Part One | Part Two
By: Jean Johnson for Back1
Sandy Kypfer remembers the woods well with their mature trees and stately green canopy overhead. Of course to get to the point where you can go “hacking out,” or ride a horse outside cantering down bridal paths once used by royalty, you have to pay your dues. In Kypfer’s case, as with many equestrians, injuries were part of that price. Although when she reflects back on her experiences, it certainly has been the joy of riding, not the pain that has stayed with her.
“Still, if you’re going to ride, you’re probably going to get injured to some degree. Especially in your earlier years of training, or if you start as an adult,” said Kypfer. ”These days, though, it’s better for me since now I can usually tell if a horse is going to bolt before it happens.”
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Some precautions to take for a safe riding experience:
Wear a safety helmet, body protector, and gloves
Ride with competent instructors
Ride in an enclosed area
Ride appropriate horses for your skill level
Consider doing exercises to improve fitness for riding
One good book for the equestrian athlete is “A Gymnastic Riding System Using Mind, Body, and Spirit” by Betsy Steiner. |
In any event, as far as her back injury and her early days riding in England are concerned, Kypfer said, “It was when I was first learning to ride. When you’re learning as an adult if you’re really serious and doing a lot of riding, the chances of injury are high. When you learn as a kid and if you have a fall, you usually don’t get injured because the bones in the body are more flexible.“Balance is what keeps you in the saddle. The ability to fall without hurting yourself is learned when you’re young. I’ve taught a lot of kids how to ride, and I’ve taught adults. Kids fall off and cry and get upset, but with adults it may involve a broken bone, often the hands,” said Kypfer. “If you’re a kid you roll just like cowboys thrown from bucking broncos and bulls. They know how to land since they’ve done it from a young age – like my son and my daughter to some degree, even though she decided riding wasn’t for her by age 10.
“With adults, though, they are holding so much tension, it’s like a china cup hitting the ground. Also, they tend to try and catch themselves with their hands. A friend of mine had a fall and broke her wrist that way.”
Kypfer puts her account of her back injury on hold for the moment and takes us out into an English bridal path back in the 1980s. It was a day after the London area was hit by a severe windstorm that uprooted trees everywhere, including one in the family’s own yard.
“It probably wasn’t the best judgment to be out on the bridal paths the day after the storm, but there were three of us women who wanted to go out in the Oxshott Woods,” she said, noting that she’d been riding six or seven years by then. “It was when we came to a good long straightaway where we could have good long canter that it happened. I didn’t quite clear a tree branch that had blown down, and it hit my hand hard.
“They took me to a hospital and an orthopedic surgeon wanted to operate right away, but I wanted to find a hand surgeon to do the repair work, which I did even though I had to wait a week for surgery because he was fully scheduled. He later said the injury was like one boxers get. He did a good job, though, and put a plate and screw in temporarily so that now my hand works fine. So it was worth the wait.”
In addition to her hand and leg, Kypfer has broken three ribs and taken hard falls countless other times over the course of 24 years in the saddle. “The bigger the horse the farther down you have to fall and it can feel like you are getting slammed right into the ground,” she said with a laugh. “That’s why I don’t jump any more. Now in my 50s my bones are more brittle, and they break more easily.”
Between Kypfer’s willingness to curtail the more dangerous aspects of her sport, and her good fortune, she has recovered from most of her injuries without any lingering effects. The only exception has been her back.
“When I injured my back I was at the stables where I learned to ride during my first two years. I went twice a week and then three times a week, since when you’re learning you have to ride often to pick it up. Some can get it in a couple months, if they are fit and particularly athletic, while others take six to eight months to be able to trot and canter by themselves. The whole thing is getting in balance. If you’re not in balance, you’re going against the horse; you’re tense and you’ll bounce.
“But when I hurt my back – it’s just below the scapula at the insertion point of a muscle,” she said. “That was in my first year of riding. I was riding in an indoor arena in a group lesson. This consisted of six to eight riders with varying degrees of ability.
"During these lessons I had to watch out for other riders and loose horses. When a horse loses its rider it gets really scared and has a strong flight or fight mechanism. In this case, it ran around the arena and spooked the other horses.”
It all happened so fast she wasn’t ready for it. So when her horse bolted and bucked, Kypfer found herself heading to the ground where she landed flat on her back.
“If I had been a kid I probably would have just rolled, but I was holding so much tension when I hit the ground pretty hard. My back and scapula hurt right away, but I got back on and finished the lesson before going home and soaking in the tub.
“The next day I could barely move – and the next couple days after that. But with my nurse’s training I knew that it was a muscle injury that would just have to heal on its own, so I didn’t go into to a physician. Instead I saw a therapist several times who worked herbal, aromatic oils into the area. It helped, and I got better even though it’s still with me. Stress will bring it back or if I’ve been traveling for a long time and sleeping in different beds and using different pillows. It was hurting at the end of a recent trip, but now that I’m home it’s fine, and I’m back riding.”
In her mid-50s and still riding. A slight back injury plus some battle stories. That’s how it is when your life turns out so your earliest dreams of having a horse eventually come true.
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