(Photo credit: Suzanne Adams)
So I’m currently in Ocala, Florida, which is total heaven for an event rider. I’m fortunate to be here for a month, and the plan was to get a jump on the competition season so I can reach my goal of moving up another level by August of this year. I’m signed up to compete this weekend, just 12 days after arriving in Florida. When I sent in the entry, I thought, “No problem. I’m entering prelim, and Chauncy can jump around that in his sleep.” As usual, life and the Lizard Brain had other plans.
Thanks to the fact that I tore a ligament in my arm last summer, I haven’t competed since the second week of August 2015. I didn’t even jump anything substantial for almost three months, and by the time I was ready for some real jumping, it was already time to go indoors for the winter. I’ve gotten some good gymnastic schooling under my belt, but it’s been 205 days since I galloped down to a big fence or a tricky combination. It turns out that a number that big had done a number on my confidence.
I got out into a field yesterday for my first cross country school of the year. I was at a 4* event rider’s facility, so I was surrounded by upper-level questions—banks to wedges, skinny to skinny bending lines, and my current bogey fence, a keyhole—not one, but three of them. And all of a sudden, I felt like I should be competing at grasshopper, not intermediate. My Lizard Brain was 100% convinced that we were going to die. The pressure of an event only 5 days away was overwhelming.
So I gave up.
I gave up the idea of competing this weekend. I gave up the idea that I should be as confident now, after 205 days away from cross country jumping, as I was at the peak of last season. I gave up expecting my horse to be perfectly well-behaved in his favorite discipline, one I’d deprived him of for 205 days. (I realized this would be like expecting me to have one bite of Ben and Jerry’s after giving up ice cream for that long. Not. Going. To. Happen.) I gave up my perfect expectations. And then we went to work.
We worked on rideability, we worked on remembering how to ride bold and forward. We started small, small enough to insult the Little Black Sportscar. “Seriously, you’re making me jump this? Don’t you know how badass I am? What about that big table over there?” Eventually, we got to the big table, and the skinny-to-skinny combination, and the smallest keyhole. And I decided that, rather than forcing myself to compete this weekend when I don’t feel ready, we’ll come back to this field, and build on what we just accomplished. I have three more weeks here. By the time we head home, I’ll have jumped all of the tough questions in that field, and I’ll be able to head to the April events with a sense of confidence and not foreboding. My Lizard Brain will still hop around a little—that’s what it’s supposed to do—but it won’t have to have a full-on panic attack, because we’ll be ready.
Sometimes, you have to know when to give up in order to move forward.
