Do the Thing

It’s January, and it’s single digits in most places, and really what better time to have an existential crisis than right now because there is literally nothing better to do. But I have seen a continuing trend the past few years of people reevaluating their riding goals and going different directions than when I first started blogging.

Back then, the goal was get your Bronze medal and go Training level in eventing. It didn't seem to matter where you were starting, what horse you had, what location you were in, what your training program was. It was just this kind of weird ambiguous Must Have. Was there a plan in place to achieve either of these things? What was going to happen after - like, was that the end goal of all riding goals? And most importantly, why? Why did everyone want these things?

I still haven’t figured any of that out lol. Maybe we were all just young and dumb and naively ambitious.

After leaving eventing to switch entirely to dressage, the Bronze goal seems to the universal standard of "I did something!" I’m fucking stoked I got mine. It was hard as hell, and I’m proud as hell to have it. But I've seen a lot of stupid ways to get there just because people think it’s mandatory to have it or you can’t be considered a dressage rider.

Two scores at 2-1 barely over 60%? It counts; we can cross that level off because we're totally ready for Third now! No, my horse doesn't counter canter or know what a turn on the haunches is. I'm not particularly good at the sitting trot and I have absolutely no idea what real collection is, but collection doesn't matter because now I can put my horse in a double bridle and fake it!

I get the frustration on scoring and judging because these tricks do slide by. People can get their Bronzes with no concept of how or why they're doing any of the movements they're doing because they’re on a nice horse. You are scored better for a bigger moving horse that’s round. But just because those horses are scoring well doesn’t mean it’s the only way you’re going to get good scores.

I talk about this all the time with my trainer. I have a small, mediocre moving OTTB. I am far from a beautiful rider to watch. Opie currently finds it easier to do all his lateral work with his nose poked out further than what we know they'll be looking to score well in the ring. We're constantly working on getting him to "drop his neck" and get deep, because deep for him lifts his back and makes it more correct. But when I've got him moving correctly, and he's relaxed, he's adjustable and he's correct and we've scored 8s on our medium canters - better than a tense, giant, but fancy AF warmblood. 

I think people underestimate how much of training is NOT a good time. It's hard work. It never stops being hard work. It's tedious, it's frustrating, more often than not you're going backwards instead of forwards. You hit health problems in both horses and humans, the weather sucks, money is a novelty – the list goes on - but there's no magic wand to fix any of that. Get on the horse. Do the thing. One day you're going to look behind you and be like, "Oh, damn. Look at everything we actually did accomplish even though it certainly didn't feel like it at the time."

And if you're not committed to being in the dredges and putting in the hard work, maybe commit to being a trail rider instead. Which is fine! Who cares! Horses are awesome no matter what you do with them! You don't have to show to own a horse. Despite what I've seen and heard from professionals (including an Olympic judge I audited this fall), horses are not going to go extinct if we stop showing them.

But if you want to accomplish these big lofty goals, it takes SO MUCH TIME and SO MUCH WORK and more than anything it requires you to go out there and DO THE THING. Suck at it. Learn from sucking at it. Go out and suck some more. Surround yourself with a support system that is always trying to make you better of course, but you can't assume that every single time you take your horse off property it's going to be a slam dunk

It's frustrating to see people quit early, throw up their hands, and just say, "Well it can't be done because I didn't get it done right off the bat." Especially people that want to ride at the higher levels but have never done so, and never had to produce their own horse to that level. Do you think the schoolmasters you've ridden were born schoolmasters? Ask your trainer how much Not Fun work it took to get them to that level where they can now teach you all these fancy moves you aspire your own horse to do. 

You don't know what you don't know. And the more you learn, the more you start to figure out how much you still need to learn. And if that doesn't excite you, inspire you, make you want to dig in and do the hard shit to get better, if you can still come up with a hundred excuses on why you can't start at all, maybe it is time to reevaluate what horses mean to you.