Kick the Can

Two true things about me:

1) Goals > no goals
2) Long-term > short-term

Because I'm a planner, right?  Given a time-frame long enough to accommodate zigs and zags and reconsiderations, a planner can make any eventual outcome look -- and more important: feel -- nigh-on effortless.  The wayfinding is half the fun for me and staying focused on winning-the-war keeps the speedbumps in perspective.

(This is a huge part of why, maybe needless to say, I am really digging this foray into distance-riding.  A sport in which having goals for a year or three -- or ten; I adore that the Decade Team exists -- down the line is Just How We Do Things Around Here instead of being some bizarre anomaly?  Sign me up!)

I'm discovering, as I dip my toes into dressage and jumping for their own sake, that that thing about the speedbumps was kind of important.  Most of my ringwork anxiety has fallen away.  (Huzzah!  I really like dressage, you guys.  It made me really sad to have gotten so twitchy and weird about it.)  But while riding through our last cold snap, I found myself getting tense and angsty re: Tucker feeling less than fantastic.

I wasn't surprised that Tucker felt less than fantastic.  It was quite cold and his turnout had been abruptly cut to near-nonexistence and that's a recipe for a stiff crooked cranky horse.  He needs to move and generally will feel better after twenty minutes or so, but I worry about him anyway.  When I feel like he's moving in a way that's hard on his body, I worry more.  Which is fair, I think, and also supremely unhelpful, since a tight stressy thinking-instead-of-riding Hannah is not exactly going to improve Tuck's way of going.

So I stopped, and kicked the can down the road.  The goal can't be just "improve Tuck's way of going" when that starts to feel too can't-get-there-from-here.  Instead I thought about, where do I want to be a month, a year, a couple from now?  Riding a healthy happy sound Tucker, yes, and eventually riding a young horse, too, which means that what I do in the interim can't be ends-justifies-the-means riding.  I can't be riding today only to get Tucker loose; I have to also be retraining my brain and my own body in correctness so that future!Hannah will sit swell, and give the right aids in the right moments, and in a way that invites the right answer.

Develop the goal = reframe the question = come up with new victory criteria.  We went back to work and it's not that I ignored whether Tuck was carrying himself properly or how hard he was hitting the ground.  It's just that those things weren't the only questions on my busy mind.  I also had, am I sitting in the middle no matter what?  Is my leg placed for him to bend around it and is my sneaky left hand refusing to cross over the wither?  When I ask him to soften, am I accepting softening for softening's sake or am I staying with it all the way, as a friend of mine says, to, "Yes, ma'am" -- until the answer to the inside rein puts him onto the outside and I can close leg and send him a fraction more through?

That ride turned into a really nice one, with Tuck all loose and swinging over his topline and light in his footfalls, and the next day was even nicer.  (And then the day after that, less so, but the day after that: yes.)  I get the ridiculousness of this even as I'm typing it (I can see you shaking your head at me, Amanda! LOL), but that's how my busy brain works, I guess: failure in the moment means panic but riding for summer Tucker, and future!babyhorse, and future!Hannah helps to keep it all in perspective and makes this one ride into a small enough bite to chew.

Now if you'll excuse me, it's finally warm enough to melt the ice; we're getting out of the indoor even if it means we end up strolling down the roads.