Ineptitude

As a part-time employee in a tack store, I’m among the first to see the latest, greatest products for horse and rider. Some are practical – good-looking, great fitting riding breeches for under $100? Yay! Some are truly beneficial – i.e. saddle pads with changeable shims that fit a saddle comfortably to your horse’s unique conformation. Others are stupidly extravagant – such as the $600 riding helmet, subject of a previous blog. This week I discovered a product so absolutely ridiculous, in both price and function, that I felt compelled to tout its absurdity.

It’s a newfangled stirrup ‘system’ called “On-Tyte.” The stirrup contains a magnet. Your riding boot houses a reciprocal magnet. The magnetic attraction keeps the stirrup on your foot. It’s revolutionary! It’s a must-have! It’s three hundred dollars!

You have got to be f*cking kidding me.

Keeping your feet in the damned stirrups is Riding Lesson #1. Before you even learn to steer, you learn to keep your heels down and keep the stirrup on your foot. Your leg position is what keeps you anchored. It’s what keeps you balanced. It’s what keeps you on the damned horse. Any kid who’s had three lessons on a fat pony at summer camp can keep the stirrups on their feet. Have riders gotten so lazy that they require technology to do their most fundamental job for them?

This is not the riding industry’s first attempt to revolutionize stirrups to eliminate the annoyance of learning to ride properly. They’ve developed inventive inserts for the stirrup bed to better grip the bottom of your boot. They’ve angled the stirrup bed, and the stirrup itself, to ensure proper foot and leg position (nevermind all those pesky exercises your instructors put you through that are intended to accomplish the same thing). They’ve constructed the stirrup of lighter materials so that if your feet slip out the irons don’t bounce and pummel your horse’s sides – a cue most often interpreted by the horse as meaning “run, Dobbin, run!!” I can only hope you practiced the pulley rein exercise (to stop a runaway horse) more than you practiced keeping your feet in your stirrups. Or are you waiting for the riding industry to invent a way to stop your horse for you? Perhaps giant impact-absorbing sandbag blockades in every corner of the arena would do the trick.

I admit I’m keen on some of the stirrup improvements. My stirrups have joints that flex to absorb impact. When you’ve got enough years of wear and tear on your knee joints that just the thought of riding hurts, these stirrups are a godsend. I’m all for eliminating pain. But eliminating the effort of learning to ride properly? Um,…..no.

Don’t ever show up in one of my riding lessons with On-Tyte stirrups. I’ll make you go change them. If I’m feeling particularly evil, I’ll just take them off your saddle and make you ride without them. That permanently eliminates the problem of losing the stirrup and it doesn’t cost three hundred bucks.

If we’re going to make stirrups that make it unnecessary to ride well enough to keep your feet where they belong, let’s just rid ourselves of the need to do other things correctly. Let’s make Velcro reins and gloves, so your hands never slip out of place. We’ll call it Grip-Tyte. Let’s put magnets in the saddle and in your underwear so your sorry arse can sit the trot. We’ll call it Sit-Tyte. And let’s make feminine hygiene products that don’t shift while you ride. We’ll call them Up-Tyte.

I had ONE student that I would ever consider allowing using magnetic stirrups. She has a genetic condition that has affected the tendons in her lower legs. Even after many surgeries and much hard work, it is difficult for her to make one of her ankles flex to the point where she can reliably keep the stirrup on her foot.

Before she had the surgery that allowed her to maintain a traditional leg position, she rode without stirrups. Didn’t even put them on the saddle. She could walk, trot, canter and jump. All you non-impaired riders out there could learn a big fat lesson in determination and hard work from her.

But if I offered her the option of the On-Tyte stirrups, I know exactly what she’d say. She’d look down her nose at me and scoff “I can do it myself.”  And she can. And if she can, you can.

So instead of spending $300 on magnetic stirrups, you might want to consider investing it in some more riding lessons. In the meantime, I’m going to hope the riding industry realizes they are not helping anyone and unceremoniously dumps this product.

I’m also going to hope my gynecologist doesn’t get ahold of it.