Matt Feerick
Feb 26

I Think I'm Getting to the Point in the Training Where It's Getting Hard, and I Want to Give Up

Someone sent me a message last week that I've been thinking about ever since. It was long and honest and a little bit all over the place — the kind of message people send late at night when they've had a bad session and
they're sitting in the car before they  drive home. 

The gist of it was this: "I feel like I've been doing everything right. I've done the foundation work. I've been patient. I've followed the programme. And now we've hit a wall and I don't know if I'm making things worse. I think I'm getting to the point where it's getting hard, and I want to give up."

I read it a few times. Not because it was complicated, but because I recognised it. I've felt that exact thing — with horses, with creative work, with most things that matter.
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The Messy Middle
There's a phase in every training journey that nobody warns you about. The beginning is hard, but it has a kind of momentum to it. There's a problem, you're fixing it, you can see the change happening. The horse that wouldn't load is loading. The horse that spooked at everything is calmer. The horse that was in pain is moving better. You feel useful. You feel like you're getting somewhere. 

And then you arrive at a new place. The acute problem is gone, and now you're working on something more subtle. Strength. Quality. Consistency. The kind of changes that don't show up in a week. The kind of changes where some days feel like progress and other days feel like you've gone backwards.

This is the messy middle. And it's where most people give up.

Not because they're lazy or uncommitted. But because the messy middle doesn't give you the same emotional reward as the beginning. At the start, the improvement was obvious. Now it's not. And when you can't see the progress, the voice in your head starts asking whether you're wasting your time. Whether you're good enough. Whether the horse would be better off with someone else.
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What I've Learned From the Barn
I've watched this happen with hundreds of horse and rider combinations. The pattern is almost always the same.

They come to us with a problem. We work through it. The horse improves. They go home and it feels amazing. For a few weeks, everything is great. And then one day, the horse does something they haven't done in a while — maybe they're sticky going forward, or tense in the canter, or resistant to something that was fine last week. And the owner panics. They think they've undone everything. They think they've failed. 

But they haven't. What's actually happening is that they've moved past the easy wins and into the real training. The part where you're not fixing a problem anymore — you're building something. And building is slower and less dramatic than fixing. It doesn't photograph well. You can't make a reel out of it. But it's the part that matters
most.
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The Setback Isn't a Setback
The thing that took me years to understand — and that I still have to remind myself of regularly — is that what feels like going backwards is often just the horse reorganising. When you change the way a horse moves, when you ask it to use muscles it hasn't used before, when you challenge its balance or its way of going, the body doesn't just switch to the new pattern overnight. It oscillates. Good day, wobbly day, good day, worse day, really good day.

That's normal. That is what progress looks like. It's just not what we expect progress to look like.

We expect a straight line going up. What we get is a scribble that generally trends upward if you zoom out far enough. But when you're in it, when you're standing in the arena on a wobbly day, it doesn't feel like a trend. It feels like failure.
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The People Who Get Through It
The people I've seen come out the other side of the messy middle all have something in common. It's not talent. It's not having the best horse or the most money or the most time. It's that they kept going on the days it felt
pointless.

They did the somatics when they didn't feel like it. They went for the hack when they'd rather have stayed home. They kept the sessions short and calm when their head was telling them to do more, try harder, fix it faster. They trusted the process even when the process wasn't giving them anything back that week. 

And then one day — and it's never the day you expect — something clicks. The trot that's been average for six weeks suddenly has swing. The transition you've been working on happens without thinking. The horse offers something you didn't ask for because it feels good and it wants to. That moment doesn't come because of one brilliant session. It comes because of all the boring, frustrating, unremarkable sessions that came before it.
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What I Would Say to the Person Who Sent That Message
You're not failing. You're in the hardest part. The part where the work is invisible and the reward is delayed and the only thing keeping you going is the decision to keep going.

That's not a character flaw. That's just what it feels like to build something real.

Don't give up at the point where you've done all the hard work to get here. The horse you wanted is on the other side of this. Not a different horse — this one. The one standing in front of you, who has already changed more than you realise.

Keep the sessions simple. Celebrate the small things. And on the days where nothing feels like it's working, remember: you're not going backwards. You're just in the part of the journey that nobody talks about.