The workhorse

“Slow and steady” doesn’t apply to the race Amy Graybill Green is running every day.

One year after retiring from her teaching career, she’s pushing herself harder than ever. Amy has more time for long-distance endurance horseback riding, a lifelong passion she calls “tough and crazy.” It involves riding horses on trails 50 miles or longer. 

“It takes a certain grit, determination, to do what I do,” she said. It also takes a high tolerance for pain.

Two years ago, Green broke eight ribs when she fell off a horse onto a gravel road. She said she walked three miles back to her trailer before driving herself home. 

This summer, her horse flipped at the end of a 50-mile ride, giving Amy two bruises and a gash on her arm that was still healing three weeks later. She said it was “the most exciting” ride of her life.

Even her life off the saddle isn’t safe. One month after retiring, Amy survived a head-on car crash on her way home.

“I just take a licking and keep on ticking,” she said. 

She faced a different kind of pain, too, after her mother died in August, following a battle with Parkinson’s disease. Days later, Green completed two long-distance rides. “I was riding for her, in honor of her,” Amy said. One ride was 25 miles long, the other 30. Amy won first place in both. 

“God blessed me with horses,” Amy said. Her first word, at age 4, was “horse.” She grew up in a house she can see from a hill on her 40-acre property. She lives there with her husband Duane and four horses — Breeze, Cash, Kolt and Whiskey. They have two sons. 

Amy spent 31 years as a teacher, most recently teaching 5th grade math in Lexington. She’s still substitute teaching, which she says is a way to “subsidize” her horse habit. 

Amy said that being on a horse, miles deep into tough terrain, is her “happy place.” She wakes up early to work with a strength coach, as she’s training for back-to-back 50-mile rides in November. 

“Conditioning your horse is one thing, but you’ve got to condition yourself, too,” she said. Her goal is to complete a 100-mile, 24-hour endurance ride before she turns 60. 

Every horse ride is dangerous, she said.  “The minute you feel too comfortable, something happens.” If it does, it’s important to get right back on, she said.

“In my mind, it’s me and my horse competing against ourselves,” she said. “It’s about me being better than me.”