November 13, 2005

The thrill of it all

Riding is a dangerous sport, which is maybe why it’s so satisfying, tantalizing and both physically and emotionally edifying. Maybe motorcycling and skydiving qualify for a somewhat distant second place. Riding incorporates both skill, daredevilishness, communication with a large animal with a mind of its own and a thirst for well, not perfection, but getting better at it all. Now where else can you achieve that?

Falling off is no fun. There’s a common adage that says that you will never become a fully-fledged rider until you’ve fallen off a hundred times. Maybe a hundred times is pushing it, but most riders have fallen off at least a number of times and you learn from each and every experience, mostly because the one fall is never the same as the next. Getting thrown off in the woods because the horse gets spooked from a red plastic bag that some damn nature-loving mushroom picker carelessly threw away and hitting your shoulder on a rock that has spent the last 20,000 years just waiting to meet you is one thing. It’s a completely different thing riding towards a hurdle, keeping your eyes focused beyond the rail that you and your horse are going to jump, making a wrong decision like looking askance at the wrong moment or shifting your weight slightly, oh so slightly in the wrong direction and then getting thrown off in an extremely inglorious fashion. It’s a toss-up which is worse, the mistake that you made which was evident to most people looking at you, or the physical pain you suffer as a result.


Prince William falling off


Motorcycles and airplanes are machines. They usually don’t have a mind of their own, at least not outside the world of fantasy. But horses are like you and me. They go through infancy, childhood, puberty, adulthood and old age. Castor is 11 years old and should be an adult by this time, but he’s still in a somewhat pubescent stage and acts like a teenager. All of you who’ve had one around the house know what I mean: you never know what to expect and they eat enormous quantities of food. That's Castor in a nutshell.

But as in my case having parented a couple of teenagers, you know how to handle the unexpected. As far as my Castor is concerned, this means everything from jumping five feet to the side in a split second because he sees something as innocuous as his own reflection in the mirror in the manége or bucking gleefully, because it’s freezing cold and that’s the weather that makes him hyperactive. I think the weirdest accident I had was the concussion from getting thrown after a hurdle. I don’t know how I landed, but I didn’t get hurt... I jumped back on Castor and finished the series of hurdles I was doing. A while later I was standing in the stable calmly brushing him off when I realized I didn’t know where I was. I’d lost about twenty minutes of prime time with my horse and had no recollection of what we had been doing. But my friends told me I’d made several successful jumps in that space of time.

But it’s an individual you’re with. He’s got a mind of his own, legs of his own, muscles of his own and a temperament of his own, and that’s the thrill of it all.



So the moral of this blog post is this: Screw skydiving. Screw motorcycling and screw human catapulting. Get yourself a horse.

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