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California Riding Magazine • August, 2009 Horse People: Barbara Adside by Kim F. Miller |
Photo: © Jeffery R. Werner/IncredibleFeatures.com Barbara Adside’s main challenge is hard to miss: she has no lower legs. Her assets, however, far outweigh that and are obvious to everybody who has been part of her remarkable journey from equestrian neophyte to accomplished horsewoman and rider with realistic goals in the para-equestrian dressage world. “She has so much drive, energy and spirit she outdoes a lot of able bodied people,” observes Victor Penner, the trainer who took Adside on as a rider after others turned her away. Born with the birth defect spina bifida and legs that end about where the knees should be, Adside inadvertently began her equine odyssey four years ago when she tagged along on a friend’s feed store trip. Although she had no previous experience with horses, it was love at first sight of an unkempt-looking young Quarter Horse stabled near the store in Los Angeles County’s Acton. She had to have the horse, but his owner balked. “He asked me did I have any riding experience or know anything about horses, and I said, ‘no.’” The owner’s reluctance was no match for Adside’s will. Raised in a succession of foster homes on the East Coast, Adside says abusive situations were additional hurdles of her inner city youth. She views those years as the source of her remarkable strength of character as an adult. “I made him a deal that I’d give him a little money toward the horse and he’d give me a month to see what I could do.” She quickly named the horse Black Beauty and began by sitting in his stall nearly eight hours a day for a week. “I just sat there watching everything he was doing and studying why he was doing it,” she recounts. “I knew there had to be a reason for everything he did.” Within a month, Adside was able to halter Black Beauty and walk him out of his stall. “We got about 500 feet, then he stopped and reared up.” She wasn’t scared. “I just looked at him until he came back down to the ground.” At that point the horse’s owner changed his tune. “He said he wouldn’t sell the horse to anybody except me.” He allowed Adside to keep Black Beauty, who was then about 2 years old, at his stable near the tack store until she could figure out another option.
Finding a trainer was the next step. “That was almost disastrous,” she admits. “Everybody I went to said, ‘Green horse and a green rider with no legs—are you crazy?’” She was even turned away from a few therapeutic riding programs. Eventually, however, the same friend that took Adside to the feed store that fateful day suggested she try natural horsemanship trainer and mounted shooting instructor Victor Penner in Lancaster. “He said he couldn’t promise me anything, but he would give it a shot,” Adside relays. Penner’s methods align with those of Pat Parelli’s natural horsemanship techniques and he taught Adside to play the system’s seven games with Black Beauty. These ground-based games, combined with Penner’s foundation training methods, enabled the pair to build an unusually tight bond. Escalating cues and aids, pressure and release and positive reinforcement are the basics of their approach. Today, Adside’s horsemanship has evolved to the point where she owns six horses, several of which were given to her because others had trouble getting them to cooperate. Those who’ve helped her confirm Adside’s affinity for all horses, but Penner notes that her connection with Black Beauty is unique. He once witnessed Adside take a tumble while leading the Quarter Horse along uneven terrain, where her prosthetic legs are a challenge to walk in. The horse, Penner recalls, reached down and lifted her back up by the seat of her pants. Most of the time, Adside works with the 16-hh Black Beauty without her artificial legs. Without them, she stands 3’ tall and weighs approximately 75 pounds. Penner demonstrated the games with Black Beauty and did some of the introductory work, but his main emphasis is getting his clients to train their horses themselves and he treated Adside no differently. “Just because she’s short doesn’t mean she’s all that handicapped,” he says. He viewed her lack of equestrian experience as a plus. “She had no bad habits to fix.” Once she understood the groundwork exercises, Adside spent several hours every day at Penner’s barn working on them with Black Beauty. “Supposedly it’s harder to do things with your horse from the ground,” Adside observes. “But it was easy for me. I never felt in danger. When you are the height equivalent of sitting on the ground, though, you do have to get your horse to pay attention to you and not run over you.” Seven months of work later, Penner told Adside about Pat Parelli’s upcoming tour stop in Industry Hills. “I had no idea who he was,” says Adside of the renowned horseman. Always game to learn, Adside again found it fortuitous to tag along. At the time, her prosthetic legs were cracked from a motorcycle accident, (“I’m very active!” laughs Adside.) so she watched from a ringside wheelchair, mesmerized by Parelli’s three-day demonstration. “I learn visually, so I was studying him intensely and trying to consume everything he did. I was amazed how he was working with the horses.”
Penner had told Parelli about Adside’s accomplishments with Black Beauty and tipped him off to her presence at the demonstration. Adside kept listening closely as Parelli began talking to the audience about a special person in the crowd. “Even when he said her name was Barbara, I just thought, ‘Oh, lucky her,’” Adside remembers. When she realized it was her, Adside shook with excitement as Parelli offered a complimentary week of training at his Pagosa Springs, CO headquarters. Just one hitch: She had to pass Parelli’s Level 1 test, which includes the seven games and riding, which she hadn’t yet attempted, at the trot for 20 continuous minutes. “I was very excited when I first heard the offer, then I was scared because I’d never ridden before.” On top of that, the late summer week Parelli offered was little more than a month away. Back at Penner’s place in Lancaster, the trainer put Adside on a bomb-proof buckskin that he ponied along. Next came learning to steer on another steady Eddy in the stable. When it came time to videotape the 20 minutes astride, Adside began singing to herself, using the song’s rhythm to help her stay balanced in the horse’s rhythm. With all the Level 1 requirements recorded and sent off to Parelli, Adside began riding Black Beauty after Penner had started the horse under saddle. The trainer desensitizes all horses in his care to many circumstances, including that of a rider in various stages of falling off: draped over the neck, slipping sideways, etc. “The worst thing is a horse that’s spooked by their rider falling off,” he notes. Adside has had her share of spills, but none have dampened her enthusiasm. Adside’s week with the Parellis was great except that she wasn’t able to accomplish her main goal of teaching Black Beauty to lie down. That would enable her to mount him from the ground, as opposed to scaling a fence to get onboard. She was told that move was reserved for higher training levels, but left with the idea that, if she really wanted to do it, she’d figure it out. Which she did with the help of “carrot stretching” techniques Penner taught her. Using carrot treats to get Black Beauty to stretch his neck and legs, Adside eventually taught him to bow on both sides, then to kneel with both knees on the ground. Penner witnessed a great moment at that stage. “He turned to look at her, as if he was asking, ‘OK, what do you really want me to do?’ She poked him gently in the cheek with her finger, and he flopped over.” Penner believes Black Beauty was careful not to kick Adside in the process. Shortly, she taught him to roll his body toward her as he lay down, then she grabbed the saddle pad cinch and pulled herself aboard. That process took about a month. Being able to get on Black Beauty without a fence became a real plus when Adside began getting requests to perform demonstrations for therapeutic riding centers, a Parelli event in Bakersfield and
Photo: © John Bradshaw Para-Equestrian Possibilities One of those appearances wound up adding dressage, by way of vaulting, to Adside’s equestrian ambitions. Nora Fischback is executive director and founder of Strides Therapeutic Riding Center in Tarzana, where Adside landed in search of vaulting lessons. Fischback is also Strides’ vaulting instructor, but was quick to detect her new student’s unusual gift with horses. “I commented that she would do well with riding lessons and that I felt her natural abilities made her a good candidate for becoming a para-equestrian athlete.” Adside was disappointed to learn that vaulting was not a para-equestrian discipline, but cheerfully pursued Fischback’s suggestion to investigate dressage under the direction of Strides instructor Lydia Lercari. The Strides team helped her secure the grading necessary to compete in para-equestrian competition and to ride in one show locally. (She received a Grade III, the fourth most able of five levels.) Adside had yet to fully sort out the dressage scene, but upon hearing about the Margo O’Callaghan Memorial Dressage show at Little Bit Therapeutic Riding Center in Redmond, OR., she had a hunch it would be worth going. It was another long drive, but this time without a horse in tow. Little Bit program director Jenny Nell worked with Adside for one day before the show began and was knocked out by her abilities. “I was super impressed with her level of determination and balance, even compared to so many riders that have been working at this for a long time.” They settled on a U.S. Dressage Federation Intro A and B test. Designed for entry-level able-bodied riders, the test includes collected and medium walk and trot, 10-meter circles, serpentines and other movements on the centerline. On a borrowed horse she’d ridden only once, Adside scored in the 70s. That earned her the day’s high point award among the competition’s 50-plus riders, some of whom traveled from as far away as Venezuela, Canada and the Midwest. A veteran coach to several para-equestrian international competitors, Nell saw in Adside all the right stuff for that path. Even though she is light on show ring experience, the U.S. team “could really use someone like her,” Nell says. “She has a friendly, outgoing demeanor and she is interested in how everybody else is doing, too. When you are competing in a foreign country, that’s really important to making a good team.” Adside would love to pursue para-equestrian dressage. Money may be her toughest challenge there and she hopes that sponsorship may be an option. In particular, she could use a proper dressage saddle adapted for her needs. For the time being, she’s using a kids western saddle that Penner gave her. With her characteristic can-do attitude, a drill, bucking rolls and a little Velcro, she adapted it herself. “It’s kind of Mickey Mouse,” she chuckles.
In a perfect world, such a saddle would not be a drawback in para-equestrian dressage competition, but it’s not a perfect world, Nell notes. “If she had an adapted dressage saddle, it would help mainstream her with the rest of the dressage community, rather than using a saddle that makes her stand out from the rest.” Rancho Santa Fe resident and USEF “R” rated dressage judge Cauleen Glass was bowled over by Adside’s riding abilities as she officiated the Little Bit dressage show in mid-June. Adside credits her steady seat to excellent balance and weight shifting, but Glass believes that much of it comes from core strength “that would put a Pilates instructor to shame.” As a pony club instructor for many years, Glass often had her students ride in a bareback pad in order to develop the skill of moving with their horse. “It takes a lot of stomach muscle strength to isolate the lower body and move your pelvis back and forth with the horse without getting out of balance in the rest of your body,” she explains. “Barbara has that.” “If she has the backing and support of the equestrian community, I think she could go to the higher levels in the para-equestrian competition,” Glass asserts. Whether or not these expectations for Adside materialize, she is happy so long as her horses are nearby. Although she’s just beginning with dressage, it’s a sign of her savvy that she quickly saw the connection between that discipline and natural horsemanship. “It’s the littlest thing you do that gets the horse to do something.” Adside supports her increasingly expensive horse habit by working as an actress and sometime stuntwoman in Hollywood, a career that brought her from Florida to California. She keeps her horses on her foster brother’s property in Antelope Valley’s Littlerock, and lives most of the time in an RV. The spina bifida she was born with doesn’t get in her way much, except that she has to be careful about not cutting her legs. She has little feeling in those limbs, and her body is poorly equipped to fight infections. “I have to be very careful and conscientious about that.” Performing at therapeutic riding centers has been a highlight of Adside’s ever-growing equestrian accomplishments. “I want to show people what could be possible,” she says. “A few places and people turned me away and said it couldn’t be done, and I want to say, ‘Don’t ever do that again!’” Cheerful, upbeat and simply not, as Penner puts it, “a ‘poor me’ person,” Adside is likely to accomplish whatever she sets her very able mind to. “I am a very determined, hard working person,” she states. “I will not give up.”
If you would like to help Barbara Adside, she can be reached at akbk_rider@juno.com or 818-422-2999.
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