Sitting on her phone and scrolling through Instagram or Facebook or any other type of social media wasn’t an option for Jackie Ganter growing up. There were horses to work, stalls to clean and all of the other responsibilities that come with helping her mom run a horse boarding and training facility, so not being active wasn’t in the cards for Jackie throughout her childhood. Not to mention social media wasn’t exactly a thing when we were growing up.
Jackie is a 2-time NFR qualifier and 2015 Resistol Rookie of the Year barrel racer, and if you know anything about rodeo and barrel racing, you know those are not easy accomplishments to have next to your name. It takes countless hours with your horses, THOUSANDS of miles on the road, the mental and physical toughness to compete for more than 10 months of the year, and the determination to keep going when you hit rock bottom. You do all of this in hopes to end the year in the top 15 in the world and have a chance to run down the alley at the Thomas and Mack.
“It is the hardest thing you will ever do to try to make the NFR,” Jackie told me. “If you’re not in good enough physical shape, your body is going to fatigue, your mind is going to fatigue. Everything is going to go by the wayside completely. When you’re in the best shape you can be in, it does make a difference. And it’s going to edge out someone who isn’t in that kind of shape because you’re mentally there enough to where you can still compete even though you’re exhausted.”
After setting the bar high with her first couple seasons as a professional barrel racer, Jackie sustained a broken ankle in the beginning of 2018. By the time she made it back on the road, it was time to re-evaluate her goals for the year. “I made the decision to not rodeo as hard because I’m a realistic person,” Jackie explained. “I looked at the numbers, and I was going to have to kill myself and my horses. The money that it was going to take – there was no way I was going to win as much as it was going to cost.”
The 2019 season is going to be different. Jackie has made that clear by seeking out professional guidance in the form of a personal trainer. It’s not that she needed to lose weight or wasn’t already incredibly active on a daily basis, but she was ready to take it to the next level.
Sure, she works horses every day, moves bales of hay and bags of feed, swims her horses, and would run pretty regularly, but that wasn’t enough. Jackie admits she didn’t really know what she was doing because she had never been trained by a professional before. She would run on the treadmill and look up workouts on Pinterest because that’s what she saw everyone else doing not realizing the damage she was actually doing to her previously broken ankle.
“When you start working out with somebody that shows you different things, you realize how weak you are in different areas,” Jackie explained. “And if you were strong in that area, think about how much better you could ride.”
When you begin barrel racing (or any other sport really), odds are you will find a coach, trainer or pay for lessons to learn and gain the knowledge on how to properly do everything involved with this sport. You invest time, money, effort, etc. in learning how to become a barrel racer. This seems logical, correct? Well, why wouldn’t you think to do the same for your own fitness and nutrition?
As barrel racers, we can all agree that we invest so much time and money into our horses. We take them to the vet, get them worked on by massage therapists or chiropractors, purchase so many different therapy products, and spend time every day keeping them in shape. We are so quick to forget to do the same for ourselves. As Jackie put it, “if you’re not doing the same thing for yourself, then you’re basically wasting half of it because half of it is you.”
There’s no doubt that if you do enough research, you could figure out how to successfully workout and better yourself on your own without consulting a personal trainer, BUT that’s time that professional athletes such as Jackie can’t afford to take away from her horses. So why not invest in yourself like you do your horses to have someone tell you exactly what you need to do and what will work for you. She hit the nail on the head when she said, “People will spend thousands upon thousands of dollars to make their horse better and spend none to make themselves better. But if you would spend a little bit on yourself, your horse is probably going to be better because of it.”
The sport of barrel racing and rodeo in general is evolving and the competition is so incredibly tough these days. The time differences between 1st and 10th at a rodeo are so tight that in order to compete at that level, you’re going to have to start doing what those before you didn’t have to. This includes treating yourself as an athlete.
Jackie noted, “With everything getting better and everything getting bigger, you have to figure out new ways to grow with the sport.”
For rodeo athletes looking to get into a fitness routine, Jackie’s advice was simple, “I think having a trainer honestly would be the best because you have someone with knowledge and someone that is keeping you accountable for it and isn’t going to let you slack off. You’re not having to come up with anything on your own. It makes your life easier to just have someone tell you what to do and just do it and carry on.”
There’s no question of where the future of rodeo is headed. Jackie is no doubt doing everything she can to grow and evolve with this sport as well as setting the bar higher for the expectations of athletes to come. If we keep moving this direction, the future is looking bright for both Jackie and the sport of barrel racing as a whole.
“I think your horse has to be in the best physical shape he can be in, but you need to match him.” – Jackie Ganter