Reality Bites

If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know that Courage is a reactive, opinionated, sensitive thoroughbred. He survived on the track for a long time by taking care of himself. He's slow to trust and quick to get defensive.

and he rocks the hell out of this browband

For a lot of people, he's a hard horse to read. I've had more than one trainer dismiss him out of hand because while there are some cool things about him, his defensiveness makes him seem like quite an asshole. Which. I mean. Yeah.

BUT.

At the same time, the opposite response is to always assume he's a dumb horse with a pure, reactive pain response, which is also missing the boat a little. Sometimes he hurts and that's the behavior and sometimes he's protecting himself and that's the behavior.

and sometimes he's just adorable

The magic to Courage is learning how to understand him enough to know the difference. What do you ride through and say "you will" and when do you get off and look for other answers?

Obviously, an integral part of this is understand how his brain works--the "average" horse gets tired and doesn't particularly want to work, if you will. So if you up the work load and ask for more, you're going to get some resistance because prey animals like to conserve energy so that they can run away from predators.

Whereas Courage is a result of hundreds of years of domesticated, specialized breeding. He'd never last two minutes in the wild (where's my grain bitches) but he will 100% work his tail off and has never understood the word "tired".

def understands "fabulous" tho

And the hard part of riding him isn't "kicking enough to keep him going". It's the mental gymnastics of "why is he offering this behavior at this time". It's the ability to divorce my pride as a rider and trainer from his behavior and keep the conversation about the horse. It's letting go of artificial expectations and listening to what this horse has to say right now.

the only moment that matters

Please don't read this as "I'm perfect and sooooo good at everything", because I'm not. I definitely let myself get too wrapped up in goals/expectations/ideas about performance and then need a good, hard reality check.

What's more, Courage is a damn complicated horse and it's not worth it to everyone to sort him out. But. I got him straight off the track. I took his prime resale years. He's now a twelve year old horse with no particular accomplishments to his name, which is not an overly great track record. I owe it to him to do my absolute best by him because I chose to bring him into my life.

high proficiency at the velcro game tho

There's no guarantee that if I stick it out with Courage, that he'll be the next great show phenom or whatever. The odds are definitely against us.

I'm an amateur. I'm not here to win all the things and make myself look good. Horses are the part of my life that help me make sense of the rest of the world.

sometimes you can't help yourself

That doesn't mean barely scraping by and doing the bare minimums and complaining if I don't get the max payout. It means putting in the time and the money. It means effort, energy, dedication. It means looking past the surface for answers underneath, listening to my intuition, and challenging myself to be a better and stronger person.

Courage is reactive, opinionated, sensitive, and defensive. He's not for everyone.

But he's mine.

this

And because of him, I will learn to do better.