05/09/2026
A story from Stephen Forbes of Solo Equine - words for us all to think about:
Besides dressage, I love to run. For years, I ran on asphalt. Pavement is a polite surface, the grades are gentle, predictable, engineered to let you get away with a certain amount of physical ignorance.
But every time my left foot struck a downhill slope, my knee locked straight. It wasn't a catastrophic failure, just a small error, done on every downhill. With every locked footfall, the impact had nowhere to go but up, through the shin, into the hip, settling deep in the SI joint, where it would sit for the rest of the day.
I knew the ache. You live with a settling foundation long enough, you stop hearing the wood groan. I assumed it was just my body wearing out the way bodies do.
Recently though, I traded pavement for trails, and the backcountry doesn't care about your illusions. I've been doing far more downhill work than years of road miles ever asked of me. And somewhere on a rough descent yesterday, without any conscious thought, my body finally mutinied against years of my bad habit.
On a steep decline, my left knee softened and bent slightly at the landing. The ache simply vanished.
No coach shouted a cue. No manual unlocked the mystery. It took years of the same wrong repetition before the correction arrived on its own, uninvited, on a random Thursday run.
Training dressage horses for a living, I spend my days projecting an aura of calculated patience. Give the animal time. Let them find the movement. But yesterday's descent laid bare something sharper than that. I couldn't have been taught to bend that knee. I had to log the miles of wrong reps before the right one finally clicked from the inside.
I wonder how much of what I call patience in the saddle isn't generosity at all, but an acknowledgment of a heavier truth: a horse has to work through its own puzzle, fumbling through the wrong balance until its body untangles the movement on its own terms. We ask for tremendous collection, for suspension, for lateral reach, and our horses have to physically experiment with getting it wrong before the mechanics of a movment make sense to its own bones. They need the space and time to fumble.
My SI joint feels good this morning. It took years and one bent knee to get here. Walking down the barn aisle, I look at the faces looking back at me, and I have to wonder how many of them I've been rushing. 🦄
Pic of me at Pony Club in the early 1980’s (near the centre on the white-faced bay mare)
