Cherry Ridge Dressage offers training, lessons, clinics, and officiating as a USEF r Dressage Judge
04/23/2025
Choose dressage?
Nah. Dressage chose me.
Like a bad habit. Like a cult. Like a beautifully choreographed breakdown.
Choose snapping your pelvis in half just to start another youngster.
Choose a sport that tweaks your lower back and foam rolling is scheduled between rides.
Choose riding a fire-breathing dragon with a French manicure and a six-figure price tag.
Choose trainers who speak in riddles. “More through.” “Over the back.” “Feel it.”
Feel what, Karen? The shame? The void? The $900 clinic fee evaporating with every wrong step?
Choose gaslighting yourself into thinking this is fun.
Choose selling a kidney to afford a new custom saddle that your next saddle fitter says doesn't even fit.
Choose lameness, ulcers, mystery swelling, and that one puffy pastern that haunts your dreams.
Choose smiling through the blood in your mouth when someone says, “You must be rich to have a horse.”
Choose braiding horses at 5 a.m. with frozen fingers and the kind of hope only lunatics possess.
Choose precision. Obsession.
Choose never being good enough and doing it anyway.
Choose chasing stillness in chaos, grace in pressure, and meaning in the sweat between strides.
Choose telling yourself next year will be the year.
And then telling yourself that again.
And again.
Why?
Because there’s something holy in the madness.
Because for one second, your horse breathed in time with you, and the world held its breath.
Because the arena is the only place your mind shuts up.
Because you don’t just ride. You become.
And you’d rather break yourself in half chasing that moment
than live a life where you never tried.
