Olivia started this with one of the coolest blog posts I've read in a while and then Liz pitched in and now I want to give it a go. Here's what I would tell myself as a brand new adult amateur horse owner who just got handed the lead rope to the hellmare and all the things that followed:
aw look how i'm not on her
1) You have no idea what you're getting in to.
I rode as a kid, on lesson horses and half leases here and there. I worked hard and cleaned stalls and did 4H and never had the newest, nicest, or best, but I read everything I could get my hands on, spent every moment I could get at the barn, rode anything anyone would let me, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
best old man horse
2) You have no idea how much you need this.
Horses and horse people have been a driving force for good in my life on so many levels. The people I've met and connections I've made have shaped the life I lead today in more ways than I can count. No matter what was going on in the rest of my life, I was always surrounded by passionate, intelligent, driven women who became role models to me whether they knew it or not.
possibly our best jump lesson ever
3) Even your lowest moments will shape you in positive ways.
When I had my wreck on the hellmare and was too afraid to keep trying but too stupid to quit, I found a community of people to ask hard questions and help me find perspective. When I lost Cuna, I was surrounded by once in a lifetime friends who carried me through dark times I couldn't handle alone. When I had to let go of Courage, I was again among incredible people who helped both of us find a resolution.
and this is how you jump a bank with 3 broken bones which is apparently a thing i can do
4) The horses are pretty great too.
Every one of them has something to show me and learning to listen and communicate, shape behavior and respond, has been transformative in my life. To me, it's not about the shows and the ribbons and the outfits. Learning to connect and trust another living being is a truly amazing experience and to me it makes the blood, sweat, tears, and dollars all worth it so many times over.
I love how horses can continue to evolve with us. My goals and approach now are completely different than they used to be. I'm more relaxed and more focused. I never expected to be where I am today, but now that I'm here, I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Thanks to Amanda for starting, Liz for making it cool, Leah for forcing me to brainstorm, T for 100% agreeing that publishing lists on the internet is ill-advised, and all of the above for being awesome anyways.
why yes i did order this
Without further ago, here are 30 indispensable facts about me that you were definitely dying to know.
1) I am deeply suspicious of lists that reveal personal information on the internet.
2) I've read War and Peace for fun. Twice. And Moby Dick. And Atlas Shrugged is next on my list because of Jen. (See also: nerd.)
3) If I had my life to do over, I'd be a professor at a university or a heavy equipment mechanic, with job prospects, job security, and pay grade inclining me towards the latter.
meet dik dik jesus
4) I hate fish. Alive. Dead. All of them.
5) I never wanted to be a vet.
6) I never wanted to be a horse trainer.
wish i'd trained her to do this
7) I was a ballroom dancer in college. Still miss it.
8 ) If you think horse people have drama, you haven't met dancers.
9) I've never played an organized team sport in my life.
10) I've always wanted to win a belt buckle but never participated in a sport that dispensed them.
me RN
11) I think pie is overrated.
12) Same with cake.
13) I once made my own costume to go to a fantasy movie premier. There are pictures.
guess that might not surprise you
14) My first car was the same age as me.
15) I like to drive down roads just to see where they go.
16) My favorite music is female-fronted symphonic euro-metal.
17) I don't read non-fiction.
31. my favorite animal is dik diks
18) I love cheese and pasta.
19) I got married so young people thought I was in a weird cult.
20) I didn't join a weird cult until much later.
pictured: the cult as dik diks
21) I don't read horse blog posts about dogs. But I do like dogs.
22) I actually don't like cats.
23) Cats also don't like me.
24) I always hated teeny dogs until I got one and now I'm obsessed with him.
no one can even in the face of Teeny
25) I rarely read books written in the last century. That's how you can be sure all the shitty ones got filtered out.
26) I rarely watch tv that's more than a couple years old because I want to be entertained RIGHT NOW and have no patience.
27) I hate watching videos. I'm a fast reader. Don't waste my time.
i am one self important dik dik
28) I delete more friends than i add on Facebook, but consider myself relatively extroverted. Relatively is probably a key term here.
32) and i regularly consider changing this gerenuk to my profile pic
29) The only constellation I can pick out on a regular basis is Orion. Sometimes the big dipper, but I always see Orion first.
30) I live 30 minutes from a ski resort and don't ski. I mean, I did ski a couple times, but there are only so many dangerous, time consuming, expensive hobbies a girl can have.
Emma got everyone talking about Thoroughbred pedigrees again, which is super cool. I really, really wish I was the pedigree queen who cared about breeding and shit, but I'm not and I don't. I do, however, have friends that are SUPER into it. So I coast on that.
My one friend who ought to blog and doesn't made me this. It's Courage's pedigree with photos of all the relatives she could track down, which is pretty cool.
His sire is Lord Carson.
def didn't get chrome from daddy
Courage was born 2005, so bred 2004. Per this article, Lord Carson's stud fee was 10k in 2002, 5k in 2003. Lord Carson won 12/27 races and made over 600k, so a decent stallion but not what you'd call "royally bred" or anything, other than his slightly pretentious name.
Oh and this. This TOTALLY sounds like Courage: "Grade 2 winner LORD CARSON (Carson City) died on March 16 due to head injuries he suffered while in the breeding shed. " Dramatic freak breeding accident? Yup. I can see that. Courage isn't even a stallion and he'd like to have one of those. Furthermore, depending on who you ask, that was either a totally random whoopsie or HIGHLY correlated with his rapidly plunging value in the breeding shed with an insurance renewal coming up. So that's kind of interesting. Definitely theatrical.
fabio-approved
Courage is a pretty unique guy--I was initially attracted to his confidence and calm and when further poking around Lord Carson lore (who knew?!), I found these quotes about the plain bay stallion: "The first time I got to ride him was in November of his three year old year and he was already built like a six year old."
That checks out. C has always been BEEFY. Like "his race trainer put him on a diet" style beefy. He's built and he's not ashamed of it.
"And he had the body awareness of a mature horse too. And confidence. He was a bay horse and he had a swagger. He walked slowly, purposely, with the confidence of a lion and a kind demeanor."
Dying laughing here. Check, check, and check. Courage believes in Courage and Courage does what Courage wants. He always takes care of himself, isn't racy or quick, and goddamn he's an incredibly confident horse. He's scared of nothing.
"Lord Carson showed speed and used it tactically as a weapon. He didn’t need to go as fast as he could and he clearly wasn’t running scared. Other horses didn’t intimidate him and he used his speed wisely and with intimidation. He was just so damn cool."
Yeaaaaaah pretty much. He's totally unbothered by other horses and actually tends to do things just to get under their skin.
And then this: "It was in this moment that I saw another side to my kind, confident, friend He was pissed!" and "As soon as I lowered my body a few inches Lord Carson accelerated and his stride lengthened so far and so powerfully that his body literally lowered four or five inches."
Emotional and overly sensitive? Hm who does that sound like?
not courage!!
It's all from this article, which is super entertaining if you're obsessed with Courage and his quirks.
Other horses in his past are either so far back I just can't get excited or are super hard to research on account of being named after American State Capitols (I'm looking at you, Carson City). Or you know. Never did anything interesting or were super important to anyone (cough Lori Gail wtf woman).
Courage is a genetic dead end due to the whole "gelding" thing, but it makes me laugh to know he comes by it all honestly.
There's a blog hop going around now that shows striking before-and-after shots of the horses of the blog world we all know and love.
That's great. Love that hop.
But I always think that to participate, one should have "arrived" somewhere, you know? Like JenS had Connor from when he was a teeny baby and now he's showing recognized. And Carly knew Bobby as the muleish baby, but now he's a muleish dressage horse who has moves and stuff.
I thought about doing a progression of fails, but people think I'm down on myself or my horse or something when I get too involved with that.
Or I can do this:
2012
2016
But all that really proves is that Alyssa has always been pretty freaking amazing, since she took both shots.
I've been chatting with Emma lately, and she reminded me that I have this giant backlog of text and image-based media called a "blog" in which I can actually check up on my progress from year to year.
So I looked.
Here's Courage in February of 2016:
rope halter tells me this was a subpar day
And here he is in October of 2016:
tack tells me i need to be better about taking conformation shots
To me, that says a lot, but it also misses a lot. Yeah, Courage is turning into something truly beautiful. I'm proud of him and I'm excited for what we do together. (It's cool y'all--we're back on the upswing.)
What a before and after doesn't show is the ugly we went through to get here.
when he decided he was uncatchable
when we started bolting every diagonal in every test
I take a lot of pictures (you might have noticed) and sometimes it's tempting to create this perfect online image where nothing ever goes wrong and Courage is always perfect. That's not realistic. Sure, I can cherry pick those images, but what's the point? Courage is a real horse. I'm a real person. We have good days and bad days.
And while yes, I can definitely tell you that Courage is improving on the whole, we're far from "arrived" and the struggle actually is real.
so real
But thanks to that giant media backlog, I can review stuff like this. Here's Courage in January all animated and prancing. Look at his slack topline. Look at his leg movement. Look at the quality of the canter. There's some nice moments in there, sure, but this is about as animated as he's ever been so that's the absolute nicest you'd ever see at that time.
But hey! There are magic phones in the future (aka now) too, so I took another video the other day. I was just videoing some free lunging to catch his movement right now, but then he got "wild" and I was laughing too much to stop. Regardless. Here's current Courage:
Now maybe I'm a little too obsessive for most of y'all here, but I see a different horse. One whose normal trot is hella better (and the animated trot at the end is pretty damn fancy). I see a horse who canters in an entirely different way. I see a horse learning to use his body and not just careening around with his back totally stiff.
And one thing I know for sure about Courage is that he has to learn how to do things on his own before he can start to offer it under saddle.
didn't have this last year
So yeah. We're in a hard place in training and no one who watches us is like "mind.blown. olympics are calling and only you will do."
But we're trending in the right direction, taking small, incremental steps, and what the hell. I believe in the little guy. I believe in us.
this is old style courage bucking. it fixes nothing. the kicking out is new this year.
I mean, I'm dorkily excited about his bucking--Courage has always been so stuck in his body that he does not "self correct" issues. Where a normal horse is like "my back is tight/stuck. I will roll or buck hard to fix it," Courage just sort of stays tight. It's bad. I dunno how he's doing on the rolling front, but learning to buck could be a game changer for this horse. Not even kidding. At a minimum, it means he's learning to use his body in a whole new way, which is AWESOME. Potentially, it also means he's learning how his body should feel and taking steps to keep it that way himself. Omg. I will take it.
Austen started this off with a bang, then Marissa jumped in. And what can I say? As another blogger with a horse sporting a larger-than-life personality, I had to try it too.
I hope this isn't too 90s for most of you, but Courage really reminds me of the infamous Darkwing Duck. From his bloated self image to his dashing persona, the similarities are just striking.
This is how Courage sees himself:
And this is him when he remembers to actually go to work:
Then he realizes he might not have to do what I'm asking.
And gets all mouthy to me.
RAWR SUPER COURAGE
Of course, his "let's get dangerous" catch phrase is absolutely perfect.
But it's hard to take him seriously when he looks like this.
Besides, any more his threats are more this:
But he never fails to approach a lady with 100% confidence.
It just fits. I probably need to get him a purple cape.
Amanda asks this week "what are those little things that make your horse special?"
It's really funny timing--I've been having a bunch of those weird "all the feels" moments about Courage lately, so here's a collection of things I love about my little guy.
He's the vainest horse I've ever met. People love this picture. They don't realize that I could take it EVERY SINGLE DAY because that is how much he loves looking at himself.
He's so opinionated. Courage will never go silently into the night about ANYTHING. Ever. Whether it's the feel of dirt under his feet or the desire for cookies right now, he doesn't so much wear his heart on his sleeve as get it a permanent address there.
He specializes in posing dramatically. Not even kidding. This is what he thinks spooking is. People wonder why I always have kickass pictures of him, and this is it. Left to his own devices, all he wants to do is model.
He's very brave. He will spook at things, but he'd really rather march up, stick his nose on it, and find out if it's food. Or if it can be made to provide food. And if it's like this yoga ball and does neither, he cannot be persuaded to continue being interested in it. (No seriously after I took this, he walked to the gate and begged cookies off another boarder).
He's so helpless. A California horse to his very core, he has no idea how to survive without people handing him everything. Or even that it's possible. Or that anyone would want to do it. I got this shot when he decided to leave the wash rack (that he can't be tied in because reasons), but then stepped on his own lead rope and waited for me to save him. Because obviously.
He positively oozes personality. While he's no safe steady eddy (most of the time) and he drives me crazy (usually), everyone who meets him loves him. He's very interactive and adorable and hilarious. Even non-horse people usually end up laughing at his NOTICE ME HELLO antics and puffed-up self image.
He's turning in to a really fun partner under saddle and that's great. It's his personality that first attracted me and he still makes me laugh every single day.
