“Let’s take a break tonight and then we’ll teach them how to say goodbye.”
How do you write a blog post to commemorate the end of a 10-year show career with a superfreak of a mare who changed your life? Every fairy tale has its happily ever after, and I wish I could start this off with completing that for everyone by saying that we won our last grand prix.
Nikki and I are about halfway through our show season this summer, and we have a new mantra. It’s called “less is more,” and features trusting your instincts, something that I’ve struggled with a bit this year.
Less is more means not overthinking and overanalyzing. It means turning off the scientist part of my brain while I’m riding, which is tough because as I approach starting vet and grad school, I’ve been working that part pretty hard. Less is more means riding off my feel, not getting married to a number of strides.
Hello there. Remember me?
I said I was going to take the winter to mull over whether I wanted to keep blogging or not after I had a bit of an issue with someone apparently stalking me over my choice of bit. I needed a break to figure out what I wanted to do, as that was rather alarming. But I like blogging and sharing my riding life with people, so after the winter off, I think it’s time for another shot.
If anyone who reads this is a Rascal Flatts fan, you might recognize this blog title as a song title. The lyrics include the phrase “things that matter, things that don’t.” As Nikki and I wrapped up our year, that phrase was on my mind: focusing on the things that mattered, not the ones that didn’t.
It’s been one heck of a year.
Things came together for me and for Nikki this year—we had a consistency that we haven’t been able to achieve before—and because of that, we were able to reach a lot of the goals that I set.
I had to be talked into going to the Minnesota Harvest Horse Show (which I will refer to as “Harvest” for the remainder of this blog post).
It took a lengthy conversation with Elzabeth, during which she repeatedly tried to get me to understand that I probably ride better now than I did four years ago, when I last attempted to show indoors. She had to pound it through my head that in all likelihood, I was not going to go in and fall off at fence 4, or get jumped off and break my hand on my jaw on the way down, or find myself in Nikki’s stall at the end of the day crying.
Well. How to start this blog post?
Best comeback week ever? No, too cheesy. Best mare ever? True, but I say that in every post, so it’s not really news. I’m struggling with finding a way to convey my excitement through words. Let’s go with…
If you ever meet me at a show, you’ll probably also meet a similarly petite woman with insanely curly blonde hair who looks almost nothing like me, aside from build. She certainly doesn’t look old enough to be my mother, but she is.
Meet the Chronicle's latest blogger, show jumper Emily Pope. She's trying to balance riding her Thoroughbred mare with recovering from a back injury and a full-time job.
The last time I struggled this much to post the trot for 15 minutes straight was when I first started riding, or about 18 years ago.
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