Virtual Tevis Loot, Virtual Tevis Thoughts

Riding Journal

Awareness of the outside world. When I was stopped for speeding, I never for a second feared for my life. This should be the default for everyone. [Be Careful Out There]

In other news, second vaccine shot today.
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Loot
Took a while for all the loot to get mailed out. I don’t think the organizers were planning on shipping quite so many shirts and stickers. “As of this writing, we have 1637 total participants. 1388 in the riding division and 285 in the non-riding division. Participants are from 12 different countries, with an age range from four years old to the mid 80s.” [Tevis Tuesday Reappears For An Update]

Requested a bandanna for me. Who am I kidding, I could never bring myself to wear the shirt. Milton’s rider is less uptight about such things, so I got him a shirt. Stickers for both of us. Yes, I have the bandanna and stickers framed, as promised. [The Tevis Sippy Cup]

Turtle Power
The official results are an alphabetic list of finishers. Sensible. The point of Virtual Tevis was to ride, not to race. However, I did check us out on the RunSignup results. Drumroll ….

Bottom 10.

Not bottom tenth percentile. Bottom ten. As in 8th and 9th from last. Approximately. There were some weird things going on with numbers down in the basement. I counted 7 finishing behind us. Out of nearly 1400 riders. That’s some serious slow.

Take-Home Lesson
Horses take a long time to come alongside new ideas. I knew this. Nothing like doing most of 100 miles at a walk to give you time to feel it.

Both horses will now stroll at a calm walk around the pasture. This took waaay longer than one might think reasonable for such a seemingly simple request. Not our decision to make. We tried to do it at our pace. The outcome was suboptimal. “Then, anxiety about having to canter again caused the cheese to slid off his cracker.” [Virtual Attitude]

For the second inning, we let them dictate how fast they were learning. We could watch them make progress day by day as they absorbed the idea. “This week’s miles were all at a walk.” [The Restart]

Horse training books should have one exercise and then 100 blank pages.

In Conclusion
Yay! We did it. To finish is to win.

Links
Quantum Chromatic Abberation: Virtual Tevis Completion

VT [Archives]

Stay safe. Stay sane.
Katherine