Riding is a sport that is driven by goal setting, and for me, having something to work towards is my motivation to keep improving myself in this sport. As these goals have moved from learning to jump, to jump 3’6”, to owning my first horse, I have always had one achievement in my mind- to compete on the A Circuit. We all have these aspirations, and thankfully most of the time we are pretty successful in achieving them. Although sometimes things don’t always work out, and believe me I have definitely had my fair share of those moments. Unfortunately, last week was one of those times were my goal that was perfectly planned out in my mind just did not seem work out.
This past week, I took my horse Niall’s to our very first A Circuit horse show at Angelstone Tournaments in Rockwood, Ontario. Having almost completely trained her myself (with help from my trainer of course), this was a very important and emotional event for me. It was something I had been waiting so long for that it felt like everything had to go perfectly... and boy was I wrong. With the combination of maxed out fences, thick grass and the ever present horse show pressure, things didn’t go as perfect as I had hoped. Now don’t get me wrong Niall’s was a trooper through everything and put in two clear rounds once we dropped down to a lower division, but I still left the barn that evening feeling disappointed. Then after some thinking, I came to a realization:
In riding, we deal with setbacks on a constant basis, but there may be that one time we fall down were we do find it hard to pick ourselves back up again. And my advice? There’s nothing wrong with taking a breath for a second while your metaphorically lying on the ground; but the important thing is that you do carry on. There is always bad in the good, although it may be hard to see sometimes. And the difficulties I faced at this show? It just makes me want to go out next time and work even harder. When working with these animals things won’t always go to plan, and I think we just need to accept that. It’s a hard thing to do trust me, but we have to push through. We can replay that perfect jump- off round, or posting trot over and over again in our mind, but when asked to really do it in reality it may be far from that perfect day dream we pictured so many times before. And I think what I’m just trying to say that it is okay! It’s okay to fail once in a while! It happens to the best of us. The important thing is that we pick ourselves up, move forward to future success and accept that not everything goes to plan.
