Hey Asshole...

The title is from a Watsky song, one of my favorites actually. Well, most of them are my favorites. The lyrics go like this (not in order): 

The attitude I wish I had all the
time, I forgot to hand my phone
off and it started slipping out of
my brace so I had to chuck it out
of the arena lol

Hey asshole,

See the sun is shining

But you are not smiling

And I don't know why

I know I'm often told

That there's a pot of gold

But I don't see no fucking rainbow and my coffee's cold

I know I should be grateful

I know I'm good and able

But I don't have the strength to get up from the kitchen table

Got the power of my will
I don't wanna win a mil
But I'm looking at window sill
Gotta take a bitter pill
Gonna pay for what I did to my head and my heart'll foot the bill

Telling myself it'll happen when I'm happy
But I'm climbing up a ladder that has got no end
Hung up on a rung I'll never make it to the top
I'm looking at the bottom and I must descend
All I want to do is buck this trend
Everybody need a buck to spend
And I'll be working on myself, 'til I work on someone else
'Til I get there Ima just pretend

Obviously it's a song about depression. I am not depressed. I have some problems like most people do, but depression isn't one of them. Which is I guess one thing I have going for me currently, at least for now, this pandemic has shown us that anything can happen, right?! But I really relate to some of these lyrics when it comes to my feelings about dressage over the last year. 

Early canters with this horse were mildly out of control

In so many ways, I am no longer the person I was when I was chasing down my Gold Medal, or before getting any medals at all. I almost feel like the accomplishment of the Gold Medal ruined the sport of dressage for me in some ways (wow I sound like SUCH an asshole saying that, hence why I thought about the song above). A lot of people work their whole lives for something I earned when I was just 28 years old (again, putting this in writing is so painful to me, I am SUCH A DICK I AM SO SORRY). I mean what do you do next, really? Start over and do it again, but better. Because does it really count if it was just one horse? Does it really count if I didn't score in the 70s? Does it really count if it wasn't at a CDI? Were my judges too easy? Is it too easy to get scores these days? 

I talked to new remote trainer about this. Told her the story of walking out of my first Grand Prix on Rico. On a horse who had recovered from so many injuries, some supposedly career ending. A horse I had brought through the levels myself (in lessons, of course, but rarely with training rides) for almost ten years. My heart horse. And I walked out of the ring upset... not in that "happy tears" kind of upset (which is what I expected), but low key annoyed that we'd halted in one of the piaffes. That our passage wasn't as powerful as it is at home. Worried for the score. So many emotions, but none of them were joy or happiness, the closest was maybe relief? No emotions about me finally making it this far on my own horse. 

Conversely, TC is always happy at shows

 

I always thought that making it to the Grand Prix on my heart horse would be the number one thing that made me most happy in riding. Maybe this will change in the future but... it's really nowhere near the top of the list of things that have made me most happy in my riding. 

Jumping a course on Rico bridleless made me way happier than getting my Gold medal. Galloping him on the trails after getting my Gold medal. Teaching my clients on him. Taking TC to the bombproofing clinic when he was older and having him help other horses through the obstacles that once made him so reactive. Earning a 73% at TC's first overnight show at First level. Jumping Flounder at Twin just last month. 

I would say that earning my Gold medal doesn't even make the top 10 most happy times I've ever had on horses. Probably not even top 20. It was so unbelievably stressful and honestly kind of lonely, which was weird because I was surrounded by my friends and family and trainer. I took such a deep breath coming home from that last show. I cried, but again, they were not happy tears. They were tears of relief mostly, and some sadness about Rico retiring. I kept repeating to myself "I will never go down centerline on him again" that night. 

I've heard that the best part of completing your PhD is telling people about it, or how impressed they are to hear you correct them with "actually, it's doctor" and I would say that the Gold medal is the same for that. When my new kids ask me what level I've competed at and I say "Grand Prix" that's way better than earning it.

Maybe the happiest part is seeing pictures of it?

And ever since, it's made dressage so much harder on me mentally. There I go being an asshole again. I feel like there's a lot of pressure on me. I'm a Grand Prix rider, right? I've got those stupid lapel pins weighing down the left side of my coat after all. So if I'm showing at the lower levels, I better be scoring into the 70s, right? Moving up the levels has got to be easier now, right? I mean, I've already done it all before so it's a walk in the park now. 

If I struggle now, does that mean that I didn't rightly earn my medals? If I can't get another horse to do the Grand Prix, am I a one hit wonder? If I communicate my struggles, is it just a sign to other people that I am actually undeserving of my accomplishments? Or, somehow worse, if I communicate my struggles, am I just going to hear "omg it's so great to hear that even Grand Prix riders struggle with the same things I struggle with!" which is easy to take in the wrong way. 

I like the silly pictures too, Rico didn't give me as
many of those

Enter: TC. A conformational sinkhole. A horse who will try his heart out for me, sure, but a horse who is not built for the sport. As remote trainer said, "he's not the worst built horse for the sport, but he's never going to make a team." If I could put his mind in Rico's body, I would have had a team horse, I'm pretty sure of it. He's got the brain for the sport but the body is challenging to arrange in the right place, especially as we hit the collection required at Third level (and I've even heard that "the only reason you got that far on him is because you're an exceptional test rider" which... ouch but also thanks? How do you take that?). 

New trainer says "there's no book on how to take your friesian cross to the upper levels, all the books are written for other types of horses, you have to write your own book" and that is really tough. Everything about Rico was pretty much by the book, even the shitty books. You could read that Charlotte Dujardin says to keep your legs off a lazy horse and it'd work. What about a horse who can go from zipping out from under you to balking in a half circle though? Hmmm. 

TC's first show and a good example of the starting point

We talked about how this is kind of a recipe for disaster mentally. I did it backwards, she said. She took an off breed horse (a mustang she worked with from start to finish! so cool!) through the upper levels and now she's coming back on her warmblood. She says she feels like she's cheating, it's so easy to get this horse through the levels with all her prior experience and this horse's natural abilities. She had to work so hard to get her off breed horse up the levels when she knew less, now she knows more AND is on an easier horse. 

I took a warmblood through the levels, making tons of mistakes along the way and somehow having it just pay off for me. Every mistake was recoverable and I got really lucky. I mean, Rico was nearly impossible to ride in the snaffle at the end, just slap a double bridle on. TC would never, he'd crumple. Even now, Rico's topline looks pretty good, he hasn't been ridden in years. He's just built to have those muscles. TC exercising him by galloping around every morning is improving Rico's topline... and probably doing the opposite to TC's. 

Looking over at the crowd during
our free walk LOL

Don't get me wrong, it's HARD to do the Grand Prix. No one doing Grand Prix is having an easy goddamn time with it. Steffen Peters is struggling (I assume this but it seems like it'll track, Steffen if you're reading this please verify). It's hard to do dressage in general, regardless of level or horse breeding or conformation or whatever. Dressage is hard. But Rico is the kind of horse where you could get a bit chaotic with your aids because you got frustrated and he'd just... get rounder and maybe slow down a bit. You could have a trainer say "hold the outside rein and massage the inside rein and he'll go on the bit!" and have it low key work. At least, work well enough to get you through Fourth level. TC's structural integrity drops out from underneath me seemingly at random, even when I'm not frustrated or doing the wrong thing. Conformational sink hole. I'll chase this down with bodywork and vet work and the willingness to inject anything the moment he asks for it, but some of it is just how he is. 

So here I am, putting so much pressure on myself. Hearing from trainers to "use my considerable experience" hearing from people in passing "oh it must be so much easier to come back through the levels since you've already done it!" hearing from myself "well, if you're not going to score better than you did on Rico at this level, what is even the point of showing?" and so on. And I'm riding this horse who, again is the sweetest creature, but who is challenging inherently, to probably a lot of people, not just me. The fact that I can't think of a trainer to send him to for him to actually improve his posture is telling... I've ridden with a lot of trainers where I walk away thinking that he looked worse after the lesson than before. 

His second or third show (just schooling this first
year because he was nuts), coming btv was very
easy for him, toooo easy ugh

Last year we were so successful in terms of scores, but I realized that the path we were going down was not the right one. TC was short in the neck, on the forehand, and behind the vertical. Like all the time. It's okay for me to not want to show him like that, it's okay to strive to be better. I want to put my horse first and what I was being told to do was not putting the horse first. 

But striving to be perfect is going to make me quit this sport SO quickly. Striving to be the best one on a horse who is not the best one (to ME he is, don't get me wrong here, he is the best horse in the world IMO) isn't going to work out for me. And for TC, he loves learning and he loves showing and I'm taking those things away from him right now by focusing so much on building a perfect solid foundation that will never be perfectly solid. 

So I'm going to try hard to find a balance between last year and this year. Between shoving him through the levels last year with no focus on his conformational issues and slowing down to a standstill this year because if it's not done perfectly, it's not worth doing at all. 

It's going to take a lot of work for me and probably a lot of leaning on other people. I am so excited to have remote trainer in my corner. She's affordable and available and totally gets the weirdness I am feeling. She likes TC a lot and seems equally as excited to help me work on the basics as to help me get him back in the show ring this fall or next year. Also a huge shoutout to all my friends who have had to read huge paragraphs of me whining and look at so many videos where they're probably like "I don't know why Megan is so upset about this... it's just TC trotting."

He's always loved showing so I do want to show him

I've been feeling way better about these things in the last week. My last lesson with remote trainer and then my lesson with local trainer (and all of her sweet clients telling me how great we looked and how beautiful TC is) really helped me out. And then the acupuncture this week made me feel better too. We are getting there, slowly but surely.  

But still, I think I have a long way to go for my mental game to be good enough to head back into the show ring with TC. But it really seems like we are getting somewhere! Hopefully we can keep up this momentum, the air isn't looking like it's going to let us though, ugh.