06/06/2026
When you truly want to achieve, effort and commitment. We'll done Sir. Wish more riders would commit more of themselves .
I started riding seriously at forty-nine. Not late lessons at a boarding barn. Serious riding, the kind where you work on it every day and study it and build a horse and a partnership over years toward a specific goal. I entered my first competition at fifty-five because that is how long it took to be ready and I was not going to enter before I was ready regardless of what the calendar said. People at the barn were kind about it but I heard the ambient conversations. Not unkind. Just the low assumption that competition at fifty-five is a participation project and not a real attempt. I entered the novice division because I am a novice and I am not embarrassed by the truth of things. My mare Grace and I ran our pattern on a Saturday afternoon in late October. We were not perfect. We were prepared. We placed second. I drove home with the ribbon on the passenger seat and I felt something I want to describe accurately. It was not spite. It was not vindication. It was the pure clean thing that comes when you do something difficult in the time frame available to you and it goes exactly the way you trained for. I have never felt younger than I did on that drive home. I am entering again in the spring. I have time. That is what fifty-five has that twenty-five does not. I know exactly how much of it I intend to use. 🐴
