Month: January 2017

It was 110% as miserable as I expected, but it is done.

Next time I’m all “Maybe I could do another half marathon!”, please someone slap me. You have permission. Here’s a breakdown of how it went:

Start Line – WOOOO LET’S GO!

Mile 1 – What a gorgeous day.

Mile 2 – This is actually kind of fun, look at all these people!

Mile 3 – *playing air drums to Anti-Flag*

Mile 4 – Wow, are we still on the north side of town?

Mile 5 – The halfway point has to be around here somewhere…

Mile 6 – Yeah, halfway!! That was easy!!

Mile 7 – It’s getting a little warm.

Mile 8 – I’M SO HOT, WHY AM I SO HOT.

Mile 9 – I think I have a blister, but I can’t really feel my legs, so who knows?

Mile 10 – Jesus Christ, there are still THREE MORE?

Mile 11 – Kill me. Anyone. Someone. I will pay you.

Mile 12 – Ok, one more. I can do one more. Just keep moving, legs.

Mile 13 – *don’t pass out, don’t pass out*

Finish Line – Praise Jesus, Zeus, Allah, Buddha, and Vishnu! OMG never again.

Was it fun? No. It was the opposite of fun. But we did it, so there’s that.

I would have finished in my goal time, but I stopped at the 100m to go mark to wait for my dad. Because you just don’t leave people behind, goal time or no goal time. My dad, my sister-in-law and I all started together, so we all finished together too. I can’t wait to see the finish photo of all of us looking equally miserable together.

And THEN in the afternoon I went and got a new tattoo with Beka! She was in town for the weekend, and what better way to do some blogger bonding than via new ink? Beka got a really awesome new piece that I’ll let her show you (you’ve already seen it if you follow her on Insta), and I got the last two lines from the poem Invictus:

The left side of my body needed something, since all 3 of my other tattoos are on the right. Originally it was gonna be ribs, but I think I want something bigger there, so arm it was!

Then I stuffed my face with Mexican food and fell asleep pretty much the moment my head hit the pillow. Today I’m definitely a bit stiff all over… mostly my right hamstring, and I have a pain in my left knee that probably isn’t good. The chafing is also next level. Otherwise though, I survived!

It was great to meet Beka and her husband too, she is just as cool as she seems. I did a completely terrible job of taking pictures… as in I took none. Oops. Next time.

I’m not a big talker while I’m riding. Some people can ride around, chattering forever either to themselves or their horse, and seem to be able to ride just fine. I am not one of those people. I’m not very chatty to begin with, plus let’s be honest it takes every ounce of concentration and ability that I possess just to be able to ride. There’s no room for chit-chat.

But I have noticed that there are a few things I find myself saying to Henry quite often. “Good Boy” is the most obvious one, and he loves that. Anyone who has watched a Henny helmet cam video has seen how he reacts to an enthusiastic “Good Boy!” after a great effort. “Oh my god she’s right… I AM A GOOD BOY! ME HENNY!” as he gallops away, ears pricked. I’m a big believer in the power of a well-timed “Good Boy”.

There’s also “Sorry” – another obvious one. He hears that from me probably a lot more often than he’d like. “Sorry” is sometimes used in conjunction with “Good Boy”. Such is the life on an amateur horse. Sorry Henny. Good Boy.

Then there’s the one he gets from me A LOT… at least a few times a week. His feet get to moving too fast and then he starts tripping a lot, which prompts the reminder “Slow your feet down so your brain can catch up!”. It’s valid, trust me. Those hamsters in his brain can only spin their wheel so fast.

In the barn the most common is probably “I felt teeth”. He likes to rest his head on me, or lick me to death (it’s kind of disgusting how much he likes to lick), but it’s inevitable that he’ll start testing the limits. First he starts pressing his teeth against you, then he’ll tap you with them. If you don’t give the stern “HEY!!! I FELT TEETH!!!” reminder at that point, he’ll happily go one step further and take a nibble. Such a cheeky little shit.

What about you guys with your horses? What phrases do you find yourself repeating all the time?

One of the first things I noticed when I switched to eventing from h/j-land was how the sharps containers at events were a) very sparse b) never had anything in them. At the bigger events there were maybe 3 of them scattered across the stabling area and they always appeared untouched. At the smaller events you may or may not even see one at all. Yet at h/j shows it seems like there’s a sharps container on every other aisle, and they’re full pretty much from the word go. We have enough of our own problems in eventing, but sticking lots of needles into our horses isn’t one of them.

As most of you know, I grew up doing h/j and spent plenty of time in the hunter ring. For a long time I thought that the A/O hunters were my ultimate fantasy. I bred Sadie specifically hoping that she would grow up to be my fancy hunter. Yet by the time she was 4 I had already grown very weary of the hunter ring, and it didn’t take long for that weariness to turn into complete and total disillusion. I had a great trainer who was one of the “good guys”, but I noticed more and more that the good guys were awfully damn few, and often at a disadvantage. Needless to say, I was not disappointed when we re-routed Sadie to the jumper ring.

I was hopeful that when the derbies started getting super popular, good changes would come about and some of the demons of the hunter world would fall by the wayside. They didn’t. Before a derby class at one show, a horse dropped dead because of an incorrectly administered magnesium injection. It wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last. But that’s the day I wrote the sport off, for me personally anyway, as lost.

When I saw Mary Babick’s facebook post earlier this week, I thought here, finally, was someone saying exactly what I’ve been thinking. Judging by the way it went viral almost immediately, I’m obviously not the only one. There was one part in particular that really stood out to me:

“As I sat in the airport, I was joined by two fellow USEF directors. The talk turned quickly to the shocking statistic which was presented in Murray Kessler’s Strategic Plan. That statistic? That almost 60% of all doping violations are in the hunter sport. The two directors (an active athlete from dressage and another from Morgan) expressed horror at our transgressions. The dressage athlete told the two of us that people in dressage are embarrassed to be part of a doping violation. She asked why we were not.
Her question rang true with me. Why aren’t we embarrassed? Have we lost our love for horses? Do we love money more than our honor? I don’t know the answer but I do know that this lack of integrity is both a sickness of people’s souls and our sport.”

This is exactly what I’ve been wondering for a long time. So many BNT and BNR have had doping violations, some of them on a pretty damn regular basis. And these are only the ones getting caught using testable substances… what about all the others that have found their way around the tests? Yet it doesn’t seem like a big deal to anyone. These people still show, they still win, they still sell horses, they still have a barn full of clients, they still have good reputations, and they still make plenty of money.  This is what has always been so shocking to me… the level of acceptance that seems to exist, and the number of people who are seemingly okay with it.

The fact that Mary, USHJA president, was willing to come forward and state her opinion in a very public way gives me some hope. Hats off to you and your lady balls, Mary. I really hope that this is the beginning of some good conversation and some positive changes within USEF and USHJA. I’d love to be a hunter fan again.

Nothing like starting a show day with an 80% chance of thunderstorms and a 7:42 dressage time.

It was kind of a gross, dreary day from the get-go, but luckily the rain showers that passed through around 5am were long gone by the time I got on Henry and headed down to dressage warmup. Our goal for this show was just to try to keep him as quiet and relaxed as possible, keep myself PRESENT, and see how much I could ask for in the ring. We walked for a while, trotted a bit, then did some canter with a few lengthenings (remember when I used to not be able to canter in dressage warmup?). Being a one day show, and knowing that dressage is not our forte, we opted for a pretty short and sweet warmup. Just no point in anything else. Full disclosure, I don’t have any media from dressage, so feel free to just scroll right on down to stadium if you don’t want to deal with my word vomit. Here’s a picture to hold you over until you make it down that far:

He went in the ring a little bit “up” but overall I thought it was a passable test. He got heavy after the first canter and I never was really able to get his balance back (uh, maybe sit up?), and most of the trot at the beginning was done with him keeping one eyeball on the XC jumps nearby. We haven’t had a dressage lesson since August, and neither of us have done a test since July, so I expected it to be rusty and it was. But there were two things I really LOVED:

1) I stayed present and I didn’t just turn into at total blob. At one point in the canter lengthening I even smiled. Whaaaaaat, me smiling in dressage? Hell hath frozen over. I was amused at my horse, who was hoping that we were going to gallop out of the ring and over to cross country (hence why there wasn’t much of a lengthening, lest we exit the arena unexpectedly).

2) After we halted and left the ring, Henry wasn’t chomping. Normally by the end of the test his brain is pretty maxed out and he’s quite tense when he leaves. And when he’s tense, he chomps his mouth at a really impressive rate. There was none of that this time, and he went back over to the warmup and stood fairly still for a few minutes while we talked to Trainer and watched Bobby go.

Those two things alone are huge wins in my book, and exactly what we were there to do. I was just aiming for a score under 40, and we got a 37.4, so I was totally fine with that. Somehow our highest score was the stretchy trot circle, which I will happily take.

We had a couple hours in between dressage and stadium, so Bobby and I went over and walked the course one last time. It was set for Intermediate/Preliminary, and I have to thank Trainer here for getting me comfortable with bigger fences, because their jumps didn’t look that big to me. Ah yes, this is why you always school higher than you show. I felt pretty good walking around their course knowing that ours would be two holes lower. For some reason leading up to this show I had been more freaked out about stadium than anything else.

While we were tacking up we checked the radar and saw a big ugly cell headed straight at us. Cue a very quick and abbreviated warmup, hoping to get through stadium before that thing hit. We did a few laps of canter, hopped over the crossrail once, the vertical once, then the oxer once. Henry was getting to the base and jumping really well, and I was actually not pulling, so I quit with that and went up to the ring.

We trotted in, halted, then picked up the canter and headed to the first fence. He went right into a really good rhythm and all I remember thinking as we cantered down to fence 1 (a single oxer) was “Oh thank god, these jumps look little!”. I dunno why I thought they’d look big, but I was really glad they didn’t.

We hopped over the first few fences and I’m not really sure where this horse came from, but Henry was jumping like a total freak. He was coming off the ground with so much power that it was all I could do to stay with him. I whoaed a teeny bit too much in the corner before the first double at 5AB and thus had a bit of a long two stride, which made 6 come up a short. He hit it, but it stayed up. The tight rollback to 7, which I’d worried about the most, actually rode really well.

Although he jumped 7 so hard that (aside from almost gouging my own eye out with the end of my whip) I pulled a little to 8, then landed and pulled a little more to 9AB, the last double. Instead of just letting him come forward out of the corner I tried to cram one more stride in and Henry, bless his soul, had to climb out over the oxer at B. That mistake cost us 4 faults, but… whatever. We did it, the jumps looked small, he was jumping amazing, and I made DECISIONS (ok that last one was a bad decision, but at least I made one).

It started raining during Bobby’s round, then as we were headed back to the barn the skies finally opened up and it poured buckets. Lots and lots and lots of buckets. Once the lightning started they held the show, and we all just stood around watching the XC course turn into one giant lake. By the time it stopped raining there was no doubt – XC wasn’t happening. The whole thing got turned into a CT, but it was the only right decision to make. No way the footing would have been safe out there, especially back in the woods. I was bummed at not getting to run around XC, but not at all bummed about not having to do it in the mud. Henry is drilled and tapped, and I had studs with me, but still. There will always be another day, and I’d rather not run our first Training XC in the slop.

Overall I was happy with the day. I stayed calm, had fun, and Henry was great. We definitely have more work to do to get everything more polished, but that will come. After a long 6 month break, it was great to be back!  I may have already sent in my entry for the February show… fingers crossed it’s a little drier.

First of all… I think I love schooling shows. I literally had all of my clothes, including show clothes, packed in a backpack. It took me maybe 5 minutes. I didn’t have to pack a ton of shit, I didn’t have to braid, and it was cheap. Sign me up for this. Ok, but not permanently, because I did miss wearing my Winston coat a little, but it was fun to be casual for once.

On Saturday I was up early (because I’m always up early, because I go to bed early, because I’m 33 going on 85), and as I was leaving my neighborhood I realized that although I had remembered to gather all of Henry’s crap, I forgot to get any food/drinks for myself. Oops. A quick stop at Walmart to grab whatever I could carry (which amounted to 2 Lunchables, an apple, some Goldfish crackers, and 2 waters… spoiler alert this is not enough food for 24 hours) I was back en route. I went to the barn, shoved all my crap in my truck/trailer, and headed out. I’ll be honest and tell you a secret here: I didn’t even clean anything. The forecast for the weekend looked gross, and my give-a-shits just were not numerous enough.

I was one of the first ones to arrive, so I parked my trailer in a primo spot and got Henry settled. Bobby and I were lucky enough to get awesome stabling spots in a smaller barn that is less chaotic and has more space. Loved it. Then Bobby got there, parked next to me (because stalker), we put our tents up, got everything unpacked, and then got on the boys.

Earlier in the week Henry had a day where he just felt kinda crappy under saddle (like SI flaring up again), to the point where I almost scratched. Then the next day he felt super, so I decided to just go and see what horse I had. If he felt weird, I could always scratch. We got on and walked for a while, then I rode him down to the arena and Trainer asked to see him trot and canter. Henry was moving pretty damn great, albeit he was a bit of a sassy dolphin. We quit after a very short ride, just in case, but definitely got the thumbs up to proceed. He might end up being wild for dressage, but he felt good and that was more important. He literally pranced back the barn, fairly certain that we were headed to the start box for XC. He was super bummed when he got a bath instead.

After the boys were settled we went to walk stadium, then walked XC twice. It was warm and humid enough to where I was sweating balls by this point. There was much chafing. Thanks, Texas in January. Overall though, I felt pretty good about the XC and stadium courses (mentally, not physically, because see above note about chafing).

Then we fed the boys, ate dinner (mmm… Lunchable…), socialized a bit, and took the horses for a handwalk. I DID wipe my bridles down with a wet rag and thoroughly brush out my horse’s tail, so… wow, such effort. Then I popped one of Bobby’s ZzzQiul’s and was in bed by 9. With a 7:42 dressage time, it was gonna be an early morning…