As Heard On

Former bull rider and current cow horse trainer Brendon Clark gets into the mental game on “The Gauge” podcast.

On his podcast, “The Gauge,” host Chance Conrado brings in personalities from the Western sports and lifestyle that highlight and celebrate the Western way of life. Brendon Clark, a National Reined Cow Horse Association trainer living in Hollister, California, and originally from Morpeth, Australia, was on the podcast to discuss his bull riding career in the Professional Bull Riders, where he earned nearly $1 million, and how he transitioned to cow horse. Here is an excerpt about why Clark chose cow horse as his second career.

“Change is a hard thing, and when you change something or try to afford to change, you are always like, what if it doesn’t work? ... I’m going to be honest, it was a really big change [to quit bull riding] and a really hard change. I see it now, and it happens with a lot of people, but I went through a period—and before I get into this, I want to say thank God for the National Reined Cow Horse Association and cow horse. If it wasn’t for cow horse, I don’t know what I would have done when I finished riding bulls. I found it before I finished riding bulls and I found that I loved it before I finished riding bulls. I guess I didn’t know I wanted to train horses, but I loved training horse and being able to do something with a horse that some other people can’t do, or to make it [the horse] be the best it can be.

“Going down the fence in the reined cow horse, for me, was the same feeling, adrenaline rush, as riding a bull: it was unpredictable, you really couldn’t control that much what was happening, although you try and control the situation you just have to make the best and go with what you got. That, I think, was what drew me to it in the first place … . “When I retired from riding bulls, I went through a period of depression and unknown and I didn’t feel like I had anything … I never talked about the depression, I never talked about what I was going through for the change. Then, [I] went into another industry where I was a terrible horse trainer, I sucked. But I had to learn. The one thing about me was that I was always ok with not being very good and always ok with someone telling me I needed to do better. I never had the thought process I was already great … there are people that have trained reined cow horses their entire life that have not had a lot of success and have worked very hard at it, and not because they aren’t great trainers, but because it is so damn hard. You need to have such good horses and so much dedication to do it.”