Pine Meadow Farm LLC

05/17/2026

Nobody starts teaching riding thinking about how it ends but your body is keeping track even when you are not. The accumulated hours on hard ground. The weather you have taught through. The old injuries that never got proper rest and underneath all of that the financial reality of a career that pays you only when you show up which means the day you cannot show up is also the day the income stops. That day comes for everyone eventually and what changes is whether you saw it coming.

Most riding instructors have no exit plan. Not because they are irresponsible but because the industry does not talk about it. We talk about building programs. We talk about filling lesson books and raising rates and managing difficult clients. We do not talk about what happens when the body that has been standing in an arena in all weather for twenty years starts sending invoices that cannot be ignored. We do not talk about what the financial picture looks like when you can no longer teach the hours needed to pay the bills. Or when it's just not financially viable to keep teaching. We definitely do not talk about what it means to build something you love and then figure out how to step back from it without losing everything you built. Here is what that conversation actually needs to include...

1. Your income cannot depend entirely on your physical presence indefinitely
This is the most fundamental structural problem in most lesson programs and it needs to be addressed long before it becomes urgent. A program where every dollar of income requires you to be physically present in an arena is a program with no safety net for injury, for illness, or the gradual physical decline that comes with decades of this work. Building income streams that exist independently of your ability to teach on any given day is not optional if you want long term financial stability. Digital products, UGC, online resources, consulting, etc these are not just side hustles. For many instructors they become the financial foundation that makes a graceful transition possible.

2. Know what you ACTUALLY make
Not your gross income but actual net income. After the horses are fed, the farrier is paid, the vet bill is settled, the insurance is current, and every unpaid hour before and after lessons is accounted for. When you do that math honestly the number is often shocking. Instructors who believe they are running a viable business are sometimes barely breaking even effectively subsidizing their program with their own labor without realizing it. Know your bottom line... not approximately but exactly. What does it cost every single month to keep your horses fed, your facility running, and your program operational before you teach a single lesson? That number is your floor. Everything below it means you are losing money. Everything above it is what you actually made. Until you know that number you cannot make good decisions about your rates, your schedule, your future, or your exit plan.

3. Scale back before you burn out or break down
The instructors who transition well almost always start the process before they have to. They reduce their teaching hours gradually while building other income streams to compensate. They bring in an assistant instructor and start transferring student relationships deliberately. They restructure their program around what their body can sustain long term rather than what it can push through right now. Scaling back from a position of choice is completely different from scaling back because your body forced the issue. One is a plan and the other is a crisis.

4. Your knowledge has value beyond the arena
Everything you have learned over years of teaching about horses, about riders, about how people learn, about how lesson programs work is genuinely valuable to other instructors who are earlier in their journey than you are. Consulting. Mentoring. Creating resources. Writing. Speaking at clinics or instructor development programs. These are legitimate ways to keep contributing to the industry and generating income without standing on hard ground for eight hours a day. Most experienced instructors have not considered any of these options because nobody told them they were available. Maybe you have other passions or hobbies outside of horses that you can capitalize on too.

5. Build your program so it can exist without you at the center of it
A lesson program that cannot function without its founder present for every lesson is not a program - it is a one person show. One person shows have no exit strategy. Building systems, training assistants, creating curriculum that other instructors can deliver, establishing a barn culture and a reputation that extends beyond your personal presence are the things that give a program life beyond the instructor who built it. Whether that means eventually selling it, handing it to a trusted assistant, or simply stepping back from the day to day, a program built with systems can survive that transition. One built entirely around a single person cannot.

6. Have the financial conversation honestly and early
What does your retirement actually look like? What does your income need to be when you are no longer teaching full time? Do you have savings that reflect the reality of those numbers? Most riding instructors are significantly underprepared for retirement because the income of a lesson program - even a successful one - rarely comes with a pension or a 401k or any of the financial infrastructure that other professions build automatically. That gap needs to be addressed deliberately and the earlier the better. Talk to a financial advisor. Look at your numbers honestly. Build toward a future that does not require you to teach until your body simply will not anymore.

This is not a comfortable post to read nor is it a comfortable post to write. The instructors who have this conversation with themselves early - who build programs and income streams and financial plans that reflect the reality of what this career actually costs the body over time are the ones who get to choose how and when they step back. The ones who do not have this conversation do not get to choose and that is worth talking about.

Have you thought about your exit plan as a riding instructor?

05/17/2026

Follow these 19 basic rules of the warm-up ring when prepping your horse at shows to be safe and courteous. Plus, 12 pet peeves to avoid.

05/17/2026

Scarlett Samuels and Torres topped Saturday’s $100,000 Governor’s Perpetual Hunt Seat Cup at Old Salem Farm, which, for the first time, offered $50,000 in scholarship money and $50,000 to the trainers of the top three riders.

“We talked about just staying calm and having ice through her veins,” said Samuels’ trainer, Laura Bowery. “I want her to learn how to ride under pressure like this, and I thought she handled it so well.”

Read more at the link in comments.

📸SEL Photography

05/17/2026

On June 5, 1993, Julie Krone rode a 13-to-1 long shot named Colonial Affair across the finish line at Belmont Stakes, two and a quarter lengths ahead of the pack.
She became the first woman in history to win a Triple Crown race.
The crowd erupted. Cameras flashed. Julie—4-foot-10, 100 pounds, the woman who'd been told her entire life that she didn't belong on a racetrack—had just made history.
Ten weeks later, on August 30, 1993, Julie Krone was thrown from her horse at Saratoga.
She landed on the hard turf. Her ankle shattered in eleven places. Another horse—1,200 pounds of muscle and momentum—kicked her directly in the chest.
The blow bruised her heart.
Had she not been wearing a protective vest, her doctor said later, the impact would have killed her.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Because Julie Krone's story doesn't start with glory or disaster.
It starts with a little girl who couldn't stay off horses.
Julie was born on July 24, 1963, in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Her mother, Judi Krone, was a prize-winning show rider and horse breeder. Their farm in Eau Claire was Julie's entire world.
At two years old, Judi put diapered Julie on the back of a palomino and sent the horse trotting off. That was the beginning.
By five years old, Julie was winning horse shows in the 21-and-under division.
She wasn't just good. She was fearless.

At 14, Julie watched 18-year-old Steve Cauthen win the 1978 Triple Crown on television. She turned to her parents and said: "I'm going to be a jockey."
At 16, Julie's mother forged her birth certificate so she could work at Churchill Downs—home of the Kentucky Derby—exercising and grooming horses for the summer.
When Julie turned 18 in 1981, she dropped out of high school and moved to Tampa, Florida, to pursue racing full-time.
On January 30, 1981, Julie made her professional debut at Tampa Bay Downs riding a horse named Tiny Star.
She didn't win. But on February 12, 1981, riding Lord Farkle, Julie Krone won her first race.
She had to climb a fence to get that tryout. She and her mother had been denied entry to the track initially.
But once Julie was on a horse, nobody could deny what they saw.
Here's what they saw: a tiny woman—4-foot-10½, less than 100 pounds—who talked to horses in body language. Who had an instinct for the track that couldn't be taught. Who was smart, tactical, patient, and absolutely unbreakable.
And here's what the male jockeys saw: a woman. In their sport. Taking their rides.
They bullied her. They tried to intimidate her. Some refused to race with her.
Julie fought back. Literally. She once got into a fistfight with a male jockey after a dispute on the track.
She refused to back down. She refused to be pushed out.
By the late 1980s, Julie Krone was dominating. In 1987 and 1988, she was the leading money winner at Monmouth Park and The Meadowlands—the first woman to achieve that distinction. She became the first woman to be leading rider at Belmont Park, Gulfstream Park, and Atlantic City Race Course.
She won six races in one day—twice—at The Meadowlands and Monmouth Park.
In 1989, Julie appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated—only the eighth jockey in history to be featured.
"Whether you're a girl or a boy or a Martian," Julie said, "you still have to go out and prove yourself again every day."
But the sport was brutal. In November 1989, Julie crashed at The Meadowlands, shattering her left arm and dislocating her shoulder, elbow, and wrist. She was out for eight months.
Her mother, Judi—who'd taught her to ride, who'd put her on that palomino when she was two—told her: "There's nothing worse than looking at the stars and seeing another horse gallop right at you."
Julie came back. She always came back.

In 1992, Julie became the first woman to ride in the Kentucky Derby.
In 1993, she became the number-one jockey at Florida's Gulfstream Park. She was in what one veteran handicapper called "the sweet spot of every race."
And on June 5, 1993, Julie Krone made history at Belmont Stakes.
Riding Colonial Affair—a long shot nobody expected to win—Julie showed "the patience, intelligence and tactical savvy" that made her one of the nation's best riders. Period. Not best female rider. Best rider.
After the race, trainer Scotty Schulhofer—who had initially objected to women racing with men—said: "She talks to the horses in body language. They respond to her. She's a very smart girl, with a great feel."
Ten weeks later, on August 20, Julie became the third jockey in 126 years to win five races in one day at Saratoga Race Course.
Ten days after that, her horse stumbled.
Julie was riding Seattle Way in the third race at Saratoga. Another jockey cut into her path. Julie stood in the stirrups and screamed: "No, no!"
Too late.
Seattle Way's foreleg clipped another horse. Julie was catapulted onto the turf.
She fell from a height, twisting as she fell. She bounced several times on the grass.
Then a trailing horse—Two Is Trouble—ran over her.
1,200 pounds. Direct hit to the chest.
"I knew I was going to get hit as soon as I went down," Julie said later. "I was still in the air when I started thinking, 'I hope I get hit in the head so I pass out.' I laid there a minute saying to myself, 'Please pass out. Please pass out.' But I stayed awake."
Then—pow. The trailing horse kicked her in the chest with "the most incredible force."
Her right ankle was shattered in eleven places—the kind of break seen in high-speed car accidents or parachutists landing wrong. Her left elbow had a puncture wound so deep she could see the shiny nub of bone. Her heart was bruised.
The protective vest—a 2-pound Kevlar chest protector—saved her life.
Julie underwent two surgeries in nine days. Doctors inserted two steel plates and 14 screws into her shattered ankle.
She spent three weeks in the hospital. Eight months recovering.
At night, she had nightmares about a devil who smelled like smoke and visited her hospital room, taking everything she possessed.
Julie made her comeback in 1994. On May 26, she rode her first post-accident winner.

Then on January 13, 1995—just 13 days after the pins were removed from her still-healing ankle—Julie fell again at Gulfstream Park.
She broke both hands.
"When I was lying there on the ground," Julie said, "I knew my life was going to change."
This time, it wasn't just physical. Julie developed post-traumatic stress disorder. She had nightmares about falling. She got lost on streets she'd driven for years. She'd ride in the back of the pack thinking: "Please don't let me die."
A psychiatrist diagnosed her with PTSD. Eventually, Julie started taking Zoloft.
"I was thinking about all the people who bet on me when I was suffering from PTSD," she said later. "When I started taking Zoloft things got better. All the things I lost came back and I got to be myself again."
Julie kept riding. She rode in another Kentucky Derby. She kept winning.
On April 18, 1999, Julie Krone retired with a three-winner day at Lone Star Park near Dallas.
She had won 3,704 races. Her mounts had earned more than $90 million in purses. She was the winningest female jockey in history.
But in 2003, the track called her back. Julie returned to racing—and won the Pacific Classic, a million-dollar race. Then she became the first woman to win a Breeders' Cup race, riding Halfbridled to victory.
Julie retired for good in 2004.
In 2000, she became the first woman inducted into the Thoroughbred Racing Hall of Fame.
Julie Krone stood 4-foot-10½. She weighed less than 100 pounds. She had a squeaky voice that could cut through any crowd.
And she rode horses faster than fear, harder than anyone thought possible, longer than her broken bones should have allowed.
They told her she didn't belong. She climbed the fence and won anyway.
She won the Belmont Stakes. Then a horse kicked her in the heart, and she survived, and she came back.
Because Julie Krone belonged exactly where she was—in the winner's circle, making history, refusing to be anything other than the best.

05/14/2026

As riding instructors we spend a lot of time managing the gap between what new students expect riding to be and what it actually is. Most of that gap could be narrowed significantly with one honest conversation before the first lesson ever happens. So here is everything I wish every new student and every new riding family walked in already knowing...

1. Riding is harder than it looks
This is the one that surprises people most. Watching a good rider looks effortless but it is not effortless. It is years of muscle memory, feel, balance, and body awareness built through consistent work over a long time. Your first lessons will feel awkward and uncoordinated and that is completely normal. Every rider you have ever admired felt exactly the way you feel right now when they were starting out.

2. The horse is not a bicycle
It is a living animal with its own personality, its own opinions, and its own good days and bad days. It does not always do what you ask the first time and that is not always your fault but it is always your responsibility to figure out the communication. Learning to work with a horse rather than on top of one is one of the most valuable things riding teaches and it starts from the very first lesson.

3. Progress is not linear
Some weeks you will feel like you have jumped forward three levels. Other weeks you will feel like you have forgotten everything you learned last month. Both are completely normal parts of learning to ride. The students who improve consistently are not the ones who never have bad lessons but they are the ones who show up anyway and keep working through the frustrating ones.

4. One lesson a week is a start but not a program
A single lesson per week gives you exposure to riding. Two lessons per week builds skill significantly faster. The riders who progress quickest are the ones who ride consistently and frequently enough that their muscles and nervous system have time to develop real memory around what correct feels like. If budget allows for more than one lesson per week it is worth it.

5. Your position will feel wrong before it feels right
Correct position in the saddle feels deeply unnatural to most people at first. Heels down feels like you are pushing your foot through the floor. Sitting tall feels like you are leaning back. An independent hand feels like you are doing nothing. Trust the process and trust your instructor. The things that feel strange now become automatic eventually but only if you commit to doing them correctly rather than defaulting back to what feels comfortable.

6. The time around the lesson matters as much as the lesson itself
Grooming your horse before you ride. Learning to tack up correctly. Understanding how to read your horse's body language in the cross ties. This is not the boring part before the real lesson begins. This is horsemanship and it makes you a better rider than an hour in the saddle alone ever will.

7. Bad rides happen to every rider at every level
Including the ones you look up to most. A bad lesson does not mean you are not cut out for this, it just means you are learning something hard and doing it on the back of a living animal that is also having a day. Come back next week and it will be different.
Your instructor is on your side.

8. Every correction we give is in service of your progress and your safety
We are not pointing out what is wrong to make you feel bad but we are pointing out what needs to change so you can get where you want to go faster and more safely. The students who improve fastest are the ones who hear a correction as information rather than criticism and apply it without taking it personally.

9. Riding changes you in ways you will not expect
The patience it builds, the confidence that comes from communicating with an animal ten times your size and being understood. The resilience that develops from falling short of a goal and coming back for it anyway. The community you find at the barn. None of that shows up in the first lesson or even the tenth but it will show up at one point. For most riders it becomes one of the most significant things in their life and not just what they do on Tuesday afternoons but part of who they are.

If you are a riding instructor share this with every new family who walks through your gate. If you are a new student or a parent of one - welcome. You picked something genuinely worth doing!

What do you wish someone had told you before your very first riding lesson?

05/10/2026

The morning of the Kentucky Derby, I pulled out my pocket knife and asked trainer Lucien Laurin if I could cut the holes in Riva Ridge's blinkers larger. You should have seen the look on his face.

"Ronnie, don't you think it's too late to make any changes?" he said. I slowly folded my knife back up, shook my head, and said out loud, "I sure would hate to lose a Derby this way." There was a long pause. Then he said, "Go ahead."

**That moment changed everything.**

I had heard the rumors swirling around the track and in the jockeys' room — trainer Arnold Winick had reportedly told jockey Carlos Marquez to shadow my every move, mirror my every step. What they didn't know was that Riva Ridge was a completely different horse than the one they thought they were racing against. Before I spent months schooling him to relax and come from behind, he was blindingly fast out of the gate. I knew exactly what I had underneath me, and I knew I could use him any way I chose.

The moment the gates opened, I saw every other jockey grab a strong hold on their horses. That was all I needed to see. I made my move, went straight to the front, and never looked back. We won my first Kentucky Derby by 3 1/4 lengths — and it wasn't even close. What a thrill. What a relief. I truly believe there is no greater feeling in this world for a jockey than standing in the winner's circle at Churchill Downs.

**But here is what I want you to understand: I was more proud of Riva Ridge that day than I was of myself.**

The first time I ever looked into that horse's eyes, I knew. My father had always told me you could tell the intelligence of any animal by the look in their eyes, and Riva had something extraordinary behind his. He never once let me down, and I never once stopped believing in him — even when the world couldn't see what I saw.

The Preakness was cruel to us. A muddy track stole what should have been ours, and we slipped and slid our way to a fourth-place finish. The mud was Riva's kryptonite his entire career — he simply would never feel secure on an off track or on turf. But when the Belmont Stakes came around on a fast track? He won going away by 7 lengths, pure and dominant. If not for the mud at Pimlico, he would have been the first Triple Crown winner in 24 years — and I would have had back-to-back Triple Crowns the following year with Secretariat. But the Triple Crown was never meant to be easy. It demands a horse who can outrun his entire generation under every condition, on every surface. Not every great horse is built that way.

California was next, and I won the Hollywood Derby — though the track was so brutally hard I could feel the jarring all the way through my body with every stride. When we returned to New York, I stepped on the track with Riva and immediately felt it: he was muscle sore, worn down by the relentless campaign. We gave him the entire month of July to breathe and recover.

Then came the Monmouth Invitational — and what happened next still haunts me. He had trained beautifully at Saratoga, so full of energy and fire that I was buzzing with confidence. Yet when Mr. Laurin gave me a leg up on race day at Monmouth Park, Riva was completely flat. Dull. Lifeless. Nothing like the horse I had been on just a day or two before. He finished fourth and I had no explanation. There was talk that he had been drugged that day. I never said a word about it publicly. But I believe it with every fiber of my being — because that was not my horse.

**He rallied. He always rallied.**

In the Stymie Handicap, he was beaten only a neck by Canonero II — the 1971 Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes winner — in a new track record time. Yet despite going undefeated on dry tracks against every other 3-year-old that season, the Eclipse Award for Champion 3-Year-Old C**t was given to Key to the Mint. Their reasoning? Key to the Mint beat Riva in the Woodward — when Riva finished fourth on a sloppy track — and finished third to Riva's fourth in the Preakness, also on a muddy track. I rode Key to the Mint myself whenever he and Riva didn't face each other. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that Riva was the better horse. He got robbed. He should have won the Eclipse Award at 2, at 3, and at 4. But voters always seem to forget the first seven or eight months of the year. He was, however, the leading money-winning horse of his entire generation in 1972.

As a 4-year-old, Riva Ridge won five of his nine starts and set five track records along the way. Three of his four defeats came on muddy tracks or grass. The fourth was a second-place finish to Secretariat in the Marlboro Cup — and even then, Riva broke the existing track record in defeat, a fact that counted for nothing in the record books. This time, the voters got it right: he was awarded the Eclipse Award for Best Handicap Horse.

Now do you understand why Riva Ridge will always have a special place in my heart?

I genuinely believe I had a great deal to do with making him the champion he became. In the wrong hands — or if someone had pushed him too hard too fast after his first stakes win — he could have been broken, physically and mentally. How many horses have been ruined that way? How many champions never got the chance to show the world what they were? Riva had the raw ability from the very beginning. But what he truly needed was kindness, patience, and time. And we gave him all three.

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05/09/2026

05/07/2026

Drop your stirrups. It is a simple instruction that riding instructors should give regularly. If no stirrup work is done correctly, it is one of the fastest and most effective ways to build an independent seat, develop core stability, and create the kind of deep balanced position that carries over into everything a rider does in the saddle. Some riders dread the thought of no stirrups but the problem is not the exercise. It is how it gets used.

The most important point about no stirrup work is that quality beats quantity every single time. A rider who grips, tenses, and white knuckles their way through thirty minutes without stirrups is not building strength, they are building bad habits.

1. Exhausted muscles do not learn correct movement so they compensate.
Compensation patterns built under fatigue are genuinely difficult to undo. The goal is never to survive no stirrup work. The goal is to use it so effectively that the rider barely realizes how much they are improving.

2. Start with one stirrup before you drop both.
This is one of the most underused progressions in no stirrup work and one of the most effective. Ask your student to drop just the left or inside stirrup and ride for five to ten minutes. Then switch - right stirrup dropped, left stirrup in. Riding with a single stirrup isolated each side of the body independently and reveals asymmetries in balance and strength that riding with both stirrups or neither, completely masks. A student who rides beautifully with both stirrups in and falls apart on one side without one has just shown you exactly where the work needs to happen.

3. When you do drop both stirrups start short.
Five minutes of genuinely quality no stirrup work at the walk and trot is worth more than thirty minutes of gripping and bouncing. Start with five minutes. Let the quality be the standard not the duration. When the quality drops and you will see it before the rider feels it, put the stirrups back. Rest and maybe go again. Progressive intervals of quality work build strength far faster than grinding through exhaustion and the rider finishes the lesson with good movement patterns reinforced rather than tension patterns locked in.

4. Know when to stop.
The moment you see a gripping knee, a braced hip, excessive bounce, or a lower back that has stopped following the movement the no stirrup work is done for that session. These are not signs to push through!! They are signals that the muscles have reached their productive limit and anything beyond that point is building tension not strength. Tired muscles build fitness. Exhausted muscles build problems so know the difference and act on it.

5. Build it progressively across your curriculum.
No stirrup work at the walk should be established before no stirrup work at the trot. No stirrup trot should be solid before no stirrup canter is introduced and for many riders no stirrup canter is an advanced goal not a standard exercise. Build the progression deliberately. A student who has developed genuine balance and stability at the walk and trot without stirrups will find the canter far more manageable when the time comes. A student pushed into no stirrup canter before they have the walk and trot foundation will grip, brace, and bounce in a way that is uncomfortable for them and unfair to the horse.

6. Use it as a teaching tool not a test of toughness.
No stirrup work is not a punishment and it is not an endurance event. It is a diagnostic and development tool that tells you where a rider’s balance actually lives when the stirrups are not there to prop it up and then gives you a way to build what is missing. Assign specific time limits.
Check in regularly about tension and fatigue. Have students put stirrups back when quality declines without making it feel like a failure. Focus on what they are feeling and where is the movement coming into your body, which side feels different, where are you holding tension, rather than just how long they can last without stirrups.

7. Do not forget the horse.
A tense bouncing rider without stirrups is not comfortable for the school horse carrying them. Monitor your horses during no stirrup sessions and be honest about when a rider’s fatigue is starting to affect the horse’s way of going. The horse’s comfort is part of the equation and a rider who understands that their tension has a direct impact on the horse beneath them is a rider who has a very good reason to do the work correctly.

How often is enough?
Three times per week of quality no stirrup work is plenty for most riders. The body needs recovery time between sessions and more frequent work without adequate recovery produces fatigue not fitness. Build it into your regular lesson curriculum as a standard component rather than a special event and your students will develop the seat security that comes from consistent progressive work over time without the dread that comes from treating it like a monthly ordeal.

No stirrup work is not about suffering. It is about building the kind of independent balanced seat that makes everything else in riding possible. Done correctly it is one of the best investments of lesson time you have. Done incorrectly it is just uncomfortable for everyone involved.
Use it well. Your students and their horses will thank you.

How do you incorporate no stirrup work into your lessons?