Practice does not make perfect

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People use this saying incorrectly all the time.

They say something like “practice makes perfect”.

But, if you’re practicing incorrectly you will only “perfect”

…….the incorrectness. (Is that a word?)

And! If only perfect practice makes perfect.

Here’s the rub …… if you could do it perfectly – you wouldn’t need the practice……

And that is the vicious circle.

So with that ridiculous prelude it leads to BadEventer’s adventure for the weekend.

If you haven’t been keeping up, here’s the 5 sentence recap.

1. Last year I drove all over the Eastern side of the country………

competing 5 horses at multiple events.

2. After the top two weren’t sound enough to make it to “the big event” which is a common theme in eventing,

I only arrived with the youngest.

3. After falling off the youngest at “the big one” I took a break from eventing & ran off to jumper land.

4. Nearly a year later I finally made it to another event, and after making exactly the wrong decision on cross country …………………..

my horse ended up with a laceration that 2 months later is STILL being treated.

5. Meanwhile the demographics have changed around the BadEventer barn. We’ve gone from (among others) 5 bay mares to 2 grey geldings…….

And that brings us to this weekend.

Poison Ivy is coming back into work so we headed out at training level.

I hardly know anything about the new kid Two-Point-Oh (as in The Zebrasaurus 2.0) so he was entered in the Novice.

Dressage started out with a bang.

Poison Ivy scored a 22 and Two-Point-Oh a 25.

#BoomGoesTheDynamite

Ok, and this may be totally getting off into the weeds………

But at my very first 1 star (now a 2 star) on The Zebrasaurus, the judge essentially slaughtered us and said “Rider needs to learn ringmanship”

Today the same judge said,

“Ringmanship Shown”

Show jumping was next and I made all the appropriate strides in every line.

Oh yeah.

I’ve been doing a lot of show jumping the last year, so that really shouldn’t be a stretch.

Right?

Poison Ivy even gave a demo on how to “ideally” jump a Swedish oxer.

I headed out on XC feeling pretty good about it. Afterall I planned to just lope around.

And I thought it was going well.

We did jump all the jumps.

And then I crossed the finish line and looked at my watch.

I knew the moment I saw the time I was actually in big trouble.

This was training level. It’s not fast.

And in spite of that…… I was well over a minute slow.

Then I saw the video evidence and I added strides EVERYWHERE.

I’m sure there were 2 less strides there….

Ugh………….

Perfect practice makes perfect…….

so I guess we’ll try again at training level next time ……

no moving back up until I find my big girl panties again.

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Did you know when the BadEventer isn’t riding badly I’m producing a true crime podcast called Aggravating Circumstances?

Season One is about a wrongful conviction.

Aggravating Circumstances can be heard on your favorite podcast app or the website.

https://aggravatingcircumstances.com/

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