After last week’s fairly shitty solo jump school at home, I was in dire need of another jumping lesson.

Not gonna lie, I was having one of those “oh god, did I ruin my horse in one ride” mini panic attacks. Short version of what happened a week before: I just could not get my canter right, which made all of my distances total shit (as in, I missed really badly several times in a row), which finally made Henry mad enough to stop. While I definitely deserved it, I still tapped him twice on the butt for stopping at a little 3′ vertical. His job is to jump the jumps as long as it’s safe to do so, and he could have, he’d just gotten tired of my monkey riding. Fair enough, I had that coming, but you still have to do your job even when I don’t do mine.

After that he came unglued enough to where I had to drop my whip completely, because he was cantering in place and wanting to run THROUGH everything. Apparently I seriously hurt his feelings with two butt taps. Duly noted. A few days later I went out and cantered a couple of jumps on a circle until all seemed fairly okay, but he was still kinda grumpy in general. Feelings, he has so many of them.

So naturally I spent all week internally freaking out about having ruined my perfect saintly horse. That’s normal, right? When we got to Trainer’s place on Friday I filled her in on what had happened the weekend before. She just kind of giggled at our ridiculousness (I know I’m crazy, this is not news to me) and set up a vertical with canter poles to help address our rhythm issue. After hopping through it both ways and steadily raising the height (while she said the word “balance” approximately 1500 times) things were clicking again.

Since we seemed pretty much back to normal by that point (Henny grudge: over), she put the jumps up to 3’3″-3’6″ and made a course for us.

Other than the fact that I really could not make myself wait to the base of the barrel vertical when I didn’t see the distance, it was actually fine. At some point I will learn that just because it’s bigger, I don’t have to attack it when I don’t see anything. But uh… at least I’m not pulling all the way to the base? Maybe eventually I’ll find the middle ground. Maybe. Let’s just take this as a small victory.

The good news is, Henny was very very rideable and totally back to his normal self, thank god. I didn’t ruin him, I just pissed him off and we had to visit Trainer for some relationship counseling (aka reminding me how to ride). Crisis averted. Ah, the life and times of an amateur horse…

Part of my job at work involves putting together metrics, and while I loathe the data gathering process, I love the finished product. The same applies here. 2016 was my 3rd year of blogging, and every year I’ve thrown together some basic infographics. To me it’s more “for fun” than anything else, since I don’t really use the numbers for anything, but it’s interesting to see what was popular and how the years compare to each other. I thought 2015 was going to be a really hard year to top, but somehow 2016 managed to rally in the last few months and surge ahead.

 

Top 10 Posts of 2016

1. Thoughts on Jersey Fresh (5,767 – this one got picked up by EN so no surprise)
2. Blowing the Whistle (3,391)
3. So You Think You Want to Breed Your Mare? (3,067)
4. Fair Hill Part 3: The Thing We’re All Talking About (2,964)
5. Black Friday Sales (1,653)
6. Passing Judgment (1,042)
7. Keeping Secrets (1,015)
8. Review: Lorenzini Stirrups (988)
9. The Great Half Pad Debate (969)
10. Return Policies: Where to Draw the Line? (931)

So basically, everyone likes controversy and sales. Interestingly, the lowest viewed posts tend to be show recaps and lesson/schooling recaps. Am I really bad at writing about them or is it just that uninteresting?

Top Commenter

Karen is so much better at commenting than I am.

Many thanks to everyone for following along with Henry and me this year, and for all of your support. Here’s to 2017! 

Is there anything you’d like to see more of here? Less of? Specific topics you think I should cover? Feel free to leave me some feedback below, or use the form on my contact page (in the menu bar above) to email me directly!

This post took me a lot longer to write than all of the other posts this week put together. I was all gung-ho to set these very specific, measurable, ambitious goals so that I can charge headlong into 2017. Then I sat there for a while and reflected on what my real challenges were in 2016… did the goals I had written down address that? Would they help drive me to fix the areas I really needed to work on?

Trainer said it quite well at our last XC school… I had gotten very frustrated at my inability to do something perfectly and started to just shut down mentally, and she took me aside for a lecture that was a combination of “suck it up buttercup” and “you can do this” where she called me Type A. For some reason that part stuck in my head and I kind of laughed at that on the drive home. I’ve never been accused of being a Type A personality ever in my life. Those people are super high strung workaholics that are mega organized and get anxious about everything, right?

Eh, turns out no, it’s not quite that simple. I started looking into it and while my general personality is only a little Type A, when it comes to riding, I’m about as severely Type A as they come. Super competitive, super intense, and never satisfied with anything. My biggest struggle this past year was letting go of my own mistakes and trying not to overanalyze or put too much pressure on myself. No one can ruin my own good time like I can. Therefore what’s my biggest problem? ME.

So with that revelation in mind, I scrapped almost all of my original goals and started again. 2017 is to be the year of “chill the hell out and have fun with it”. I’m not aiming for anything super ambitious, I’m not setting out an intricate show plan or worrying about qualifications or scores or points or any of that stuff. This year I’m fixing my brain (I am my own worst enemy) and working on having confidence in myself.

Complete at least 4 Training horse trials – schooling or recognized, whatever. I don’t care how I place or what our score ends up being (that’s a lie, I care a lot, but I’m trying to convince myself not to care) I just want to complete and put a deposit in the confidence bank.

Score under 35 in dressage at Training – it would be nice to get a respectable dressage score, even if I don’t finish on it.

Take at least one lesson a month – I’m hoping we’re back on track with this now, but it’s still worth writing down.

Attend another course/seminar related to the Young Event Horse program – I had so much geeked-out fun at Fair Hill, I really want to continue that education.

Get Baby Horse registered, inspected, and microchipped with RPSI – This is all fairly obvious stuff for a baby, but it’s a milestone, so here it is.

Get Baby Horse lifetime recorded with USEF – This is kind of a reminder to myself, because if you do the USEF lifetime recording the same year they’re born, it’s $35. If you wait til they’re 3 or older, it’s $200. He may or may not ever actually need to be USEF recorded, but for $35 let’s do it.

Chill the eff out, you psycho – ha, j/k. But really, dial it back like 12 notches in general.

 

Finish half marathon under 2:40 – I feel pretty confident that 2:40 is doable… I did it in 2:15ish in 2013, but I’m also definitely nowhere near as fit now as I was then (at the peak of my triathlon “career”). 2:30 would be the stretch goal, but I’d be satisfied with 2:40.

Keep running 3x a week – even after the half is over, I want to keep running just to keep my fitness level up. It’s helped a lot.

Work on my core strength – The rest of my lower half has gotten so much stronger from running, but my core is definitely still lacking. If I want my dressage to get better, I need to work on that.

Take a non-horse related vacation – Chicago in the summer, maybe?

 

Look at me, over here ready to chill out and relax in 2017…

but I’m gonna try not to do it like that.

 

 

P.S. If anyone has some Christmas money burning a hole in their pocket, Riding Warehouse has 20% off sitewide through the 2nd! Time to stock up on Henry’s favorite rock salt and some new clipper blades. Even the sale stuff is 20% off! Hope no one’s 2017 goals included “control my spending”…

Some of you may have noticed a lack of riding photos lately. Or an overabundance of really fuzzy, kinda far-away ones. Or a ton of “between the ears” shots.

Yeah well… that’s because I always ride alone. Literally in the past 2 months I’ve ridden in the same space with someone else a grand total of twice. In a lot of ways, that’s a great perk. There’s never anyone in my way, no one ever comes in and changes all my jumps around or messes with what I’ve set, and I rarely have to share the crossties with anyone. The fields are pretty much mine to do with as I please, since the only other people that use them are trail riders. And of course, when I royally screw up, there are no witnesses to my idiocy. All of those things are awesome.

The downsides are that there is never another rider around to bounce ideas off of, or anyone to put a rail back up for me. And trust me, there is a limit to how many times I will get on and off to put rails back up or raise/lower jumps (usually that limit is 1, because lazy). Those things aren’t too bad, but they do make for a lack of media. The only pictures you get are from the times where I set my phone on a barrel (or bungee it to a tree branch with a hair tie, which did actually happen) and point it at a certain spot. SIDE NOTE: now accepting donations for a Pixio or Soloshot…

It also means that there is much less of a social aspect to my barn time, and it’s more about me and my horse. For the most part, I really love that. No distractions, just pure Henny time.  We’ve had many a one-sided conversations. But… sometimes a girl wants someone to hack and have a chat with, ya know? Granted, a busy barn is NOT my thing, so I’ll choose solitude any day over that.

I suppose I can’t have it both ways, and that’s the (admittedly small) price I get to pay for all of the other perks. It does get a teeny bit lonely out there sometimes though. Until I remember that people like Bobby exist, and then I’m like “meh…alone is probably better”.

Last week things got a little exciting on the internet when a thread was posted on COTH about an individual’s personal experiences with a particular trainer. Threads like that aren’t too uncommon, but usually they’re vague and don’t name the trainer or give a lot of details about their supposed transgressions. This one, however, did just that, and provided a veritable laundry list of complaints and bad experiences. The poster even said she had evidence to back it up and had consulted an attorney.

I’d already seen the beginnings of this situation unfolding on facebook, since I’m friends with some of the other people involved. Knowing both the accuser and the accused (not well, but I’ve seen them both at shows), I didn’t find a lot of it too hard to believe. But of course I kind of gave it the ol’ “Well, it’s probably half true” eyeball, because that’s usually the case. Of course, even if only half of it was true, it was pretty mind-boggling.

What I thought was really interesting though, complaints and situation aside, was the initial knee-jerk public response to the thread. A lot of people blamed the poster for putting her horses in that situation, or for not getting them out sooner, or called her a pot-stirrer. At one point someone even posted personal information about the poster’s occupation, which has absolutely zero bearing on the matter at hand. Initially, it sure looked a lot like bullying and victim-blaming instead of people trying to get genuine clarification on the situation.

This isn’t the first time that’s happened, and won’t be the last. For some reason that seems to be the MO of the internet in general, which seems to make a lot of people hesitant to say anything. When it comes to a client calling out a professional, the automatic assumption is pretty much always that the client is wrong… yet usually if you just ask the right questions, it’s pretty easy to get the gist of what really happened and where the fault my lie. While I certainly think that it’s 100% correct to meet stories like this with healthy skepticism and to do your own research before you cast judgment, it makes you think… is this why more people don’t speak out against well-known professionals?

Because the more that the thread went on, the more people came out of the woodwork with stories about this trainer (both on COTH and on the poster’s personal facebook page). At one point it was just nuts to see how many people had similar experiences but had been reluctant to speak up publicly. And of course, that was the point at which the tide began to turn in the COTH thread and people started to support to the poster, rather than attack her or point the finger (and the point at which several of the rudest comments from the first few pages magically went *poof*).

It was so interesting to watch this unfold, from a social and psychological aspect. On one hand, when you go so far as to publicly call out a professional, you have to be prepared for a lot of questions and some criticism, and rightly so. On the other hand, there was some downright bullying behavior from people who suddenly changed their tune later. A few people still criticized though, saying that they didn’t think making such a public display of their grievances was helpful.

I absolutely do see the potential harm if someone is hurling false allegations, but I was really glad to see this poster be brave enough (and it’s sad that it DOES require bravery) to speak out and be unafraid to name names in the process. While I had already seen enough of the trainer’s methods at shows to never give her my business, this person’s experience plus the experiences of everyone else that subsequently came forward and shared similar stories really sealed the deal on staying as far away as possible. And now that all of it is out there for everyone to see and discuss, there’s no burying it. Will it actually have any impact on her business? Well… probably not really. I mean, people like Paul Valliere still do just fine (which is a whole ‘nother subject entirely – wtf, horse world?). But at least the information is out there now for anyone who may Google her name.

What are your thoughts on public “whistle blowing” like this against trainers and industry professionals? Do you think all of it should be kept behind closed doors, or do you think it’s important for the public to hear about these things? And, maybe more importantly – why do you think there tends to be such a mob mentality type of reaction with bullying and victim-shaming, rather than intelligent questions or concerns?