giddy up or hiya, your choice

So I just got back from horseback riding. Today I was on a crazy little pony named Ty. He's only 4 and is shorter than me (I'm just short and light enough that they sometimes have me ride some of the spunkier ponies), but boy can he jump! On the flat he was calm and sensitive and responsive--very sweet--but once we started jumping, he suddenly became feisty and over-excited, galloping up to every jump and leaping about twice as high as he needed to to clear them. Anyway, after coming home and having a shower, I remembered that I've been planning to post a few photos of my various athletic endeavors that my parents took when they came to visit in early December. Sure, having them join me (at my invitation) and videotape me at all my sporting events made me feel like a little kid again, but in a good way.

In any case, please bear with me (or feel free to skip ahead) while I do a little bit of show and tell:

First, my parents came with me to my horseback riding lesson on Wednesday (Nov. 29). Before the holidays I was riding a horse named Flight 101 (Flight, for short) a lot. He’s owned by a girl who went off to college and left her horse at the stable to be leased; my riding instructor tried to convince me to half lease Flight, but not only is the $300/month half lease a bit out of my price range, but I also don’t have the time (as much as I’d like to) to ride three times a week. I haven't ridden Flight since early December, so I imagine someone else agreed to lease him since then.


Flight’s an excellent horse—sometimes he fumbles a bit over fences, but only at first (like he’s nervous or, ha!, flighty). He’s really lovely under saddle. Even though I’m mostly doing hunter-jumper now, I still love riding a horse that has a sensitivity for basic dressage; he transitions seamlessly between a smooth sitting trot and a faster, more elongated posting trot and, even more unusual (for the horses I ride regularly), he has a great collected canter which makes it feel almost like he’s floating in place.


He jumps huge, as you can see from the second picture of his jump over the oxer, where I try in vain to stay with him but end up sitting on his back much more than I should (I should be stretched out with my hands up on his neck, not all hunched over). I prefer jumping Hughie, one of the stable’s horses, although his gaits are not nearly as refined as Flight’s; Hughie’s still challenging—he’s got a lot of power and certainly isn’t an automatic pilot kind of horse—but he’s more predictable over fences. For example, unlike Flight, you can be fairly certain Hughie will jump the fence in front of him and at a decent pace; Flight sometimes slows to a walk right in front of the jump and then jumps it anyway, which is disconcerting. But the day of the parental photo shoot, Flight was behaving himself, although I almost fell off when the horse and I had an argument about which way to turn after a jump and we nearly ran into a wall. All par for the course.

On Thursday, my parents came to my dojo to watch my karate and jiu-jitsu classes. I went to the brown belt class that night because the black belt class I usually go to is in the afternoons and I thought it would be easier on all of us to just go to two classes in a row (since jiu-jitsu's right after the brown belt class). We did some free sparring that night without protective gear (so no real punching or kicking, just light smacks).

After karate, we rolled out the mats for jiu-jitsu, which I've only been doing for about a year and a half (I think). Below I wrestle with one of the few other women in the class (there's 4 of us on a good day, but sometimes it's just one or two...often it's just me and a room full of guys).

In the above picture, I'm about to do an arm bar (one of many possible submissions--with this one you over-extend the shoulder and, well, it hurts) on one of the jiu-jitsu senseis. Don't be too impressed; he's probably defending at about 25% in order to let me practice different moves. One of the things that's great about jiu-jitsu is that technique is ultimately more important than sheer muscle strength, or so I'm told. While karate is my first love, I think jiu-jitsu might be the better sport for bare-bones, end-of-the-line self-defense since it's a lot about instinct and positioning--e.g. some positions are defensive, some offensive, and some safer or more vulnerable than others. When a 180-pound guy is about to choke you, it's good to have an instinctual sense of how to get away or at least how to defend yourself until you can knee him in the face and run away (not an option in class, of course). Since I watch way too much CSI and Law and Order, these are the things I think about.

Better yet, I could knee the attacker in the face and then ride away on my pony!