After training a number of eventers at his Ocala, Fla., CrossFit gym, CrossFit Ocala Second 2 None, Joey Williams has a healthy appreciation for the sport. He watched the live stream of the Wellington Eventing Showcase (Fla.) and sent his rider clients congratulatory texts throughout the weekend. But soon he wasn’t content with just watching, he wanted to experience it.

“I grew up in Fort Lauderdale in the city, and I’d never ridden a horse before,” said Williams, who trains Michael Pollard, Jennie Brannigan, Jonathan Holling, Hannah Sue Burnett, Jimmie Schramm and Zach Brandt.

Williams had discussed the possibility of riding with Brannigan, but Pollard was the first to make a solid offer. “So I jumped on the opportunity—couldn’t wait for it! I’m like a daredevil at heart.”

“Joey is so good to all of us and he’s now got a really good horse crew,” said Pollard. “He really cares about the people that train with him and I think that’s part of the reason he wanted to do it, so he understood a little bit of what we go through.”

For his foray into the equestrian world, Williams tacked up Schoensgreen Hanni, Michael Pollard’s team gold medal partner for the 2011 Pan American Games (Mexico). The 13-year-old German Sporthorse (Gingerino—Halina II, Grossist) has been competing at some training level events recently with Maddie McElduff before her owner Christine Turner brings her out to Texas later this year.

“I thought well, you can’t get a more perfect horse to try that on,” said Pollard. “And I figured that we’d put him on and let him lunge around and try to get a general feel and then put the breast plate on so he doesn’t catch her in the mouth, and then she’ll probably be fine. So that’s kind of how the whole thing happened.”

After a few minutes of instruction from Michael’s wife Nathalie on the lunge line, Williams thought he was ready to mark jumping a fence off his bucket list.

“He thought it was going to be easier, and then he got on, and then we started to try to teach him to post the trot a little bit. He’s super fit—works out multiple times a day—and he got about 15 minutes in and he goes, ‘Holy cow! You guys do this on eight or nine horses a day? My back is killing me already.’ So I assured him a lot of it was just working against himself, but it’s still pretty impressive,” Michael said with a chuckle.

“It was pretty fun, you know what? I’m a person who I’d like to think is in really good shape being that I run a CrossFit gym. I train six days a week, and it was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be,” Williams said. “It was definitely a lot of core strength involved. Just being able to maintain a position on a horse was probably the most difficult thing to me. I’m normally somebody who can hop on and figure things out really, really quick when it comes to sport performance stuff, but riding a horse was a lot different.

“Nat Pollard gave me a little bit of a riding lesson and then I was ready to go! Mike Pollard he didn’t want me to go hard. I was ready to just go all out,” he continued. “But probably for the safety of myself Mike Pollard highly advised against it, but I got to jump a horse you could say after 15 minutes of learning how to ride.”

For Pollard, the choice to use “Hanni” for the job was an easy one.

“That is the sweetest horse in the world,” Pollard said. “She’s the only one of any of our horses that all of our kids get on. She’s just an angel. He couldn’t have asked for a better one.

“She doesn’t mind at all,” he continued. “She’s so sweet. She probably hasn’t had somebody lean that far back since I jumped big water jumps with her, but she was completely unbothered. You give her a carrot and a pat and she’s completely happy.”

As for Williams, he was unperturbed by the unexpected difficulty he encountered. “It was fun! Oh yeah! I’m going to try to go again this weekend!” he said.