Horses A Lifesaver For Dressage Lover Ann Romney By Deborah Welky
All of us have that one special something that elevates our spirits and makes us happy. For Ann Romney, that special something is the always-challenging sport of dressage. You can hear it in her voice. “I had the best ride of my life today!” Romney enthused, unbidden. “There’s no one happier on the planet than me today! It’s like I won the lottery, and all I did was have a good ride on one horse.” A breakthrough? Perhaps. “He’s been tricky for me to learn how to ride, but I’m learning to figure him out, and he’s learning to figure me out,” she said of her current mount. If you ride, you know that joy. It was a joy that Romney, however, had lost for a time. “I rode as a kid,” Romney recalled. “I galloped around bareback and had a great time. But when I was 16, I started
dating and moved away from horses. In fact, I see this as kind of a common pattern in girls of that age.” Fast-forward through college at Brigham Young University, marriage to high school sweetheart Mitt (the former governor of Massachusetts and Republican U.S. presidential nominee in 2012) and the raising of five boys. Horses remained on the back burner almost out of necessity. But Ann’s athletic side would not be denied. “I played tennis when my kids were young,” she said. “I could get out of the house and be athletic. I had a friend with whom I could play tournament tennis, and it was a great social and
physical outlet for me. It kept me sane while I was raising all those boys.” It was a health crisis that eventually led her back to her equestrian roots. “Just before I turned 50, I started getting sick,” Romney said. “It took a few months to diagnose, but I was losing function very quickly. I lost feeling in my right leg and half my torso. But worse than that was the unremitting fatigue.” When the diagnose finally came, it was not good. Ann Romney had multiple sclerosis (MS). “It was sobering,” Ann recalled. “Mitt was with me, and we both cried. Then he said, ‘Ann, we’re in this together.’ And that’s the name of my book — In This Together: My Story. In life, we think we can do it by ourselves, but when we hit the bumpy road, we need emotional support. We need to learn how to put one foot in front of the other and find joy.” In addition to providing emotional support to readers struggling with overwhelming health issues, Ann supports the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (www.bwhannromneycenter.org), which works to accelerate treatments, prevention and cures for the world’s most complex neurologic diseases: multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and brain tumors. “MS has two stages,” she explained. “It can be relaxing-and-remitting where you’ll get attacked and then go into remission, or it can be progressive, where you get weaker and worse. MS is very treatable for some people. People can (Left and right) Ann Romney credits horses and her love of dressage for helping her defeat multiple sclerosis.
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march 2017 | wellington the magazine