Trainers would teach apprentice riding at level 40 for 100 gold, and when you finally hit level 60, you had to pay again for the journeyman riding skill that wow classic gold will allow you to buy a swift mount that would double your speed--in this instance, a trendy 1000 gold. Was it worth it? Can Tauren be cowboys? Is that weird? Let's proceed.
Can you scoff at the thought of saving 100 gold? If this is so, it's likely you experienced the crushing poverty of vanilla WoW. Just like real life, there were players who were rich and had all the best gear, and there were others who'd scrape a living selling vendor trash so that they could rub two copper coins together.
Making money was a grind. Everything was pricey. Even training your skills came at a price, diverting funds away from this valuable mount you were saving for. Making money involved repeated trips back to dealers to market your gray junk, and lots of vanilla players saved time by devising their own get-rich-quick schemes.
As a penniless herbalist, I used to classic wow gold sellers farm swiftthistle--a herb used by rogues to earn thistle tea, popular with higher level plaers that couldn't be arsed to pick their own.