Night Cap Riding

AKA: How do you do all these things?!?

This is what happened today:

2:30am - Went to bed after working on this blog, organizing pictures, and reading some Game of Thrones.
10:00am - Woke up due to husband's lack of food protesting
10:30am- Came back in from letting dogs out and feeding horses.
11:00am - Pancakes made.
11:00am-5:00pm Messed around on the internet and watched TV.  I think we made some nachos for a lunchy thing
5:00pm Made some epic Panko crusted turkey meatballs on cous cous.
6:00pm-9:00pm Watched TV/aka Family Time
9:00pm - Put kid to bed, went to ride Katy.  In the dark.  With minimal lighting.
10:00pm - finished riding, untacked, fed/brought in dogs
10:20pm - trained the puppy
10:25pm - in the shower
10:45pm - on the computer/watching tv

So you may be wondering why I'm putting this nonsense up there.  Well, its to point out that you can do LOTS of things in a day.  The key is to be focused and stick to a training plan.  It was 100 degrees (F) today and felt like 105 at 6:00pm.  While I could have ridden, I decided it was better to just chill out and avoid heat stroke.

I'm funny like that.

For my focus on the day, it was to rest up.  We've started to do a lot of things lately and we really need to let our bodies, minds, and wallets rest.  My goal while I rode today was really to work on my equitation (shut the front door, I know!).  I need my core stronger in order to get better and do a good job riding Arthur and Piper so here I am.  The program I'm wanting to use is more of an endurance racing/eventing hybrid.  Week One is walking for 30 minutes increasing to 1 hour.  Katy can do trot work for an hour with interspersed canter but I wanted to work on a harder surface than normal to help her legs get a little tougher and hopefully her feet too as they're normally softish.  Considering that I was meaning to work on a walk, I ended up trotting most of it while focusing on me to avoid boredom and the Eq work at the walk was too easy.  So long as Katy went where I told her at the speed I told her, I left her alone and worked on my things.  She's awesome like that.  I tried a canter and I sucked.  I found a nice stopping point during the canter and rewarded her with some walking before finishing out with a trot cycle.  So basically, the canter falling apart was my fault BUT my goal in this lesson didn't involve canter, but to work on my eq at the walk/trot.  Don't throw out your plan or pick a fight when your goal was something else.  Find a decent quitting spot on that sticky situation and move on.  Did I canter the other way?  No, and yes it bothers me because I like everything to be symmetrical, but again, it wasn't going to be good due to me not being strong enough.  I was out there to work on that.  Derp.  Don't make it harder than it has to be.

For the dog training, people think I spend 500 hours a day training my dogs.  Nope.  I spend some time with them each day and make sure (like the horses) that when I'm around them they're learning something and I'm consistent.  I wanted to work on my puppy's downing after several weeks of focus/motivation work so I brought her in, grabbed 10 treats and worked on what I needed before hitting the shower.  Sure I could have trained her for an hour, but they don't learn well that way and I don't have time for that.  Leave them wanting more too.

Because of these short sessions, I tend to jump around a bit, but always am working towards a goal.  Keep sight of your goal, but break it into tiny parts and work on each individual part until they're as good as they can be and press on.  If you ever need to go back a step, you can always do that since you made up 10000000 exercises to get to the final product.

So back to my schedule, you're probably thinking suuuure you sat around a lot but its Sunday!  What about a normal work day?  Oh here you go (Monday through Thursday, Friday we take off from the gym and do date night or something):

7:00am - up and getting ready

7:10isham- feeding horses and letting dogs out

7:30am - leaving the house

7:40am- drop kid off at camp/school

8:00am- at work

5:00pm- leave work

5:30pm - get kid

6:00pm- home and changed into workout clothes

6:15- hubs and kid grabbed, head to gym

6:30pm- workout

7:15pm- home from workout/dinner/family time/tv

9:00pm- kid to bed, me to horses

10:30pm- done riding/critters fed, take shower/tv

Now mind you, just like my training, I've gotten to this point in tiny pieces.  I started working on the gym a month ago.  This meant I haven't been riding.  Then I got good at that and added in eating less (portion control).  That got decent and then I started eating healthier (see the difference?).  Next up was adding in riding.  I tried a lesson and it just really bottomed me out during afterwards (Friday night), I spent the next week tweaking my nutrition to keep up with the energy demands.  With that better now, I'm adding riding in this week.  Yay Soreville!

Why go through all this?

I want to ride.  I need to work.  I want family time.  I train dogs.  I'll be going back to school for a PhD in the spring and will need to have a schedule down pat in order to continue.  The other thing about all this is... I feel great.  For the first time in over a decade, I'm DOING not WISHING.  If you want it bad enough, you'll figure it out.  My body is starting to feel great - no nightly abdominal pain, no headaches, no weird sleeping patterns.  Also, don't beat yourself up if you mess up a day or two here and there.  Sometimes you just want to veg, or pig out, or whatever and that's ok (your body, your training, your money, your horses, all of it!).  Restart the next day and push on.

You can do it; I swear I'm not Wonder Woman! :)