Ep. 1 How it all began

A huge welcome to all of you who are joining me here for this series of podcasts. I'm Mary Wanlis, the founder of the Rider biomechanics movement, the author of the Ride with your mind books, and I have spent the last 40 years really trying to unravel the mystery of how the rider horse interaction works. So as a kid riding, it was clear to me that I didn't have talent. And I became, as time went by, really incredibly jealous and upset by all of this. And from 40 years on, I can tell you that talent is not a thing that you either do or don't have. Talent is not something like a brick or a flower that you can put in a wheelbarrow. That's what defines a thing. That means that talent is a process. It's not what you've got, it's what you do with what you've got. And nowadays my working definition of talent is the idea that she's really good at it, but we don't know why. Now, I've been investigating this and coaching and riding and looking at riders for so many years now that I really do know why talent has a structure. One can learn to replicate talent in bite sized chunks because there are various processes of what talented riders are doing in their body that are learnable, even if you start out without talent. This, I think, is really good news and it is my gift over these years to myself and to everyone in the riding world who really has always wondered, how the heck does this thing work and how can I get better at it? So I need to do here, I think as our way in is to tell you my story. I was born a horse and animal mad kid. I begged for riding lessons from 4 to 14. The riding lessons happened maybe somewhat by chance. My best friend, who lived a few doors down from me, she had a porch where each side of her front door there was a little low wall and an upright pillar that held up the roof of this porch. And she and I used to ride these walls for hours on end. We made saddles, we made bridles, we played horses. We were in heaven. It was as close as we were ever going to get. We both knew that. But then her parents moved to the countryside and soon after that she invited me to come and stay for the weekend. And that invitation included. Would I like to go with her on a hack at the stables that she was now riding at? Well, you bet. I wanted to go and my parents said I couldn't go unless I had a hat. So we managed to get Me a hat. And once I got the cat, the hat, of course I'd done the hard bit. I remember that hack to this day. I remember every now and again managing to go up, down, up, down in rhythm and thinking that was totally amazing. And then I'd lose it again and get it again as one does and haven't got my hat. I managed to get riding lessons at a little school that was a fair way away. I grew up in outer London, actually not far from Heathrow. But I went to this little school. I became a Saturday helper there and that day of the week was the light of my life. And I worked my way up to the top of the tree of their group of helpers. I also did a riding holiday every summer with a friend. We went up to Yorkshire and had the most wonderful time. I fell in love with a falconical prince and we did the most beautiful rides. And in fact she and I actually ran that center one year. It's remarkable when you think of it now nowadays with parents drop their children off with two 18 year olds in a tiny cottage at the top of a hill with ponies grazing on the hill. No bath, no sink, no shower, just the kitchen sink and a loo. But we had a wonderful time with those kids. We even fed them, we led the rides, we made it all happen. So it was all very informal and all very basic until I got to university and I went to Bristol University to do a degree in physics. And it was there that I signed up for the riding club on day one and began to discover clipped horses riding arenas. A much more professional and competitive based approach than anything I'd been exposed to until then. And I need to tell you as well that my father died during my first time I was at university. My mother had died before then. She died When I was 16, my dad died when I was 18. Both had cancer. It left me in a not very good place and not very well equipped to deal with the world. But basically I buried myself in physics and horses for the next three years and had a great time with the riding club. And I went home and stayed with my older brother and his wife over the Christmas after my father died. And then that Easter vac and over that Easter it wasn't so easy and I'm sure I was a stroppy, grieving, difficult teenager and I vowed I just couldn't go back there. So I had to come up with something I could do that summer and I would never ever have considered what actually happened. But my friend said to me My friend from the riding club, why don't you go to the stables where I kept my pony and go and be a working student and do your assistant instructor's exam? And I thought, well, why don't I? It was somewhere to go, something to do. I had a roof over my head. So we cooked up this plan, it all worked and off I went. And I was a working student there. And whilst I hated being the lowliest person on the totem pole, I got a lot of lessons. I began teaching and did my exam at the end of that summer. In fact, I rather remember there wasn't a date free before I went back to university. But then suddenly one day there's a phone call from the British Law Society going, there's a cancellation next week, could you take it? And I talked to my boss and teacher about it and she looked at me and she said, well, if you wait, you won't get any better, will you? So you might as well just go. And whilst I thought that didn't show a lot of faith in me, it was a good decision. In those days there were pass marks and the pass mark was 75 and I got 75. So I went back to university as an assistant instructor, teaching some of the more beginner members of the riding club and having a little business with a few local kids that my friend and I between us would teach. And the closer it got to my finals, the more I rode horses and the less I did physics. And I had some wonderful jobs during various facts, running trekking centers and riding holiday programs for kids. It saved my life, basically. Horses saved my life. And at the end of my time at university, I decided I would take a year out. In theory, I thought I'd get horses quote, out of my system and that I would go back and do post grad teacher training. And I got myself a job at the Yorkshire Riding center as head girl. I was there for about nine months. That was another experience of a bigger yard. And I can actually remember after a lesson with Mrs. Bartle, this is Jane and Chris's mother. And in that lesson she screamed at me, can't you control your body? And the thought that went through my head was, no, I can't, of course I can't. If I could, I wouldn't be here, I'd be off somewhere riding competition horses, being paid to ride. But I'm here to learn because, no, I can't control my body. And I went and hid behind the manure heap and burst into tears and then mopped myself up and Went off with the end of my day. I was there for about nine months. I then did a job in a little riding school in Ireland, went back to Bristol, began my teacher training and discovered I hated it. And a few weeks into it I was getting headaches which I'd never had before, never had since. And I was walking along the road one day and I had the blinding flash of light experience that went, I really don't care if kids understand Newton's laws. And I walked into the department and I quit the course. And I spent the rest of that year teaching freelance, working with kids in youth clubs. My friend and I, the same friend that had come up with the plan for me to do my AI. We at this point owned a horse together, and I did a lot of the work with that horse. We evented that horse between us. It was a colored cob that you could just about get around the cross country if you were very determined. And I lived out that year doing that. And at the end of that, she bought me out on that horse. I bought another young horse and I went to my first horsey job in a yard in Wiltshire and had a wonderful time there. I was eventing my horse, a horse my boss got on loan for me, a horse of hers. I had a number of clients eventing. Some of them became very good friends and stayed good friends for many years afterwards and were immensely supportive for me. And during that time I was struggling my way towards the intermediate exam and I did get it during that year. It took me four goes. In those days you had to pass all the various modules at the same time. And I failed the flat work and the jumping and then I failed the jumping and then I failed the flat work. And on the fourth go, I got everything on the same day. And having done that, I decided I had to do my. I, my bhsi. And I took myself off to be a working student with Mrs. Starrock, who was one of the fellows of the British Law Society of that era. And at that point in time I was there for, I don't know, about three months working towards the exam. I didn't take it, but that was a concerted input that I'd never had in quite that way before. And when I left there, I did the job that became life changing. I went and worked for a gentleman called Dan O' Harone, who died in the 1990s, so nobody's ever heard of him. But at that point in time, which was the mid-1970s, he was one of the very few continentally trained Dressage riders in the uk. He had been due to ride for Israel in the Munich Olympics, but his horse went lame and he took me on as his head girl in his new centre. He himself was a high powered accountant working in the city. And he would come back in the evening and we would have supper, maybe about seven and about eight o' clock we'd go out to the yard and it was not unknown for him to lunge me on three horses one after the other. And at the end of that I would have to sweep the yard and get everything put away before going to bed, before getting up the next morning to start mucking out again. And you can imagine I eventually did burn out. But it was a fantastic learning opportunity and he put his heart and soul into teaching me in those lessons. What actually happened though, was that he kept saying the same thing and he kept saying them louder in response to that. I kept doing the same thing, like grow tall, stretch your legs down, sit deeper, relax, all those kind of things he was saying. I kept doing the same things and I kept doing them harder. Now, looking back on my youth, when I despaired of my lack of talent, one of my really big problems was lack of understanding, of learning. I had no clue how to learn. He unfortunately did not have that much clue on how to teach. And we were like ships that passed in the night. He said it louder, I did it harder. And neither of us thought, if what I'm doing isn't working, maybe I should try another way. So during that time I'd stopped eventing. I basically gave up competing to sit at the feet of the great master. And he was head and shoulders above any rider I had met until that time. We had a variety of horses arrive in our yard that basically looked like ugly ducklings. And it didn't take very long of him working with them for them begin to look like swans. And I sat there on the edge of the arena with my mouth open and what really happened was this opened my eyes, but it also gave me a new brick wall to bash my head against. I passed my BHSI while I was there. That only took me two goes. I failed the flat work the first time, I thought maybe I failed the jumping the second time, but actually the examiner put up a rather big fence. I think he might have suspected I was a bit chicken and put up this greatly forefoot parallel and it was do or die and I went for it, cleared it, passed the exam. And whilst I don't think I was really at the standard, it has been immensely Helpful to have those letters after my name. I was with Dan for two years. I did eventually get some help with a working student. At one point I was doing all those lunch lessons, looking after 11 horses single handed, teaching five hours a day and riding my own horse on the sixth hour. And even when I began to get help, there came a point in time where I was just so exhausted and so kind of defeated by the fact that Dan had basically given up with me and I had basically given up with myself. And my parents deaths and my past were weighing really heavy on me and I decided the only way out was to give up on my dream. And I sold my horse, I quit my job and I went to live in London. And in doing that, I followed both my brother and a really good friend into the world of psychotherapy. I just knew I needed a new ethos for my life. And actually what happened was I found myself selling fire extinguishers, which really means I was tramping the streets of London whilst poking my head into various businesses and finding out did they have the fire extinguishers they were legally supposed to have, were they up to date in their being refurbished and all that kind of stuff. And I did that for a while. And I was walking on Hampstead Heath one day when I met a kid on a pony and I said, where do you keep your pony? And she said, oh, it's not my pony, it belongs to Kentish Town City Farm. And I said, oh. And we chatted for a while and she said, here, have you got your AI? And I said, yes, I have. And then she said, here, have you got your intermediate exam? And I said, yes, I have. And a while later she said, here, have you got your instructor's exam? And I said, yes, I have. And she, you should come down to the farm. So I did, I went to visit and I ended up working there as a freelance, spearheading a project to build a new covered arena, actually over the tunnels of the main line into St Pancras station. It turned out we couldn't build a cover on that, the tunnels weren't strong enough. But we did make an outdoor arena and I taught the staff there, freelanced there, and found myself teaching riding again. In fact, I probably had about six months out of the horse world before I began again. And this is the critical thing, because when I began again, I didn't care how good, bad or ugly I was. I stopped trying to be somewhere else instead of going, I want to be good, I want to get this, I want to look right I want my horse on the bit. I want this, I want that. And resorting to way too much kick, fiddle and pull to make it all happen, I gave up on all that. And I just started noticing. And this is rather like, let's say you want to be in Paris. Paris is a metaphor for where everything works really well and everything's wonderful and the sun shines and the coffee and the croissant are lovely and want to be in Paris, but you can't go to Paris till you know where you're starting from. Is it London? Is it Sydney? Is it Toronto? Is it Atlanta? Is it Berlin? Is it Stockholm? Do you go north, south, east or west? How far do you have to go to get to Paris? And in my riding life prior to that, I'd been desperate to be in Paris. And I'd done the equivalent of never stopping long enough to stop and look at the map. I'm of course, drawing an analogy here to before everybody had sat navs in the days when people did read naps more. But after I gave up trying to be good, I basically sat on a horse and I started noticing my right seat bone is always clearer than my left, and the horses tend to be heavier in my right hand than my left and this and that and the other. And I started putting two and two together. And some of Dan's old clients who lived on the London fringes, they kept ringing me saying, come and give us a lesson. You explain it so much better than him. And I kept saying no until eventually when I was bored and broke enough to say yes. So that began my clientele in the London area. And it would be true to say, I think that in those early days, the people I was teaching were very willing to go out on a limb. And many of them were the people who'd run away in tears from every other instructor in the London area. So me and my little crew of people set about this quest to really go, how does riding work? And I made a discovery very, very early on in this process of noticing which really set me on this path. And it involved a horse that jogged a lot. And this horse would jog and it would pull on the reins, and I would pull on the reins and I would just keep pulling and it would just keep jogging until every now and again, I could stop that horse from jogging just like that, in a moment, but I didn't know what I'd done. And maybe five or 10 minutes later, I'd managed to do it again. And then it would start jogging, and I'd pull. And it would pull. And eventually I'd managed to do it again. And my little physicist brain was there going, I'm doing the right thing. What the heck am I doing? I need to know what I'm doing. I need to know how this works. I want to make this skill repeatable, I want to make it teachable. I don't want it to just be an occasional miracle. And it took me quite a few months to work out how I was doing it. And the process of that and that discovery was the beginning of what, 40 years later, I consider to be a 40 year empirical research project into the biomechanics of riding and the rider horse interaction. And it really does explain how elite riders do what they do and how normal people who would like me in the early days, consider themselves not talented, can begin to learn those skills. This is a journey. I hope you will join me on in these podcasts and I'm looking forward to speaking to you again very soon. Meanwhile, have fun, keep safe, enjoy your riding. These podcasts are linked to two other Internet sites. One is Dressagetraining tv, which hosts a whole variety of webinars taught by myself, Mary Wanlis and my colleague Ali Wakelin, where we're working live with a variety of horses and riders, showing them the basics of biomechanics and helping them build their skill and train their horses and explaining to the audience as we do this. There's also a groundwork certification course on that site based on the work of Dr. Andrew MacLean and Equine Learning Theory. And this too gives you a step by step guide to building your skills. We'd also love you to take a look at Just Giving and then to search Overdale to find the Just Giving page for Overdale Equestrian Centre, which is my UK home base here in this time of lockdown in 2020, we have 10 school horses eating of course, and pooping and doing all the things that horses do and no income to support those horses. And whilst they're having a wonderful time for us, this is something of a stress and if you've enjoyed these webinars or enjoyed these podcasts and benefited from them and you're willing to give any small or large amount to our Just Giving page, we would be so grateful. Many thanks to you.