S2 E20: The Logic Behind the Ride — Aubrey Graham on OTTBs, Education & Instinct (Part 1)

S2 E20: The Logic Behind the Ride — Aubrey Graham on OTTBs, Education & Instinct (Part 1) Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi everyone and welcome back to OTTB on Tap. I'm Nev. And I'm Emily. Hey, nev, what's on tap today? We're here with Aubrey Graham of Kivu Sport Horses, a well-known OTTB trainer, reseller, and educator. Aubrey works with more than 50 thoroughbreds a year, whether it's giving them their first post track ride, transitioning them into new careers, addressing behavioral challenges, or refining their training for competition.
She's also the force behind Thoroughbred Logic, a widely followed educational series that includes weekly articles on horse Nation, nationally held masterclasses and local clinics. We're so excited to dig into her background, her approach to training, and get some practical exercises for working with OTBs today.
So Aubrey, welcome to the podcast. Thank you guys so much for having me. This is super exciting. Awesome. Let's start with your background. Can you give us a little bit of your background and what got you into horses [00:01:00] in the first place? Oh boy. Alright. I will try, I will preface all of this with saying I'm an academic, I am an anthropologist, and that puts me in the social science side of things.
And we like to talk and we like to tell stories and deal with narratives. Awesome. So I'll try to keep everything reasonably concise, but my version of Concise is here, is not other people's versions of Concise. We're here to listen to you talk, so it's fine. Just go for it. Super. Okay. So quick background is yes, I am a cultural anthropologist.
I did my PhD at Emory and finished in 2016 and I've been training horses professionally since I was 19. So that would've been 2003 and I've been riding since I was four. So the horses have been a stable factor in my life. Every time I can ride. I did ride, there was probably only one or two years of my life where I wasn't riding four days a week, if not seven days a week.
And I'll track back around to where this all started, but even though I have this kind of crazy academic [00:02:00] background and I worked as a photojournalist and across East Africa at Points and in Europe and various things the horses have always been there, right?
They were a second career throughout. And then at a certain point, I took a nice deviation from all the other careers I was on, was like, Nope, this is what makes me happy and now do it full time. But to track back around to the first part of that question in how did I get into horses and things like that my family's not into horses.
I am named after my great-grandfather who had Tennessee walking horses. That's the best I've got at this point. That and my, parents hung a mobile over my head when I was a kid that had unicorns on it. I can blame them for both of those things for this passion slash obsession slash life course.
But , my family, lives in small town Connecticut and did not have horses, had no interest in them, no farming background. And I remember lots of dogs and cats growing up, but I was the weirdo that as soon as I could talk was like, horse. And they're like, oh, no. The local town fair and I think they spent $40 on $1 Pony rides.
And at that point I was three and a half or four years old, [00:03:00] and they were like, I guess we have to get our lessons. So I started riding, taking lessons when I was four and , I started at one farm. There's lots of great stories. Great, like old lesson pony packed me around, got me on the back of a horse, and then another trainer that I rode with until I was 18 was finally willing when I was five, I think, to let me come and ride at her farm.
And I just became a barn rat. My parents would drop me off. I didn't have a horse. I got a pony when I was eight. I didn't come from a lot of means, so we did what we could and, but the trainer was wonderful and I was allowed to hang out at the barn hop on anything I could. How she tolerated children that were five and wanted to ride.
I have no idea. That's amazing. I I love that. I'm so glad I got that opportunity. And then just, as I carried through, had a pony for a little bit. Got my first thoroughbred when I was nine and carried on from there. Nothing in my life has ever been a straight line from one place to another.
But yeah, the horses were an organic thing in my life and they've just stuck around. [00:04:00] You're talking to two people who. That message resonates so well with I think I'm very drawn to people that have lived these multifaceted lives and Emily's no exception, the two of us.
That's how our whole life has been where it's just this series of just now I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna follow this passion and maybe at this age I'm gonna go back to school. And I think I wish for most young people, especially in this day and age, that they would embrace that wholeheartedly.
Absolutely. When did you, or when did OT has become your focus? Was there a particular horse or an experience that kind of solidified that for you? That's a really good question. Thoroughbreds became my focus by, in, in a way, by default. I was that rider that would get on anything. I've got some, funny stories from the early ages and the later age, more recent years on why Thoroughbreds and how that really came to be.
But they've always [00:05:00] been the horse that I found that a lot of people struggle to ride and I will get on anything. I have always been willing to get on anything and as a kid that meant somebody's horse would be a little too much one day. And it's not that the horse is too much, right? It was just there was a need for something else to be happening at the time and it wasn't happening.
And somebody would get scared or worried and. They'd be like, I don't know if I could ride this. And I'd be like, I'll get on. And I'd be the first person to like hop it up and down and be like, yes, sure. Okay. And that put me on a lot of thoroughbreds throughout my life.
Sure. I'm not worried about what it's doing. . Let me see if I can figure it out. And I've always loved their brains. They've always made sense to me. But an interesting aside, my first thoroughbred when I was nine, I think I got 'em when I was about nine and a half.
So I was a tall kid. I'm five nine now, and I was five foot when I got this 12 three Welsh mountain pony as an 8-year-old. I had to be five foot or under or I couldn't get the pony. And it was one of those where I remember my parents were literally measuring me and being like, your trainer says if you're over five foot, we can't [00:06:00] buy the pony.
And I was, I was like, shrinking down as much as you're crouching, right? And there's these great photos of long legged, spider legged me riding this little 12, 12 3 pony. And he was a bucker in this just absolute menace to society. I hit the ground twice a day, every day for the first six months.
And I, and I. Grass of that pony, I learned how to have a seat and stay on and have a sense of humor about all of this. I suppose if you're gonna quit, you're gonna quit then. Yeah. And so I then when I sold the pony, I was too tall for him. Sold him to a young woman who mother asked me to come out and help her ride him and, trail ride around on her other horse and just get her comfortable on the pony.
'cause again, of course he has a bucking fit. And we rode out to somebody else's house. And I remember going to this dark barn at the top of a hill at this person's house, who person I did not know. And they , they just gotten off the track thoroughbred. And I was like, that's cool. And I remember this dark horse, emerging out of the shadows in a very dark, if you guys have been in New England barns, the old, nine 19 hundreds ish [00:07:00] barns are just, they're, there's no light in there.
So you just see this thing come out and he's got this nice stripe and he is beautiful. And he is looks black, he's dark bay. So of course my 9-year-old heart is oh, this is amazing. And the girl's he's terrible. And I am afraid of him and I can't wait. She didn't say that. She did not say she was afraid of him.
She said , all the things were wrong with the horse. All the standard I don't like him. He's too fast, he's too big, he's too dangerous, da. And I was like, have you ridden them? And she's no, I was like, can I ride him? And so I got on him bareback. She didn't have a saddle and rode him around.
And this is just me being, dumb ass me. I, rode him around. I was like, he's really cool. He's 16 too. It was a big old horse and he was not straight off the track. He was nice. You're nine? I was nine.
Okay. I just wanted to reiterate that. Yeah. Yeah. No fear, zero fear. No, no fear. And he was like, okay, that was really cool. Went home, never thought about it again. And then about a month later, those parents called my parents and were like, Hey, our daughter really isn't into this horse. It's really not going well.
Your daughter seemed [00:08:00] to really like him. Do you wanna buy the horse? For eight, 800 bucks, we bought my first thoroughbred, who was 19 years old and had been around the block that horse had done everything. And had him for about a year and a half. And I learned oh, it's a windy day. And it's, the type of fall in Connecticut where you breathe in and your nose freezes and you're like, your horse's got a bolt.
'cause I had no riding skills. I was just a kid and he'd take off and I'd be like, clear the middle and we'd go running around the ring and oh boy. And it was great. I love that horse to pieces. And eventually, I, he did have navicular, so I ended up selling him onto a lower level person who wasn't gonna do more than cross rails.
And the funny kicker to that is that woman who had that horse ended up marrying my high school boyfriend. There's a random Oh wow. Random thing for you. And she still hates me for it, for the horse, not the boyfriend. And I was like, what? I was nine. I didn't know better. So that, that horse, I think in many ways I, as a kid, I had no idea what an off the track thoroughbred meant.
He was, I knew he was [00:09:00] his sire was the same, was also secretary at Sire. He was a bold ruler. And I thought that was really cool. I was told to think that was really cool. I didn't think anything else about, I had no other education about these things. But I do think that probably set the stage in a certain way.
And then throughout my life, there have been a ton of thoroughbreds who have both taught me humility in riding and other ones that have brought adventure, heartbreak, the ability to chase dreams in ways I didn't think I could as a kid that didn't have money, wasn't, bred into the equine sport world.
, I went to Colgate and there was a horse on the the intercollegiate riding team there that was donated named Druthers. I don't know his jockey club name. He was a steeple chaser. And , at that point I thought I could ride. And I was 19, 20 years old. And I remember that horse just teaching me lesson after lesson.
You pull to a fence, you pitch to a fence, you do anything. And he was going right. That steeple chaser was like, I know how to jump like that. You wanna ride like an idiot? We go fast, right? And [00:10:00] it was such an accomplishment when in my senior year I got on him and I left him alone, and I was able to click around a course in this beautiful, measured just cadence with a nice 12 foot stride and get all of the things.
I don't think I've ever felt as accomplished as being able to actually ride that horse at that time and being like, wow, I learned something. And he taught me all of it, right? So there's been a ton of them. I can go into others later. Otherwise I'll just take over and just tell you life stories for the rest of the time.
And you do train other types of horses as well, you're not, solely focused on thoroughbreds now or do you branch out to other breeds as well? I am, I'm a really open-ended situation. I, right now I have. I have 23 thoroughbreds in my barn. Wow. I laugh because I would really love it to be 20.
We're just a little overflowing right now. But I have a Connie Cross coming in at the end of the month, and I have a Belgian cross coming in around the same time. [00:11:00] So every once in a while somebody likes to punk me and be like, here's my draft cross, spell that for me. And oddly enough, it usually goes really well because people are used to me having thoroughbreds, but a lot of people who are interested in thoroughbreds really want the draft cross ride.
Yeah. And so when it shows up at the place, they're like, I love thoroughbreds, but Right. That it works really well to have those horses in here. But I will train anything. I came Yeah. Hustled back into this podcast from the second barn that I work at. I'll talk about the business model later.
Yeah. And I had taught a lesson to one of my students, an adult student who rides a, I can only guess, he's an Amish draft horse. We have a lot of them around here. He's lovely. And there's a quarter Horse Arab was the lesson before that. And then I had a training ride on a 23-year-old thoroughbred previous to that.
There's just it's a good mix. And I do training rides on these horses too. Yeah. So I, again, you don't discriminate. I [00:12:00] haven't dropped the, I will ride anything. Pause from my life. I just really I understand Thoroughbreds, I think better than I understand some of the other breeds and they Yeah.
That therefore it works. Yeah. So what is it about Thoroughbreds that makes you so passionate about working with them? That's a really good question. I think some of the things with Thoroughbreds are some of the same things I really loved about teaching in college or teaching college. So I taught at Emory for a while.
I love students, whether it's a horse or a human that has that's smart, but also has all of this drive and try and there's just so much energy towards getting it right. And thoroughbreds always have struck me as the horse that is so smart. But if you micromanage 'em and you break it down and take away their agency and you take away their ability to make choices, they're smart and they get pissed off and they're just like, no this is not a team anymore.
I don't do the whole, you tell me what to do. I do the thing and that's [00:13:00] it. They need a partner. And they need a challenge. And there's so much heart and try in the thoroughbred that, I love that. I love that they come out and they're like, are am I working today? You walk past my stalls, it my turn.
Totally. And they get mad at me when the answer's no. I run a training bar and my, some of my top courses are like, Hey human, you haven't ridden me three days. What the hell's going on? Obviously clients get preference, but I really do think the thing that makes me so passionate about them is they just, they make sense to me.
I think there's a lot of things that if I'm gonna, compare horses and humans personality wise, there's a lot that's very similar between how I function and how my horses function, or at least the ones that I get along with really well. That said, if I met myself in life, who knows if I'd actually like me?
Let's keep it in horse form. But the amount of work ethic try hard. They just come out wanting to do the right thing as best as they can. And when they get confused or they get, punished for things that they [00:14:00] don't understand or whatnot, I've seen it with students that, try really hard and really have all these passions and these ideas and they get shut down and you watch them shut down so quickly and just turn into a completely different creature in a classroom.
And I feel like you can turn that around. And so with thoroughbreds, not only are they an amazing field to gallop, like I love a fast horse. I love a caddy horse. I love one that is smart enough to get me out of trouble. I mess up to a fence on cross country. I want it to save the day. They will. So I feel safe on them.
But also I, there's just so much of the mental game that I appreciate and that they bring forward. It's really cool to hear you talk about your experiences teaching and equate that to the horses. I don't know. I've just never thought of it that way before. But yeah, I was interesting thinking the same thing.
Having somebody believe in you is one of the greatest gifts in the whole world, and I think that's what you can share with horses is that I believe that you can do this. I see something special in you and I wanna help you get [00:15:00] there. And I think that's something that's really synonymous between teaching students and then also working with off the track thoroughbreds.
And I love that you just said that, 'cause I haven't thought about it that way of believing in them, but that is exactly what it is. I wrote two today and most of, I talked to them the entire ride. If you guys ever watch my videos that I put out for sales, all I do is talk to the horse.
But I was like, you got it. I know you can get it. And I probably said that four, seven times in a row. Yeah, you nailed that right on the head. That's really cool. Yeah, I was when I was in college, I had , something kind of traumatic happen while I was in college and it was the death of a friend and I was in photography school and , I had never dealt with a death before, and I decided that I was gonna just quit the program. I didn't know what I was gonna do with my life. I didn't know how to move on. And I remember going to all of my professors who I was very close with, like I was the student that would go for office hours and hang out and just pick the brains of my professors.
Every day, anytime I could. And one of my professors was so cutthroat with his students and , I sat [00:16:00] down, I talked to him about it and he goes, listen, I've been teaching at this school for 30 or 35 years. And I'm not gonna beg you to stay in the program.
You can do whatever you want. But teachers teach their entire lifetime to have one or two students like you. And it stuck. It's stuck with me my entire life, that statement. And I stayed in the program and I've a photographer and I've been a photographer for the last, 25 years or whatever.
But that feeling of having somebody that believes in you, when I say that resonated really strongly with me. It really does. I feel very emotional about that. And I think the way that you approach thoroughbreds is a very similar ideology to the way that I do.
And I know that Emily does as well. Sorry, I went down a little bit of a no, I know you bring the party down, Neve. No, but thank you so much for sharing that and to the degree that I actually had a student in. When I was teaching at Emory, I got to teach at interdisciplinary studies field, which was really cool because you had all these really special students that didn't fit in any department.
They fit between departments. And I [00:17:00] feel like with Thoroughbred sometimes, there's no, okay, you got a thoroughbred What? Discipline? There's no ready-made discipline for these guys except for racing. Yes. So they are between departments, they are multifaceted, but they can do a lot of things.
We were talking about your horse and being able to do competitive trail and all of the other stuff, right? Yeah. And the student also had one of her best friends died in, obviously young and everything enormously tragic. And she was an artist and she didn't know what to do and I went, make art, right?
Yeah. She came into the office hours. She was one of my TAs, the one of the smartest kids I've ever met in my life. Blew me outta the water. And I was like, great. Make art. Turn your final project into some form of something that makes this makes sense to you. And working with her, that wasn't just me telling her what to do, right?
She came in, she was trying to define a final project and it was like, you can do this. And she's wait, what do you mean I can do this? And I was like, you, why not? And it kept, in some ways she stayed afloat. And I don't think it was just the project, but the ability to really have.
[00:18:00] A space to be yourself and process those things. And that is such an important thing. And I do feel like bringing it back to Thoroughbreds, they come off the track in so many ways. Some of them come off fantastic and they're just goofy and they're ready to go and all the things, but a lot of them come off relatively shut down and they do need that kind of I gotcha, let's figure out where you're at and who you are and how you wanna go forward.
And that's always such a wonderful process, whether there's, trauma there or not. Yeah it's interesting because that's exactly what I've been dealing with my new Off the Track Thoroughbred, is that it was so deeply insecure and I was like, I need to find something he's good at and celebrate that every single time I work with him.
Because above all, if I can tap into that one thing that he knows and believes in then I feel, and actually, when I was doing the voiceover for the obstacle course, just now, the amount of times that I say, you can see right there his try. Did you see it? He's trying. , because in my mind, I'm just his little cheerleader being like, this is something he knows [00:19:00] and believes in with himself and he wants to try and then you can see the places where then he trusts me and looks, and it's just it's amazing.
I could, yeah. And you see why I do this as a full-time job all the time. It's not rewarding all the time. It's hard because we did this for such a long time together and then, and our lives changed and you get away from it. And then for a couple of years I didn't have a thoroughbred and now that I have one again, it's man, this is the part that I really enjoy so much.
Before we get way too emotional as I am likely to do often can you give us an overview of what you do at Kivu Sport Horses? Sure. I opened Kiku Sport Horses in 2019 in Georgia. So I lived in McDonough, Georgia. I now live in Lansing, New York. Big change. I decided I wasn't gonna go on the tenure track market for academia anymore.
I had been done a couple postdocs, was teaching all sorts of fun things and decided to take horses [00:20:00] full-time. I'd been training full-time as a second job, but I decided to switch the emphasis and train full-time as a first job and made academia anything secondary that drove departments nuts.
That was a fun thing. They're like, what do you mean you're not coming to these meetings? I was like, you are my second job. Sorry. So since 2019, I basically had a chance to figure out what in the world I was doing with horses other than just being the rider that will get on anything. And that's how I started the business.
And very quickly it turned into a lot of thoroughbreds coming in because again, they were the ones that people struggled with. They didn't know what to do with them. They were unsure how to train them or there were just issues. So they came in, I trained them and I developed the business into a well with the retired Race Force project.
I absolutely need to throw that out there. They changed a lot in my life and really wonderful ways, and we can go into that later at points. But I did the makeover with my first adult thoroughbred, right? I had trained forever. I was an academic. I had no [00:21:00] money. So when I got my first paying postdoc, I was like, do I buy the motorcycle or do I, I buy the thoroughbred.
And I was like, I don't really wanna commute to school on a motorcycle on the highway. I owned a motorcycle in the Congo. , I love them, they're great. But I didn't wanna drive on the highway and I was like, oh, look for a Thurman. So I ended up I was obviously Travis. I was riding seven horses a day at the time.
It was one of those funny decisions in life where everything changes when you make it. And I bought my own thoroughbred, actually got him from Jessica Redmond, and he's now eventing, beginner novice. I still own him. He's eventing beginner, novice with one of my good friend's daughters in Georgia.
This is my roundabout way of answering your question, but so as Thoroughbreds became more important in the business, I decided to focus on them. And in Georgia. I ran an eventing team. So I had a handful of students that invented with me and we did local and some recognized shows.
I taught lessons, I trained thoroughbreds. I eventually ran a consignment business mostly for thoroughbreds, but [00:22:00] whatever anybody needed me to sell. The occasional draft was a pretty regular thing. And I developed Thoroughbred Logic to my article series that I wake up at 5:00 AM every Wednesday and write an article between 5:00 AM and eight 30 when it gets published.
It's a little nuts as an academic where you're like, please be able to think and write coherent sentences that aren't complete run-ons. Okay, good. Next now go feed the horses. And so that did that, got that going. Started running clinics. So you can see I don't ever do just one thing.
It's 1,000,008 things. And at some point I started a thing called Thoroughbred School where I worked to train people to ride these thoroughbreds. All of that was in Georgia. At the end of my lease this year, I chose to move to New York. I was looking at opportunities to try to move to Kentucky.
I couldn't make it work financially. And a friend of mine here where I'd come up and talk a couple clinics was like, let me just throw this out here. What if you went to New York? And I was like, I hate the cold. And she's our winters have been really mild recently. Yeah. No, this has been the [00:23:00] horse winter.
We've had, they has been awful this year. It's been terrible but she's wonderful. But my family's in Connecticut and I'm closer to tracks up here. There's no tracks in Georgia. So I moved up here and in doing so, I've done things a little bit differently and the business is not quite the same as it was in Georgia.
I'm running a training and sales barn at my home base. So I am , at a farm that was formerly finale farm. It's a big pony club farm in the northeast that has just not done much in the past couple years, hasn't had horses in the past couple years. So I've moved in there and I'm working on buying the property and everything on that bar on this farm is completely under my control.
I have no borders. I don't teach lessons here. I go into town and I go to the Ithaca Equestrian Center, which is an amazing boarding facility where a woman Paula runs it and she runs it to a t for the people and the horses. And it's the most beautiful boarding facility I've seen. I can walk in, go to work, be happy to see everybody leave, come [00:24:00] home and deal with my own circus here.
That's really nice. That's been amazing. So it's a big shift because I'm not currently teaching thoroughbred school. The lessons that I teach and the clinic series, I'm still getting reset up in New York. I just moved into this farm in October. I've been bouncing around for the last year trying to get my foot footing here, which I feel like at this point I have. But yeah, so it's that two farm situation for the business. And I run training and consignment, and I own some of the horses, obviously consignment people send them to me and I get to do a lot of thoroughbred problem solving, which is what I love on a day-to-day basis.
Sorry, roundabout to get you to where we are now. No, that's perfect. So weird segue, but you describe yourself as a middleman between horse and human and helping both sides understand each other.
Can you talk about that role and why it's so important in retraining off track thoroughbreds? Yes. The middleman thing is, like I sell horses, right? So you are the middleman, right? In some ways just standing right? Literally I [00:25:00] have to understand the horse enough to market it to the new people.
But , I feel like this is one of those weird things that comes in from my anthropology background that. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the narratives are, what am I dealing with from, it's not like I can talk to horses and I am no medium. I can't sit here and be like, I ask you questions, you answer, but in a lot of ways you do.
You observe them, you ask them questions, and you answer, they answer. And you try to figure out what you're dealing with, what they like, what they need. I had a client the other day ask me a really wonderful question about a horse that I didn't have a good answer for. They go, what do they need to thrive?
It's a difficult horse , that we're trying to sort out how to make it the happiest we can. And it was like such a great question that's what the middleman does, right? Is figure out what does this animal need to thrive? And then find the people who want the same thing to be able to make that match.
And I'm one of the standard horse people who constantly is like, God, I hate people. [00:26:00] Comically, I'm an anthropologist. I study people. That's fine. Maybe that's why you hate them. That's all right. I can, when things get real bad, I just start taking field notes mentally. So it's just this is great.
Keep going. But as a middleman, one of the things that happens with that is I care about the horse so much that if I put the horse in a bad match, if I say yes, I wanna make the sale. And I know it's not ideal for the horse. . The horse is gonna bounce, right? They're not gonna make that person happy, therefore, they're gonna be up for sale again soon.
And then you get on this down slide pipeline where eventually , maybe they land on Craigslist, maybe they have to come back to me, maybe they end up going to auction. And I've pulled some horses that have come through my barn, years later out of the auction pipeline.
So I really want the horse to succeed. And for that to happen, I have to make sure that the human understands the horse and it's the right one for the right horse. So it's a lot of talking, listening to the horse, figuring out what they care about, what they love, what they're going to excel at, [00:27:00] and then finding the people who want that.
I have a horse in my barn right now, Finch, who is this big, beautiful Tsow thoroughbred Tsow have their own following. They're real uphill, they're quirky. They have this amazing movement. I'm just shaking my head. And they're a little quirky. I feel about Tsow is the way a lot of people feel about Storm Cat.
Yes. And am happy to work with them, but I don't seek them out. , I have my own. Bloodlines that I love and will buy in a heartbeat. Yeah. I've just, I've worked with a lot of tis nows because they come through programs like mine a lot because they're quirky. Yeah. And they're gorgeous too.
They're gorgeous. They're always gorgeous. Are stunning. And they're usually big and they just have, huge movement and Yeah. And a lot of people want them and not a lot of people can mesh with them. It's really tough. Yeah. So I have a tis now and he came in from an eventing barn. And I'm like, okay.
I get on him and I'm expecting a lot of times when you get on something that is not straight off the tracks, straight off the tracks are easy. I find them to be quite easy. They are quite [00:28:00] easy is the wrong word. But you get on a first ride and I don't often have this trepidation of what the hell is under the hood?
Yeah. When I get horses in from other people that have already been through training, that have been elsewhere and are given to me or are sent to me for, Hey, let's have you sell it. But there's not a lot of background information or things like that, there's nothing wrong with that. That's great. I appreciate you doing that.
It's much harder doing, but sometimes there's a little bit of me going, why are you here? And we're gonna spend a little bit of time finding out why you're here and how I can fix it. Please don't kill me while you're figuring out why you're here. I got on this horse going, we're gonna figure this out.
And he was amazing. Zero. Just oh my God. This is the most he has so many buttons, he's been so well trained. Everything is beautiful. He wants to do dressage. I put him over a few fences and I was like, oh, I understand. This stresses you out. This is a different horse.
I put you in a dressage saddle, or I just ride you my jump saddle. And we do flat and we do like yields and we do all these things and he is I love this. This is great. And you just feel the horse become the horse they want to be [00:29:00] under you. Yeah. Which is a crazy thing to say, but you could feel them enjoy the process and gain confidence and just be a wonderful creature.
And then I put him at fences and that's that wonderful creature disappears into an anxious mess. And I'm like, cool. People want to buy him as an inventor because there are t his now lovers that want to event him. I don't wanna sell him as that. He needs to go to a dressage home, which means in large part a big lanky, narrow thoroughbred dressage horse doesn't have as much appeal as a big lanky thoroughbred inventor who's gonna be able to take big fences.
So that middle manning right there is I have to negotiate that and that's part of the game. But he's made it really clear. And unless I wanna really push the envelope and go figuring out. Why jumping makes us anxious, which I can do and will do, but in the meantime, if he's so happy with dressage, why change?
Yeah. So it's a little bit of that, right? That's some of the stuff I do. That's a real simple example, but sometimes it's trying to figure out what rider makes them happy, what [00:30:00] type of seat, what type of engagement, what type of activity, et cetera, et cetera. And then just making sure that the people I talk to and who are looking are right for that horse, not just somebody who has the right amount of money, they're ready to spend.
Yes. Yeah. And not to get totally off topic, but evaluating the person is so difficult because I feel like what people say that they want and say that they need and what they actually need are often drastically different, right? Yes. Yes. And I absolutely could go down the rabbit hole of and at some point, I've got a couple books in the pipeline and some of this will end up in them at some point.
Where you go down the rabbit holes, you're like, how? . No, you need the 17-year-old packer. What do you mean you need the 3-year-old that could go prelim in six years? No, you don't need that. And usually I get around that by asking people to send video.
Yeah. I've had people threaten to sue me over me asking them to send video. Wow. That's usually a nice flag. Wow. Yep. And I'm like, cool. Not selling you a horse, you're like losing your number. We're not playing this game, but usually people are wonderful and the trash shook itself out.[00:31:00]
Yep. And it does. But usually people are wonderful and they will send video and I can take a look at that and be like, I either have what you need or don't have what you need. And because I don't do a super high volume, I think that a lot of people who are serious buyers are really wonderful and they do come to me ready to take in some advice.
That's not all of 'em. But if I'm like, Hey, I have this horse, that's what you're looking for and the one you want, yeah, it might be bigger and fancier looking, but honestly it's not gonna make you as happy. A lot of them are willing to listen to that, and I really appreciate that. People will take the time to do it.
Yeah. I've never really understood we've talked to Jessica about this a little bit, but I've never understood going into someone's barn and maybe wanting to look at, say, four or five horses that might be, suitable for your goals and things like that. And listening to the seller who knows the horse and saying.
How does this horse like to be ridden? And it such a simple question, what is this horse like? Oh, this one prefers to warm up on a loose reign, or this one likes, it's because when you don't sit on sixth or seventh or BRS every [00:32:00] day, you're not gonna have that natural feel.
Just built into when you go sit on a random horse. And I think that's something I wish buyers would do a little bit more often is en engage and ask for that feedback so that they're not going, we've literally had people that were like, how do I get it to trot? Not to say these people weren't great riders in their own right. Because they were, but when you speak the language of thoroughbreds day in and day out, your feel for that is much more refined. And it's hard. Like you say, it's very humbling.
They're very good at that. Very good at that. Day in and out. I thought I knew something. I don't know anything today. It's no, thank you for reminding me that in fact, things I don't. Thoroughbred Logic has become a go-to resource for a lot of people. What inspired you to start the series and what are you hoping to accomplish with it?
That's awesome. Thank you for asking. Thoroughbred Logic came out of that. You guys got a little bit of that, the background of me being like, I'm doing horses and I had no plans. This is what I do with my life. It tracks from the kid who wants to [00:33:00] jump on the thoroughbred bareback at nine years old.
It's all the same thing. I get an idea. I think about it. I weigh all the options. I don't just rush into stuff, but once I make a decision, I'm in. So I was like, I'm gonna not do academia and I'm gonna train horses full-time. Didn't have a plan, didn't have a business plan, didn't have a barn, didn't you name all the things.
And I was like, I will figure this out. Fantastic. Serendipity stepped in and things helped and largely, it's certainly not figured out at all, but it's a little further on the way. So Thoroughbred Logic came out of that kind of like really not thought through move to horses full-time, where I was like, what am I doing?
Am I was two years in. We had just gotten through Covid. I started Thoroughbred Logic in January of 2022. So Covid had, by that point, largely become something we were used to, but I, gosh, I opened the business right before six, eight months before it hit. Oh man. And was trying, then a lot of people bought [00:34:00] horses during Covid though, right?
They did, but I wasn't selling horses at that time. I was a horse trainer. And I didn't know what type of horse trainer I was. I was just, you bring it to me, I can ride it and I can fix it. I don't know if I can teach you to ride it, but I'm gonna try. I was that horse trainer and I had a lot of thorough bridges through, and I was like, what do I love?
What am I doing? And around that time, and this goes back to the retired race horse project, really and Jen Ros, honestly, being someone who has shaped my life in a way, in other ways that I never expected I love her. She's a fantastic friend at this point. When I first met her, there had been a snafu.
My horse was colicking. I was at the makeover. I was supposed to get some prize that didn't end up happening. There was a computer glitch and geez, it was an awful awful situation. And she was the most wonderful, just professional, amazing human I have met. And she spent a bunch of time talking to me after that and was like you're a writer.
You're an anthropologist. You should do more with this. And really encouraged that. And I didn't really think about that. I thought I was just training horses. [00:35:00] And at some point she was like, I want you to come and do a masterclass with the makeover.
So I ended up teaching this masterclass live streamed all the things. I'd never done it before. And she pulled me aside afterwards and she's figure out how to do that professionally. Because you can verbalize what you're doing in a way that's really hard to do, right? You're watching the horse, you're telling the readers or watchers, viewers, that's the word I want, what they're supposed to be looking for, what you're looking for, and then you're making the next move and everything's explained.
And I was like, oh yeah, that's real easy. And she's that's not easy. Yeah, that's just a thing that you do normally. . So I started to think about that and I was like, I do, I love that. Training, these thoroughbreds has felt great. Getting to the makeover a couple times at that point has just been something I've been doing.
And I was like, all right, what am I good at? And what do I wanna do? Do I wanna be a big time inventor? Because I don't have backers, I don't have money, and I don't have the horse by that point. I've had a couple of equine heartbreaks of you get a horse up to training and I'm like, ready to get back into green flags.
And you're [00:36:00] like, we're not going anywhere. And start over at starter or amoeba, right? With a brand new fresh off track and another couple years to bring it up. And then you're just like, okay, here we go again. And it's not that they can't get there. I don't want anybody taking that way.
I just had a bout of two of them back to back. That was really rough. And I was like, I don't know if I'm a good enough inventor. I don't know if I'm a good enough trainer. Again, all the fun self-doubt that comes with these things where you're like, what am I doing?
I could really put all my effort into eventing, or I can put all my effort into Thoroughbreds right now. And that seems to be what I love and what I'm really good at and what I have access to on a day in and day out basis. And I'm pretty okay at writing. At that point I had been blogging for the makeover.
So Horse Nation, put together a call for people to blog going into the makeover. The Retired Resource Project does this great thing where there are these six blogs that want riders send, writing samples for these things. And, horse Nation picked me up and was like, yes, please write about, [00:37:00] going from, this was in 20 20 and we were supposed to go into the 2020 makeover, and of course it was canceled for Covid and pushed into the mega makeover in 2021.
So I ended up riding for two years and I loved it. I wrote once a month about the progress with the horse and a lot of things. It got less horsey at points and training like, here's what I'm doing for the makeover. And it was like, here's how I'm trying to deal with the fact that my horse has another dispensary and I'm trying injury and I'm trying to figure out how to manage this.
And also my love life is falling apart and somehow these things go together and I can write them in ways that don't make me feel like I'm sappy and over the top. But I find that all of this dovetails in interesting ways. So I found a voice and found a way to write through these things.
And at the end of the makeover in 2021, Deanne Sloan, who's the editor, was like, Hey, please keep writing for us. We'll, we're gonna pitch you some stories to do journalism on and these other things. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it. And in January I was like, I pitched it to her and I was like, I wanna start at the beginning of the year, I wanna kick off an article series about training thoroughbreds, because people have been like, you should do a podcast.
And I'm like, this is not my [00:38:00] comfort zone. I love it, this is fun, but this writing is my comfort zone and people are like, you should do videos. And I was like, oh God. Put me in front of a video. Ah. Oh listen, I was just doing, I was just doing voiceover over like it's a 45 minute long 'cause it's all slowed down clips.
If you wanna humble yourself, do voiceover of something that you are doing with yourself in Slowmo. Oh gosh. Like closeups of your face where you're talk like, so all the sound where I'm like interacting with the person, videoing is muted, but I'm doing voiceover and I'm just looking at myself.
I'm like, this like melting potato on the screen. Just oh my. Why do I look like that? Why? Oh my God. And so it's all slowed down. It's in my mind I'm just like, oh God, I hope people can get over just looking at that and just appreciate the, maybe I'll just put the captions over my face, it's brutal. I don't recommend it. Oh God, I've got so many stories on this, but yes, this is exactly why I write. And I thought, I think I have something to [00:39:00] say. As aside on that, if I had a photo shoot for Sidelines Magazine and this was the most terrifying thing of my life.
I'm photographed with horses all the time. I do sales photos, I ride, that's fine. My working students get really good at capturing wonderful candid with that I know are existing, I'm very comfortable with that. Don't make me pose. Oh, Phil, love of God.
Don't make me pose sidelines. Came out to my barn. My barn is a working training barn. I do not have chandeliers. Nothing is tiny. Blankets are everywhere. We're functional. We are not fashionable. I was supposed to be in three different sets of outfits through the day. Oh my God. Including at one point I guess I'm in like, they're like fancy.
And I was like black jeans and stilettos. Weird. Okay. I guess this is where we're at. 'cause I don't do fancy. That's about as close as I get. I grab my leather jacket. I was like, cool, we're good. The morning of the one horse who was cleaned up and clipped and all the things, my top horse at the time managed to puncture, stop it himself, right near his jugular, bled all over his face.
It was crusted down the entire side of his face when he came in from the barn. So I have just blown out my hair, which is now [00:40:00] huge, and trying to stay clean. And my working student is you need to come see Rodie. And I was like, shit. Oh my God. Does he have a guttural pouch?
Mycosis or something? Like Jesus's Christ, just I mean he's just blood is everywhere and I'm trying to wipe him down. It stopped bleeding. I didn't have to call a vet. It was fine. But we like tried to photograph from the other side of his face because I kept putting my hand under him and getting covered in blood.
Oh my God. And at this point he's not actively bleeding. Do not call Peta. He was fine but this is what happens when you come to my barn and try to photograph me. This is why I'm wipe. Oh yeah. Like I'm trying to, you totter around my muddy ass farm in stilettos with a bleeding face force.
And I'm like, go figure. And the photographer at some point was like, Aubrey is your life always this chaotic? And I was like. Yes. Pretty much anyway. Listen that's all I do is I, so I work as a photographer, but I work for a rare book company, but I have a little side business photographing, doing equine portraiture and it's just really funny the amount of times that I have to talk people off a ledge and be like, it's [00:41:00] okay.
Why don't you put that one back in the barn for a minute? , 'cause translation, somebody's gonna get killed. Yep. It's a lot of just, but I'm also not big on posing or anything like that. 'cause man, people are unpredictable, horses are unpredictable. We just have to, I'm just like looking for the light.
That's all I'm doing. No, just keep shooting. Just keep shooting.
Alright. Anyway, so that's how the logic got kicked off and they came with a clinic series that I teach, like a conference, which is really fun because I basically get to get people together with all sorts of thoroughbreds. We look at their pedigrees, we look at their dosage profiles.
That's cool. I bring in something like a saddle fitter or a nutritionist a feed rep, et cetera. And we spend lunch and learns and basically just teach it like a conference. Again, I can't get rid of academia, so I've just decided to try to figure out how to make it work for horses. Yeah. And. It's great to, 'cause you get to have, and then we have auditors. I bring people in and they can either sit near me in the ring when I'm teaching or they sit at the end. I try to teach so that they can hear me and ask questions as we go, like a conference. So you can see the [00:42:00] overlap from, the multiple young horses, the ones that are jumping around at, just that there's continuity with these horses and the way you ride 'em and various things work really well.
And it's one thing to go to a clinic and ride your own horse and go home. It's another thing to see that, the same processes are working on all of these horses. And they're happier and they're coming out successful. And letting people see that does something a little different than just coming in and watching one.
Yeah. That's really interesting. The article series tries to do similar things where it's I write, I think I've written probably 160 of these at this point. Wow. I write 'em literally every week. Every once in a while it'll be like, ah, it's Christmas. So like Christmas was a Wednesday or something.
She and deanne's please don't write an article. And I was like, thank you. So every once in a while we skip one. But I don't run out of things to write. Yeah. And that's the really fun and amazing thing. And I am working on a book proposal to try to turn this into some form of, more coherent, nice.
Less. Aubrey ran rambling for 1400 words at five in the morning. Process. It's one of the reasons, like when we started the podcast, we [00:43:00] were like let's come up with a hundred things we can talk about. And then if we have that many, then we know we can start it.
And then. Yeah, talk about just throwing something together the way Oh my. Yeah. Honestly, we were literally, this was like back of a bar napkin. I was like, what? Why don't we start a podcast? Yeah. . And he's yeah. I'm like, okay. And honestly that's how we both operate,
and we're both organized enough in our own individual ways. We both bring a lot to the table. And so we divvied up the responsibilities and we just did the damn thing and hit record and just went with it. And now it's an endless supply. And the partnerships not partnerships.
'cause we don't have any, it's none of this is being paid for. But the relationships that, that we have developed over the last year, plus the community and the community has been unbelievable. Incredible. It's, and so we're just like, every time I talk to somebody, like sitting down talking to you, I'm like, man, I wish she lived closer.
Oh, it'd be so cool. That's what's so cool. And the relatability of all of these topics. And I think what you're saying too about bringing in your personal life into [00:44:00] the topics that you're talking about on your series, I think it's really important. If I think about the people that are at my barn right now, and I think about the borders that are just in the top barn.
So there's 10 horses up there and I think about their backgrounds and their lives and their professions and things like that. It's really interesting to think about how all of that impacts. What you do with your horses, how you interact with your horses? I don't know. , so I think it's all relatable no matter what.
If you're getting off course and talking about something that's just about your personal life, it's that's still relatable, because at the end of the day, you still have to figure out how can you enjoy being around horses while you have all this other stuff going on. Maybe your personal life's falling apart , but your horse still needs to be ridden.
So how do you know? How do you work with that and Right. He still needs food. Yeah. Yeah. There's an annoying amount of continuity. There's another book in there at some point, and my mom's I'll just pretend that you didn't write it. And I'm like, okay, that sounds like a good idea. You'll have to go under a good pseudonym.
She's I wanna read it though. I'm just gonna pretend it's not my daughter. Okay. So that one will [00:45:00] get written later. You're like, mean, it sounds like me. I'm like, I would like to write my book, but I, if I want my mom to read it. Hi, mom.
Okay, so we're actually gonna split this episode into two parts. When we pick back up, we're gonna pick Aubrey's Brain about everything related to her approach with thoroughbreds and problem solving from how to get started to quirky habits and everything in between.
If you like what you heard today, please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts. You can follow OTTB on tap on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. And contact us with interview candidates and topic suggestions at o ttb on tap.com.
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