The vast majority of those things have required a lot of patience on my part, and endless amounts of frustration as I attempted to master one thing after another. I wouldn't say that I have a true mastery of any of those things—I haven't been doing any of them long enough to have a true mastery of them—but I've certainly learned plenty about them and about myself in the process.
The thing that has required the most dedication from me, though? The thing that has commanded the most frustration and caused the most tears and resulted in more annoyance and discomfort than I can even begin to measure?
That's horseback riding.
I've faced plenty of frustration in my musical endeavors. There have been measures that I just couldn't quite play properly on the piano no matter how hard I tried, or chords that I can't reach correctly on my guitar, or notes that I just can't hit when I sing. There are work-arounds for all of that, though, and with enough time and enough patience, I can get just about anything done in music (except hitting those high notes. Vocal range, why do you hate me?).
With horses, things are different. With horses, you can't be frustrated and just give up and walk away and tell yourself that you'll come back to it later. Every ride has to end on a good note, no matter how small, because otherwise you're setting yourself up for a bad ride the next time you get on. Your confidence gets knocked constantly and more than once, you find yourself wondering if you ever even knew how to ride at all—this is a conversation that my roommate and I have had on many an occasion—because ride after ride is filled with mistakes and you don't know how to fix them.
I have screwed up so many times in the saddle. I've screwed up on the ground. I've face-planted and gotten rope burns and been concussed. I landed on my tailbone twice in one day because we just couldn't find our distance to the jumps and I kept getting popped out of the tack. I've had the wind knocked out of me from hitting the ground, landed smack in the middle of a giant pile of branches when I fell off on trail because my horse went one way and I went the other, ripped my palms open on hay bales, been soaked to the skin from riding through a rainstorm, and I have gotten bruises in more strange places than I would care to count.
I bruise easily, admittedly. I'm quite pale and bruises show up no matter how light they are, so I'm always sporting a fun collection of them (usually on my legs). With most of them, I don't even know where they came from, but it's usually a pretty accurate guess to say that they came from something at the barn.
I almost got the skin ripped off of my hands today. I'm sporting a lovely rope burn on my wrist and a couple of slightly torn-up fingertips because one of the horses didn't want to let me take his halter off before he tried to charge away (looking back, I should've put gloves on. I know he's an asshole about turnout, but I'm an idiot, so there you go). Is that going to stop me from getting on again tomorrow (or whichever day my next ride is)?
No, it's not. I put up with discomfort at the barn unless I'm physically incapable of doing so. I'll clean up the rope burn and bandage it, put band-aids on my fingers, put on my gloves, and go, because that's just how it works. That's how it works when there are bruises on my legs from the stirrup leather buckles, when my ankles are torn up from a new pair of tall boots, when I'm sore and tired and just want to be done, because you don't become a better rider if you don't ride.
You don't become a better rider if you don't ride. You don't become a better rider if you can't put up with getting bruised and scraped and cut up, or if you can't handle being bitten and stomped on or hitting the dirt over and over again. You don't become a better rider if you can't learn to put up with the discomfort so that you can step into that barn, get to know your horse, and figure out how to fix yourself, and the discomfort isn't always physical.
I have learned to put up with frustration because of riding. I have learned to deal with being uncomfortable, with doing things the wrong way over and over again until the time that I finally manage to get it right, with nailing that distance or getting that lead change and hearing "Good—now do it again." I have learned that you never stop learning, that when you hit the dirt you just have to pick yourself back up and get back on, that nothing is impossible as long as you're willing to put up with and work through all of the things that are going to get in your way.
Denny Emerson likes to talk about how you can't become a good rider if you don't have patience—he wrote a book called How Good Riders Get Good (and I highly recommend it) so you know he's serious—and he's right. You have to have patience. You have to have patience to get through the days when your horse's head isn't in the game, and the days when yours isn't. You have to have patience to deal with the fact that sometimes your mind gets ahead of your body and you understand what to do but aren't physically capable of it.
You have to have patience to deal with bad distances and botched lead changes, screwed-up courses and the fact that you can't sit the canter like you used to (I'm so ashamed, Kim), injuries and rides that are just plain terrible. You can't be good if you aren't willing to put up with the bad days, and sometimes there are more bad days then good ones. Sometimes there are weeks—months—of bad days, and the good riders are the one who get through them, the ones who take the frustration and learn to work with it and come out better in the end.
Sure, you can buy a fancy horse that somebody else made for you, and you can ride it, and you might win on it, but you won't be able to sit a buck or a rear like that person who started with a problem horse. You won't know your horse like that person who bought something and had to work with it to really become part of a team. You won't know how to get a horse in shape when it's been out of work for a while. You won't have the ability to get over the little obstacles in your riding because you'll have never seen a big one. You won't be able to deal with the scrapes and the bruises that come with learning how to be a real equestrian, not just a person who hops in the saddle every now and then.
I've discussed bruise collections with a couple of friends—there's a few of us with sports that have given us some pretty interesting ones—but the thing about my collection is that I always have them. I've got marks all over me. Right now my legs look like I got in a fight with someone—I didn't, and I don't know where the current collection came from—but so it goes.
That's just the way it is, though. I will never not have marks all over me, just like I'll never really get the dirt out from under my fingernails or stop gravitating towards the horse world, and I've accepted that. It's just part of the deal, and it's a part that I'm willing to work with.
I have learned so much from being an equestrian, from having to deal with failure after failure, and sure, sometimes things build up and I want to quit, but I never truly do. There's too much good to go along with the things that aren't so fun.
Really, the bruises are a small price to pay for learning how to stand back up every time you fall.
(They're also a small price to pay for the fact that I can be tackled by one person, have two more people trip and land on top of me, and respond with "I'm okay!" which literally happened during a game of Ultimate once because three teenage boys landing on you is nothing compared to hitting the ground after you've come off the back of a moving horse.)
Until next time x
No comments:
Post a Comment