"I’m Just Going to Go For It"

High-school teacher and lifelong equestrian Colleen Rull set aside her fear of failing and used three strategies to achieve her dream of competing at the 2022 U.S. Dressage Festival of Champions.

By Colleen Rull

When I first got into dressage about 25 years ago, I really had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t even know it was a discipline. I just thought it was something we did as part of flatwork for jumping. As an adult, two things attracted me to dressage. One is the connection I feel with my horses, I believe an important part of dressage is having a clear dialogue in your partnership. The other part is that dressage is just good training. It’s good horsemanship. I don’t think I really grasped that until I read the FEI levels and connected those dots. I recognize now the importance of the training scale and how each level builds and prepares for the next.

That reminds me of education a lot. In education, we call that backward design, where you start at the end goal for your students or the assessment at the end of the unit, then you look at how you’re going to get your students there. I feel that

now about dressage: every exercise, every movement, every pattern has a purpose or an end goal, I think that’s really cool.

I’ve been teaching high school for 22 years. As a teacher, one of my jobs is to create and implement lessons for my students. I have to know the learning styles of every kid in my room and how I can best help them. It’s the same with training horses.

With my students and my horses, I think it’s important to walk into the room or the arena in a good mood, and in both places you have to stay organized and have a plan. Things don’t always go according to plan with the horses, but I have an idea of what I want to accomplish that day. One of my coaches is actually a high-school teacher, too, and we often discuss that we’re looking for just a 1% improvement in our students and with the horses, too. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but if we can just chip away at 1% each ride, we’re doing pretty darn good.

I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been worried that I couldn’t achieve my goals on a budget. I’ve come up with three strategies to help me get there.

“I think of the arena as Simon’s classroom”

First, I make sure every dollar I spend has a direct purpose that I can connect to my goal. For example, last year I couldn’t afford to go to my regional championships and also to U.S. Dressage Festival of Champions, so I had to make a choice. Festival was my true goal, so I had to skip regionals if I made the cut for Festival.

Second, I try really hard to keep my eye on my goal and understand that everything is going to take longer than I want it to, and that’s OK. It took me 20 years of planning, but I knew I really wanted a competitive horse. My strategy over that time was to buy and sell. I started off with a $900 off-the-track Thoroughbred as a high school senior. Each horse I’ve sold or traded was with a lot of emotion and a broken heart, but I always tried hard to keep the end goal in mind and stay pragmatic. Each horse I got was just a little bit better quality or a little more competitive until I finally had a bigger budget and was able to afford a local young horse who became successful through the developing grand prix program with Martin Kuhn. I knew when the right time came to sell him it potentially would give me the ability to buy my dream horse, and it

did.

My third strategy is that I’ve made sure to keep positive connections with people I meet, because those connections are invaluable. When I finally had the budget to buy my dream horse, I knew through other people about a woman named Leslie Waterman, who became a mentor for me. One day she called and told me about an interesting prospect. That was MSJ Simon Sez ("Simon").

Simon is 5 years old and 18.1 hands, so it’s very important that he believes I’m bigger than him! When I got him, he was an unstarted 3-year-old. I didn’t have a lot of experience backing young horses, but I decided to train him myself because I had the tools, the facility around me, and the people to help create a program for him.

There are three lessons I’ve learned on this journey. First, I ride with a smile, even when it’s scary. Young horses do silly things and don’t always think about the human on them, but if I can ride with a smile through those things, I can keep Simon from getting tense; if I get tense it would only escalate things.

Another lesson is not to forget to play. I want him to look forward to his rides with me. So once a week I take him out for a field hack, and we just walk. No pressure.

The third thing I’ve learned is to create structure. I think of the arena as Simon’s classroom. It’s where his education happens. I think he knows the expectations I have for him, and I know the expectations he has for me.

For myself, I have learned to conquer fear, the fear of making mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. It’s OK to fail. It’s part of the process.

I found that I had more education than I thought. It built my self-confidence to do this. It’s about digging into what you’ve learned from different coaches and people over the years and putting it together. Then you come up with a system that works for you. I think in that process you learn you know more than you might think, and it’s okay to give yourself credit for that.

" I think of the arena as Simon's classroom."

Getting to Festival with Simon represented so much for me as just an average person. It
was a personal journey of self-reflection and
goal-setting, and, most importantly, just the pure love for the sport and horses. It was a really big deal for me. For me, it was a huge risk. But I thought, “What’s the worst outcome? Is it so bad in the long run if I don’t make it?” And the answer was no. So I thought, “I’m just going to go for it.”

A coach said to me before Festival, “Everyone goes to win.” My immediate response was, “I’m not.” My goal was just to ride to the best of my ability each day, and it represented a new opportunity for me to grow as a rider and as a teacher for Simon in this electrifying environment.

One of the mornings at Festival, in the hotel bathroom where I was getting ready I looked in the mirror and thought, “Do you belong here? Did you fake it?” And then I thought, “Stop doubting it. You didn’t fake it, you made it.”

That was emotionally charging, especially when you’re warming up with Olympians and people you watch videos of, to be in the same classes with them is like what actors say: it’s an honor to be nominated.

Photos: SusanJStickle.com and Deborah Dysart Photography