Last night I woke up sobbing from a terrible dream about Tevis. I guess it had to happen sooner or later. However, I really didn’t expect my Tevis Cup nightmares to begin until I was actually entered and counting down the days. Instead it was last night… at least 11 months and possibly years before I actually RIDE Tevis. Oh well!
Once I finished waking up, I realized the absurdity of my Tevis Cup nightmare and determined not to forget it so I could amuse others by sharing. I wrote down a few key words, and then fell asleep reciting it to myself. You can read it as I now recall the story… and after that I’ll go into some of the things I worry about regarding Tevis when I am awake!
Jump to:
My Tevis Cup Nightmare
What I really think I’ll be having nightmares about before riding Tevis
My Tevis Cup Nightmare
A bizarre Dreamworld
The dream started at a big banquet that was, in my dreamworld, a sort of Tevis pre-ride night. In the bizarre world of my dream, everyone was carrying their horses around in their arms. Yep, everyone had a tiny little horse curled up on their lap or cradled in their arms. When a horse was put down, it immediately ballooned into a full size horse. People had to be careful not to let their horses get all four hooves on the ground. There really wasn’t enough room for 200 horses in that room.
I didn’t have a horse. I was at a table with about a dozen other people who also didn’t have horses. We were all hopeful catchriders. (Read my blog post on catch-riding.) At another table sat about 20 people responsible for horses that needed riders. There was going to be an auction where catch-riders could bid on those horses. I couldn’t afford to pay the normal price (this at least was realistic). I was hoping that there would be leftover horses whose owners were desperate enough to see them ridden that they’d be willing to cut me a deal.
(In real life, I have no desire to catch-ride Tevis. Any other ride, yes. For Tevis I want to do the conditioning myself. I want miles of partnership before tackling the ride, especially for the first time.)
How I ended up with a horse
In the end I did get a horse, because there was a horse that no one else wanted to ride. (OK OK, this too is not unrealistic. In my life as an amateur jockey in Spain, I ended up racing the horses everyone else refused to ride several times.)
No one wanted to ride this horse because he had to be on a continuous IV drip.
I know I know. I didn’t say this was real life or realistic 😉
The owner and vet kept saying, but it’s not a problem! The jug is in the next dimension, so you never see more than the catheter and half an inch of line. They explained what was up with the horse (some weird genetic disease that only exists in The Dreamworld). Not giving this horse the chance to do Tevis amounted to discrimination and exclusion, they said. No horse should be prevented from achieving its dreams because a genetic defect it couldn’t help. The WSTF was going to be in trouble if it started down the road of discrimination. And did the AERC want to be associated with a discriminatory event?
(Yes, the semester has just started. I had to do professional development. Sarcasm and sincerity both happened. Sometimes that stuff shows up in your dreams.
I stood up for the victims of discimination by agreeing to ride this horse, of course
Well, not really. I asked about its AERC record. It had completed many 50s. It had had a successful season and would be in Pen 1. I asked how was it to ride? Fast and surefooted, but sometimes hot and always a handful. Sounded like a horse for me. (I love hot horses.)
What was the horse like?
Remember that at first all I saw was this Italian Greyhound sized horse curled up in its owner’s arms. In fact it kinda looked like an IG, with fine lines, prominent bones, and big buggy eyes. It was almost translucent, a pale grey (not albino) with darker mane and tail. It did indeed have a tiny catheter in its jugular vein. The line did indeed disappear into thin air. Or into the fourth dimension.
The next day (I guess, time’s hard to pin down in dreams) was Tevis. I went to the horse’s trailer and found it grown into a tall (15.3hh or thereabouts) nearly skeletal horse with translucent white skin. He really looked like THE pale horse, so I called him Binky in honor of Terry Pratchett. (Well maybe that was his name in the dream. You never can tell with dreams, the difference between cause and effect.)
He was a bit like my current project, Dillon, to mount. (See my video on getting on a skittish Dillon.) But once I was in the saddle he was a pleasure to ride.
My Tevis Cup Nightmare didn’t begin for many miles
At first all went well. I seemed to really be riding Binky, and he cruised up and down canyons effortlessly. (Keep i mind that I have ZERO experience with Tevis, so this was all my imagination!) In fact, when there were horses in front of us blocking the trail, he just flew over them. Very convenient.
Then it all went to sh*t
Around mile 65 (in the deram I knew where i was, some famous Tevis checkpoint; Binky pulsed down at 20 bpm), things went weird. I got on Binky, and notcied he had this weird elastic bitless bridle on. It was made of black stretchy stuff. When I pulled on a rein, it stretched. And Binky REALLY wanted to race. Despite his flying abilities, we were not in front, but rather amongst around 20 frontrunners. Binky didn’t approve of that.
Suddenly we weren’t in the Sierra Nevada. We were on Highway 190, aka Poplar Avenue, heading west out of Porterville, CA. We wree going down off the bridge over Hwy 65, and Binky wanted to gallop. I didn’t, so I pulled on the stretchy rein. Again resembling Dillon, whose one issue with saddle training was suddenly bolting and then falling down when I tried a one-rein stop, Binky bent his neck down and started to fall when I tried to slow him down.
The tragedy
Of course,stubborn me, I insisted on pulling, trying to do a one-rein stop with the left rein, until Binky fell over. I jumped free, but he went a$$ over teakettle until coming to a splat n the ground. When I ran up to im he was dead.
Trigger my guilt and the blamefest
Of course it was my fault, according to the owner and vet. I just didn’t know how to ride. Others leapt to my defense, saying it was wrong to let a horse on a continuous IV drip to compete. These attacked AERC and WSTF. There was talk of calling in PETA. Some whispered of conspiracy theories involving shadpw governments. Some blamed Kamala Harris, others blamed Donald Trump.
All the while I sit with Binky’s head in my lap sobbing, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Until I woke up.
What I really think I’ll be having nightmares about before riding Tevis
In reality, my Tevis cup nightmare(s) will assuredly be all about “is this horse really ready?” One of the reasons it’s taking me so long to get to Tevis is that I don’t want to start unless I am 100% certain my horse is capable of finishing not only fit to continue, but with no lasting physical or mental damage.
Originally I had planned to do Tevis with Fantazia, and maybe I could have, if I hadn’t really messed up her conditioning and feeding schedule. (Read my post about Everything I was doing wrong vis a vis Fantazia.) But it’s probably just as well, because it turns out she doesn’t sweat well. Between that and her arthritis (that I assuredly didn’t help by overtraining), I decided I needed another horse. And now I was going to be very careful about conditioning for Tevis.
Above: Fantazia in fall 2021, when smoke from wildfires was so horrible I couldn’t train for two months. (Not-riding in smoke from wildfires)
My real nightmares may be leading me to be over-cautious
First there was Jazz
When I was deciding whether to lease Jazz in late March 2022, I chatted with Rachel Shackelford, who had started him. She asked me if I planned to do Tevis that year. No! I said, surprised this could even be an option. I was going to have only a few months with him before the ride, and according to his owner, he’d had only 60 days with Rachel and then light trail riding.
Rachel was definitely on to something, because the more I worked with Jazz, the more I realized he was an extremely talented and physically gifted endurance horse. I realized he could most definitely do Tevis. Maybe I should have set my sights on Tevis 2023, but I was afraid that would be too soon. His owner and I agreed I could keep him until after Tevis 2024, so I planned for that.
Given how things turned out (Saying good-bye to Jazz), some people have asked me if I regretted not attempting Tevis with him last year.
No I do not. I turned the idea over and over in my head before I had River to distract me, but in the end, I just don’t think he was ready. Yes, he had completed many 50s successfully, and he had never so much as stocked up. He was 100% sound… but! I’d never done back-to-back 50s with him. He still got too worked up when asked to go slow. And I just had that “feeling” that 100 miles was too much for him at the time, especially 100 Tevis miles.
(Yes yes, I know. Rachel proved me wrong about Jazz being ready for 100 miles–She completed the Virginia City 100 with him last fall! But she’s got way more experience than I do, so she was better equipped to judge his readiness.)
Above: Jazz when I’d had him for about four months. I could already tell he was extremely talented but I didn’t want to rush.
Now there’s River
I got River last September. Even though she was an ex-racehorse and thus physically no doubt capable of doign Tevis this year, there was no way I wanted to get a horse Tevis-ready in less than a year. And I decided I wanted calm horse who wasn’t going to get worked up. So I went very slow with River. We have been as close to last place as possible in every ride we’ve done…
And yet still I managed to break her! Argh. She slipped and fell in the mud at the Cache Creek Ridge ride. So now I’m thinking I should have actually trained a bit more intensively. If she had been fitter at that ride, she would have been less likely to injure herself.
Sigh. Perhaps I will never get it right!
Above: River has turned into a very calm horse, so I am happy I’ve gone slowly at rides… but I still qustion whether I ought to have trained her to be in better condition for tough terrain.
I’m taking it really easy with Dillon anyway
Because I only just got on him in July, it’s going to a long time before Dillon is ready to do endurance. And then he had a fight with his fly sheet yesterday and thinks he’s broken. It’s always something! But we’ll aim for an LD this fall, and maybe work up to 50s next fall.
And I’ll still have nightmares about going too slow or too fast….
Above: Dillon promises to be an excellent endurance horse!