Prepare yourself for a story.
My wife, Melissa, and I compete our horses in the 3-Day Event - aka Eventing, aka 'The Military'. Originally this contest was to see who was the best military rider and horse in the world. It is an olympic sport. And no, this post has nothing to do with investing. Its just an anecdote for the way it goes sometimes.
The sport has three phases - Dressage (3 gaits in specific patterns in front of a judge), show jumping (in an arena jumping over rails) and Cross Country (riding a couple of miles and jumping whatever obstacles the course designer puts in your way). Here's how it went last week:
I rode my best dressage test ever and was tied for first. Then I show jumped without knocking down a rail and the girl who was tied with me knocked a rail so I was in first all alone. Now comes the Cross Country ride.
I walked the course twice, once with Melissa and once with Becky Holder, our trainer (and superstar rider). We wheeled the course for distance and set time markers minute by minute. I wear an eventing watch that beeps on the minute from the time I leave the start gate. The plan was that each minute I'm supposed to be 400 meters farther along in order to make the optimal time and not be penalized. The person in second place was only 2 points behind me so just a few seconds over the optimum time would cost me the game.
I carefully studied the major points on the course where I had to be at each minute. 1 minute be past jump #3. 2 minutes be at jump #5 and so on. And Becky walked me through the harder jumps like the off-angle combination at #4 and #5 (two jump very close to each other), the coffin at #8 (jump over a stack of logs, then over a ditch then over another stack of logs), jumping into and out of the shallow lake at #11 & #12.... I went over it every step all day. I owned it. I kept picturing clearing jump #14 and crossing the finish line on time.
When it was time, we warmed up pretty well. Ty was jumpy and spooking at stuff blowing in the wind but he was pumped and excited to go and when it was our turn he shot out of the starting gate and launched the log at #1 and then he put it in another gear and we were flying. The course was like a flat golf course with perfect sandy soil and we were in a great rhythm after 500 meters and several jumps. We made the first big turn, cleared the tricky 4-5 combo and motored on. After the coffin at #8 I remembered I was supposed to be at certain places on the course at certain times and here I was just sailing along without thinking about it at all.
It is a measure of my intense desire to stay on top of my horse at all times that my watch can beep like a banshee and I might not hear it. When I remembered I should be thinking about it, I saw I was at my "3 minute" point on the course so I looked at my watch and was pretty surprised to see we'd only been on the course for two minutes. Instead of riding at 400 meters per minute, Novice speed, we were doing about 600 meters per minute. This is not Novice speed. This is Olympic speed.
The problem with that, besides the obvious threat to bodily harm, is that they penalize for arriving too soon. Something about reckless riding. Ty and I feel the use of the word 'reckless' is a bit harsh since Ty is just having fun when he runs hard and we hadn't ridden over any spectators, so, I ask you, where's the problem? Still, rules are rules and in this case, if you get to the end of the course 30 seconds faster than you're supposed to, even if you're having a lot of fun, you still get penalized.
The solution to this, of course, is simply to slow down. This seems simple enough and probably is but I discovered that slowing down is a relative thing. I took Ty in a big loop to kill time before we got to #9 and then we 'slowed down' some more and cantered the lake line though 10, 11 and 12 and I was thinking things were under control time-wize. We were two jumps from the end. We were going slow. Surely we're good on time now. I checked time again and, dang, I was at the 4 minute mark and my watch said 3 minutes. I was going to get penalized and lose if I didn't burn up some more time. I thought, well, we'll just canter up this tree line here and then wander around a bit, burn up the time and then get on home and win this thing.
As we came through the trees I saw Becky and Melissa with big smiles waving at us. I waved at them and trotted over toward them and added a big circle and then remembered I was only burning off a minute so I checked my watch and saw that now I was now actually a bit late and I had to get going to make the time and not lose. I clucked at Ty and he bolted for the finish line, we cleared jump #13 and there was only jump #14 and the finish line and time was ticking but we were going to make it.
I lined up for the last jump, Ty locked on and it was just like I'd imagined it 20 times and I was thinking, 'Just jump this clean" and then as we got two strides from the jump I realized the markings on this jump were wrong. I was jumping things that were numbered black on white. This jump was numbered white on black. I'd mentally practiced jumping the wrong jump. This jump was marked for a different division. Ty was a split second from jumping the Training-level jump just to the right of my Novice jump and if he jumped it, we were disqualified.
My mind went into a state of "Oh s__t" and somehow Ty unlocked and hung a hard left and I thought whoa that was really close and then I thought "oh s__t, THE TIME." I looked at my watch and saw we maybe had just enough time to make it if we made a really tight circle and jumped the correct #14 quickly enough. Ty, my little 3/4 ton burrito,spun like a quarter horse, launched the correct #14 and I stayed in the saddle. And we made the time by 2 seconds.
Yay.
Except when we made that quick circle, I crossed my own line for jump #14 and you can't do that. They consider it the same as a refusal before the jump. They added 20 points to our score. We went from first to about tenth.
Back at the stables we ran into the girl who was in second place. She should have been happy but was not because she didn't win either. She got to the finish line too fast and was penalized and dropped to 4th. I said, 'Well the girl behind you in 3rd must be blown away that she won." She said the girl behind her went from fence #1 to fence #3 without seeing (or jumping over) fence #2 and was disqualified. And apparently the girl who was in 4th forgot to go over jump #6 and was DQ'd. So the girl who was in 5th, unless she also had a brain fart, won.
This is why they call my division, "Novice Rider".
Now go play.
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