Fortune Favors the Prepared Mind

"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it."

-William Hazlitt

Prior to owning a horse, one of the charmingly naive ideas I had about horse ownership was that it would ensure that I always had something to ride. (Which is a bit like saying, "I'm so sick of the crappy plumbing in this apartment! If I owned my own place, I wouldn't have to deal with any of this!" Hah hah. Yeah.) Since I obviously now fall into the "older and more cynical" camp, I've had some time to reflect on the inevitability of periods in which I won't be able to ride. These fall into three categories:

1. The horse is injured, sick, or cranky.
2. I am injured, sick, or cranky.
3. I have no horse.

I spent a large part of last year dealing with category #1, I had instances of confronting the possibility of category #2, and I am currently in category #3. Once I get back from my travels and my Trainer Dude gets back from Florida we will be working to remedy this, but since I plan on being actively involved with horses for the duration of my life, I can see that I need to come up with ways to deal with the times when I am unable to ride. These seem to boil down to two problems, either I don't have a horse to ride, or I am physically incapable of riding.

Lack of Horse, Able to Ride

This has been my main issue so far, but even though it's been driving me bonkers and I've been venting my frustration far and wide, it is probably the easier scenario to deal with. 

• Find people with horses who are willing to share. When my last horse was on stall rest I was very lucky in having a trainer who owned a schoolmaster. She was very generous in giving me lessons and ride time on him. Even after the schoolmaster was semi-retired and my horse started slowly coming back into work, she found me another horse to ride occasionally. More recently, barn manager extraordinaire and all around hilarious person Meredith has very generously given me ride time on her guy Willie (who deserves his own post, I can't do justice to him here.) And the Lipipotamus's Amazing New Trainer lived up to her name by giving me a lesson Sunday on her own eight-year old competition horse (in a double bridle, no less. And yes, she had seen me ride before!) The two experiences I had share boarding with total strangers are what convinced me it was time to buy a horse in the first place, and I will never go down that road again. But I can see that, once you get involved with the horse community and get to know people, opportunities are there, and there is always something to learn. 

• Train for riding off of the horse. This also deserves its own post, but essentially, I call bullshit on anyone who says things like "Well, there's nothing you can do off the horse to engage the muscles you use in riding," and "Riding is about balance and coordination, not strength," and just generally makes excuses for why they don't exercise or even stretch. My first proper trainer was one of those types, and we actually got into a couple of civilized arguments about it. He preferred to ascribe the progress I made in my riding to some mystical "talent." I guess because I'm the only one who knows exactly what I'm doing outside of the stable, it's more obvious to me than it is to other people. But I know, through experience, that there are a lot of things that I can do physically to prepare my body so I get the most out of the time I have riding. And I can feel a very direct and fairly immediate difference when I do them as opposed to when I slack off. I am just like practically everyone else in the Western world in exercising less than I could or should, and I know that I have room for improvement. But I feel like this has been one of the key factors in making it possible for me to do the stop-start riding I've done all this past year. I still have lag time when I relearning everything that I used to know, but physically I'm not starting from anything like scratch.

•  Mental training away from the horse. I'm assuming that anyone who is really into dressage is already fairly obsessive about books, DVDs, clinics, etc. What I am referring to here is something I actually have not tried yet.
  
  
  It came about from the Amazing New Trainer's lesson on Sunday. Bless her heart, A.N.T. wanted to see if I could get a few steps of piaffe and/or passage out of her mare, just so I could have the experience of feeling them (and, I think, to give me something to look forward to so I'd be a little less grumpy about being back at the figuring out how to walk, trot, canter, steer and halt stage.) I totally failed on both movements, and she was a little disappointed on my behalf, but I genuinely didn't care. I've never even tried to ask for those movements before, and just the act of physically sitting up there and trying to do it gave me a mental concept of them that I've never gotten from reading about it or watching other riders perform them.
  
  
  I am aware of Jane Savoie's training material on visualisation. (But cheese and crackers! I am not sold enough on the concept to shell out the kind of money she's asking. And her infomercial-style website does not persuade me to give it a try.) Guided visualization exercises would probably help once you know the feeling of a movement.What I'm talking about here is a little different.
  
  
  What I realized on Sunday is simply this: when I read about riding, I still very often picture it from a third-person, "video camera" perspective. Which is partially just laziness - it's easier to consume something as it's presented than mentally (and often physically) do the work of picturing myself performing the movements, and actually standing up or sitting upright in a chair, shifting my seatbones, moving my legs, holding my arms, etc. (I have been thinking for a while about building a wooden saddle stand that is elevated off of the ground so that I could sit on it with the stirrups down. Which no, would not really be like being on a moving horse, and yes, is probably a crazy idea. But I dunno, it seems to me like sitting in a saddle when I'm, say, on my laptop, or reading (equally ridiculous contraption to function as minimal desk at appropriate height would also have to be created) would at least give me that many extra hours a day when my body is sort of doing what I want it to do when I ride, am I right? I will discuss this with the saddle fitter I know when I see her, she has a lovely saddle stand that she uses for trying out saddles.)
  
  
  Related to this, I rode Willie on Sunday shortly after my lesson, and had a PHENOMENAL ride on him. (Obvious evidence that I need two horses, not just one.) Part of it was due to me being warmed up mentally and physically to ride, but I think it was more a result of, for whatever reason, the lesson unlocking in my mind what the physical sensation of "right" feels like. 
  
  
  I'm pretty sure that the problems I was having were more to do with my upper body being stiff and protective and that most of the changes happened up there. I could definitely feel my torso open up (mental imagery that pops into my head is of the big sails on those old Spanish galleons unfurling in the wind. Apologies if I inadvertently ripped that off from someone else.) My seat connected deep into the saddle, my shoulders relaxed, my arms functioned like they were supposed to.
  
  
  
  I had a stronger conscious awareness of what was going on with my lower body. My knees were like, We wanna scooch forward a bit. They got scooched, and then my heels went Yay! We are right down here beneath your seat bones. Mmm, weight drop. And my legs were all, Willie's warm. Let's wrap around Willie. A little while later, I was trotting around, thinking everything was fine, but then my knees were all HEY UP THERE! WE'RE NOT HAPPY! I looked down, and they'd shifted back to the old spot, so I scooched 'em forward, and they were all Mmmm.
  
  
  As annoying as I'm sure that was to read, that's pretty much what it was like. Oh, and I got that whole 'hula-hoop belly, cocktail waitress upper body' for bits of it, at the walk, anyway. It crossed my mind to try cantering (there is an issue I've been working through, and I haven't cantered outside of lessons recently), but I always like to err on the side of ending on a good note rather than pressing my luck. But at the end of the ride I did do tons and tons of three-loop serpentines at the walk without stirrups on a loose rein, because, Oh yeah! Moving your outside leg back as a turning aid is really just a natural consequence of opening up your outside hip, which is really where the movement should originate. And, in addition to looking pretty and connecting leg parts, knees can actually serve a function of keeping the inside shoulder from falling in. And I can feel my seatbones and notice where my weight is and adjust accordingly! Magic!
  
  
  I have experienced something similar in other times I've returned to riding after a break, where I'm not getting it and I'm not getting it, and then, Oh yeah! And it all starts coming back. Part of this is related to what I call "The Futility of Working on Body Parts in Isolation", which is, again, probably a topic for another post. (Yes, I do have a lot to say for an adult amateur who's been doing this for about five minutes. Thank you for noticing!) The relevant bit to my current post (and I promise, it ties in somewhere) is that I'm realizing that I have not really used my mental resources to their full capacity, either in the saddle or out. There is an element of "remembering" how to ride that is physical, and some of it is concrete knowledge, but clearly there's something a little more subconscious that kicks in. My subconscious is aware of what I am doing in a way that my conscious is not. In a number of ways, over the last year or so, I've felt like my subconscious has gone to great lengths to tell my conscious brain things about my horse life and my riding. As a total coincidence, I had two conversations somewhat recently with different friends about their meditation practices, and one of them recommended books by Jon Kabat-Zinn. And a third friend recently told me how to check out books from our local library for my Kindle. So. Whether or not it does anything else for me, mindfulness meditation when I am not riding seems like it would be helpful for training my mind to be... mindful, I guess, when I am riding. I'll let you know how it goes.

This post is already way too long, so I'm going to do a separate post on the strategy I'm thinking of for dealing with the (probably inevitable) periods when I am unable to ride due to my own physical injury or illness. Stay tuned!