06/14/2026
. The Winning Is Not The Ribbon
When I went to the show in Arizona last month with KRA Patron and LEA Zeus, I was asked why I was still showing them as they both exhibited so much fear in the show pen last year.
‘Because I just have them at this show, and they both need loads of my time to grow through their fears,’ was my response
It made me sad. Not because the comment was unkind, it wasn’t. Rather because what was seen from the rail completely missed the point. In my hours with each of them on warm up day, and I mean hours, in the moments they were finally still, it was all about what was going on between the ears
Let me tell you about Zeus;
I raised him. He’s nine now, a copper red boy of almost comical confidence. As a youngster until now, he’ll let himself into the tack room, strip the walls, and drag things around the barn. He’ll pick up hoses, dog beds, flags and then chase the other horses with them.
He isn’t spooky. He is delighted by the world. I gave him the slow start I always do and didn’t show him until he was six. In his very first class, trash bags blew under him and a flock of birds flushed beneath his feet. He didn’t blink. Elizabeth was riding him, and I was holding my breath. And they won. And he went on to win and win; in Amateur and Open Performance, Luxury Geldings and Gait. I think he was all-around, versatility or high point horse in every show he was in, with a variety of riders, his first two years out
He was that horse. Trail obstacles, costume classes, beginner lessons, trail, mountains. Fearless and happy — not because nothing ever startled him, but because his brain knew how to sort and file and move on. He had the biggest window I’d ever seen in a horse.
And then came the chickens.
At a show in Texas there were fun evening classes and he and Patron were entered in a pairs class. A fun class. Zeus and Patron moving side by side, performing maneuvers like a little ballet. And somewhere in the middle of it, two exhibitors walked in wearing full chicken costumes.
Something about that— the shape, the movement, the wrongness of it, I’ll never know, crossed a threshold his brain had never encountered. It didn’t just startle him. It broke something. This was the only horse who would run up to my twin boys when they dressed in gigantic T-Rex costumes for Halloween. And I was riding Patron, who is legit afraid of his own shadow, and he was nonplussed
Zeus’ brain inexplicably broke in that innocent and fun moment. He’d won all his qualifying classes and yet I scratched him from every remaining class at that show as he had a complete melt down anywhere near the arena.
And at the four shows that followed, he melted down. Badly. This horse who had never met a scary thing in his life was suddenly looking for the exit in every warm-up and show pen.
Spinning out, panicked, genuine fear.
His brain wasn’t being dramatic. It was doing exactly what a prey animal’s brain is designed to do: encounter a threat you can’t categorize, encode it fast, and generalize it wide. And one innocent moment blew his filing system.
So I took him to Arizona — along with Patron — with one goal in mind: time with me. Not ribbons. Time. Endless time with me without the distraction of more horses or clients
On warm-up day, both he and my other project, Patron, fell apart. Dramatically.
I let them. I stayed with them for hours, worked them through it, let them pendulate back to something that felt like solid ground. And then I asked again. By show day, Zeus was calm, centered, brilliant. He won everything. He even went into a pattern class bitless and performed flawlessly
The reward wasn’t in the neck ribbons he won with myself in Open or Ava Mann, who rode him beautifully in Amateur classes, it was in his mental return to home in the show environment
The other horse in this story is Patron. He’s twelve, and for the first four years of his life he lived in a concrete box. No windows. No variation. No leaves skittering across a paddock, no shadows shifting through the afternoon, no footing that wasn’t perfectly level grass and familiar. Just walls and routine and a world that never asked anything unexpected of him.
Then I brought him to the United States and his world became enormous.
The early years of a horse’s life are when the brain builds its filing system , cataloguing experiences, learning what’s dangerous and what isn’t, developing the capacity to encounter the unfamiliar and sort it rather than flee from it. Patron missed all of that. Not through any fault of his own, and not through any cruelty, it’s simply how he was kept. The result of his raising was a nervous system that never got to build those files.
Shadows, harrow lines, falling leaves, cones, a patch of different footing, snow, basically anything on the ground, things that register as background noise for most horses, send his brain sideways. When he arrived from Peru, it took him months to come out of his turn out shed and taste grass. He lives with a kind of chronic sensory overload that isn’t anxiety in the conventional sense. It’s closer to a gap. The world keeps presenting inputs he was never given the chance to learn to sort.
Last year I tried to turn him into a ‘Sunday’ horse. Meaning he has won about everything and is qualified to go straight to the Sunday championship classes. That didn’t work. He needs loads of warm up classes. And an infinite amount of time from me. About 6 hours of my time in Arizona on warm up day to stand, assess, look, process, walk, breathe. And the luxury of that time isn’t something I have when I’m managing multiple horses and clients
Some people would say: retire him. Give him a pasture and peace, he clearly is stressed at a show
And yet here’s the thing about Patron; pasture isn’t peace for him. Open spaces, unpredictable environments, the endless input of the natural world with no structure to organize around? That’s not rest. That’s more noise. His nervous system doesn’t find quiet in the field.
His venue is the show arena. The routine, especially in venues he’s been at before; the familiar smell of the stalls, the rhythm of warm-up, being in an enclosed space in the trailer next to his friends is comforting to him. He’s the only horse I have who loved showing at places like the Oklahoma State Fair. He thrived in the swarms of people coming to his stall, and wandering around visiting with all the people. That is his happy place
It gives his brain something it can hold onto. When I warm him up with drills that bore even me, he will visibly exhale. The structure is the regulation. Four years in a concrete box gave him a nervous system that craves containment — and the show environment, with all its apparent busyness, actually delivers exactly that.
So I have a choice: retire him to a life lived in a higher state of fear, or keep gently asking him to widen his window. Keep giving his nervous system new experiences of ‘I was afraid, and then I wasn’t’. Keep building the evidence that the world, navigated carefully and with someone he trusts, is survivable.
That’s all I can do in reading the horse and helping them be their best version. And the biggest reward for the countless hours I put into listening to each horse is to widen their horizons and watch them succeed. A horse that can manage multiple situations and is well trained is the best guarantee I can give for any horse to have a safe passage if anything were to happen to me and they needed a safe landing
The science of how a horse’s brain works has a name for this. Dr. Stephen Peters calls it the window of tolerance, the bandwidth inside which a horse can encounter stress and still process it, still learn, still regulate. Too little challenge and the window never grows. Too much and the brain hijacks — floods, shuts down, files the whole experience as threat.
The work is in finding the edge. Going there. Letting them complete the stress cycle — not white-knuckling through it, not shutting it down, but moving through it until the nervous system can exhale. And then asking again.
That’s what the Arizona show was for both of these horses. I had the time to dedicate to them to allow them to process and exhale. And they both did so brilliantly, in spite of my warm up day doubts
So when I was asked why I still wanted to show them , they were having issues and hadn’t they won enough? What I wanted to say was this:
The ribbons were never the point. The point is the moment a horse who lost his confidence walks back into an arena or the mountains or any environment, and remembers who he is. The point is the exhale. The point is a twelve-year-old who spent his first four years in a concrete box in Peru finding, inside the structure of a show arena, something that feels like peace.
That’s the reward. And no, I haven’t had enough of helping a horse accomplish that
The question was never whether to challenge them. It’s whether you’re challenging ‘with them’ , or just ‘at them’. One builds the window. The other blows right through it.
I’ll do my best to keep building and listening and deeply appreciate the support you all give me along the ride~
