Review of a Clinic at Pony Track Farm in Portola Valley, CA
(Submitted to The Chronicle of The Horse for publication)
by Laura Krumholz

There is a place available for all riders to visit briefly and it isn’t reserved for FEI riders. It is located a minute past trying, a mile past struggle and frustration, right beyond exhaustion but just before quitting dressage riding forever. It is a wonderful, mystical feeling that I call That Thing. This is not an idea, a concept or a theory- it’s real. Feel it just one time and it’s a banquet you can feast on for a year. That Thing will keep you riding in snow and tornados. It can keep you jamming a daily ride into your already packed schedule. Each time you ride you will have that goal to reach for. It is that moment during a ride when a rider goes past striving and doing too much and simply becomes a quiet breathing listening entity. It’s when your horse clicks into a sublime and elusive groove and dressage becomes easy for the both of you together. The horse is between all of your aids, and you are between all of their aids too. You can think and the horse just does. The rider has a feeling that any request would be gladly fulfilled. You and your horse become a team, allies in a common movement. There’s no difference between the two of you.

I have recently experienced That Thing and would like to tell my fellow amateur low level riders that the sensation is available for us all. The qualitative differences are so great that That Thing cannot be overlooked once it has been experienced. It just might change your riding life forever.

I had the good fortune to ride in a Karl Mikolka clinic. This in itself is an act of extraordinary courage and risk for a terminally beginner rider such as myself with a very average draft-cross horse such as my mare. We are both limited in terms of our physicality and feel for dressage. I had to be pushed into the arena for my first lesson and felt close to vomiting from nerves.

From the beginning I could tell this was not to be an ordinary riding lesson. For starters, Mr. Mikolka was not sitting in a chair surrounded by adoring auditors. In fact, these sessions tend to be very private, personal and in-depth conversations between Mr. Mikolka, you and your horse. Auditors are discouraged from attending. The few people who are allowed to watch are forbidden from taking notes or videotaping. This is not just because watchers tend to be negatively critical and judgmental, thus taking up brain space from the rider noticing them, but also because Mr. Mikolka’s methods are very technical, challenging and different from others and therefore easily misunderstood. His lexicon and terminology is completely foreign. It’s not only an entirely new syntactical language, but a new physical one as well. It doesn’t translate well, not only to those watching but those writing clinic reports for the Internet. It really can only be understood by the horse and the person riding.

And so Mr. Mikolka started teaching me that every ride can be looked at as a series of questions the rider poses to the horse, and the answer the horse gives back. The horse is allowed to express his opinion about what it being asked of him. The rider does not necessarily have to agree 100%, and so the dialogue begins. Mr. Mikolka began to teach me how to feel what each hoof was doing or was about to do, and ways to influence this leg at just the right moment in order to make the request easier for the horse to comply with. This was extraordinarily difficult for me to grasp and unfortunately I still have to think about it.

Midway through the first lesson, Mr. Mikolka asked for shoulder-in. And so I positioned my horse and tried for it. My inner dialogue is “too much bend, not enough bend, not forward enough” while he launched into an elaborate discourse on the Old Masters and technically what needs to be done in order to achieve a correct movement, all the while throwing out questions to me that he expected to be answered by me in a shout. I have always been trained to be silent when I’m riding, and ask questions after the lesson is over, so talking and riding was harder than it sounds, especially as I’m struggling to “nail” a shoulder-in and prove to him I know how to do it. So I’m trying to concentrate on my horse and my frustrations and striving to get it right, and yelling back immediately when Mr. Mikolka demands an answer to some out-of-the-blue question and I got so exhausted trying to do both that I stopped. Immediately he booms in his operatic Austrian accent “Don’t Stop! Continue on” and my horse and I are blown back onto the rail, now riding in a complete frenzy trying to get that damn shoulder-in just right and Mr. Mikolka escalates his demands, hammering my limited abilities with “which hind leg is on the ground- shout it!” until it felt like he stuck an eggbeater into my ears and scrambled my brains like an omelet. I honestly could try no more. Obviously nothing I was doing was working. I felt ashamed and exhausted. I can’t say I gave up, but it felt something like that. And that’s when That Thing kicked in. My horse sailed down the long side as if she had wheels on a train track. The shoulder-in was immediately flawless and it was unlike anything I’d felt before. Mr. Mikolka recognized what was happening and thundered, "That’s it, that’s it! That’s what you are going for. Like a ship sail catching a strong wind" It was beautiful. A feeling that made me wonder what all those other things I was riding were, all the while thinking they were shoulder-in. Words seem inadequate to describe the sensation, but that lateral long side was enough to pose a substantial shift in our personal training paradigm. All rides since have been ridden with an awareness that That Thing is somewhere out there waiting for us to walk, trot or canter down that rabbit hole.

Of course, once you feel That Thing, you try to keep it and unfortunately it just doesn’t work that way. I have talked with many upper level professional riders and they all know exactly what I’m referring to. And they all say if you can feel it even 3 times a year, even for a minute, it’s a true gift that maybe only a surfer could understand. You can’t force the feeling. Less really is more. Just be still and enjoy it for as long as it lasts. And know that it’s out there for all of us riders, if only we can find it!

The Tao Te Ching said it best:
less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
True mastery can be gained
by letting things go their own way.
It cannot be gained by interfering.

By Laura Krumholz