Another real life lesson learned in the riding ring

So a new one to add to the ongoing list of "real life lessons learned in the riding ring"...

I had a lesson this am and chose to ride Athena, who, some of you may be aware, I'm really enjoying. My coach questioned this as she's not entirely fit yet and we've been getting some good work out of Jack and Lissy so, while open to other ideas, he was expecting one of them... In response to his why I answered fairly incoherently "well, I kinda think I might love this horse," very much *not* the professional/acceptable answer I generally strive for, but what can I say? It was not even 8am and I've been averaging 4h sleep all week. Creativity was not high on the list of accessible options.

But then he surprised me -- he didn't just shrug off my rather useless answer, instead he asked why.

This gave me pause and I scrambled to find a justifiable answer and redeem my original statement. Except, there really is no logic to it. She's never going to the Olympics. She has, ummm, interpretive movement at times. She's so *not* my usual 'type' - my type being the little spinny sports car model and this type being pretty much the opposite - huge and powerful and in possession of a reasonably good brain. And she's drastically underweight and no muscle and nothing spectacular to look at, and *none* of this was helping me come up with a viable answer. And it wasn't a rhetorical question.

"Ummmm I don't know," I eventually admitted. Honest if a little embarrassed. "There's nothing really special about her. But every time I get on her, she makes me smile."

"Well," he says to me seriously, "often when an partnership clicks unexpectedly those relationships turn out to be the best ones." And that, evidently, was that. Horse was accepted into the lesson and we're good to go. But I couldn't help thinking of how that applied to so much more than the horse/rider relationship.

So that was my moment of the day... Just thought I'd share :)

And guess what??? I get a WHOLE DAY off tomorrow. hahaha thanks to Hailey and Amy for covering at the barn so I can escape to the cottage :) First day off since xmas. Have to admit I'm fairly excited about it.

I've been wearing a pedometer in lieu of a watch for the last little while -- I discovered I average about 35,000 steps/day... On non-running days (somehow an extra 8k is cheating) Somewhere I read you're supposed to aim for at *least* 10K, so I think I'm good there. Had a good laugh though today - I didn't put said pedometer on till just before I started teaching at 4:15 this aft, and by 11:00 I was at 18000. And that's withOUT any xc lessons! Just pacing around the sand ring and to and from the barn. So my goal for the weekend is *under* 18K over both days combined. hahaha wish me luck.