note, that explains why I can't get a straight first toolkit answer when I ask upper level riders things like "how to ask for collected canter").


I wasn't even gifted the letter "A" at birth, and have had to scrap and struggle for every letter I've learned.  This is why, as grateful as I am for being included in Karen's clinic and as cool as it was to ride with an Olympian, I have to admit KPG wasn't nearly as effective with my lesson as she was with Karen's.   KPG is one of those naturally gifted riders who, I suspect, has not had to teach many lower level riders yet.

So it's not that I'm a bad rider or slow learner, but it IS that I'm not a naturally talented rider and that's important for me to understand.  That needs to inform who I choose to ride with; there are instructors out there that will start too far down the alphabet for me to get anything out of riding with them.


This is part of the reason CGP - who has been riding with Mary for 10 years - has been so effective with me, and it's also part of the reason I've had a great lesson with my own trainer since the Mary clinic, which she attended with me.

My trainer can now say things like "Remember when Mary talked about the water wheel..." and jump a whole bunch of alphabet letters with me, and likewise, I'm also much more capable of articulating back to her what I'm feeling - something that Kate can attest I have not always been good at.  But my lessons now are a constant flow back and forth of feedback and communications, and they're better for it.


I'll leave you with one final anecdote that illustrates why this communication stuff is so important.  There was a trainer riding in the clinic this time, riding with Mary for the first time, who made some great positional changes, but when Mary asked "How is this different from your old position?", the rider kept saying variations on "It's different." And Mary would reiterate, "But HOW is it different?" and started to get frustrated after several awkward minutes of this, back and forth.

Finally Mary said, "It's great that you made these changes in your position, but all this is for nothing if you can't articulate what's different.  You will go back to riding the way you were before."  Basically - nothing sticks until you understand it enough to describe the change out loud.  And that nails it for me - in addition to helping me make the physical changes, she's also given me a language for them, and that has made all the difference in actually helping it to stick.

Me five months ago - I have since sold every single piece of tack he's wearing except the polos, the pad and the irons, lol