Last week my daughter and I had to make the difficult decision to let her beloved horse Fancy go. She was almost 24, so a decent age for a horse, but had been suffering from a couple of things that caught up with her all at once. The tipping point was sinus surgery that required she have a drain in place and therefore had to be on stall rest. Fancy loathed being indoors, and despite the anti-anxiety meds she ended up with colic and very poor prospects for recovery even if we could get her to a specialist veterinary clinic in time for surgery.
Looking back over the blog, I see that I have written a lot about Fancy and the things I have learned about balance, visualization, mental health, and hard work over the years: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. She even got a peripheral mention when I wrote about the hot sweaty workout you get from filling the hay barn.
My daughter did a lot of research when she wanted me to buy her a horse at 16. We travelled all over eastern Ontario and western Quebec looking at prospects, and finally ended up at a place near Woodstock Ontario. To my eyes, Fancy did not look promising at all, but my daughter saw something. Plus, as she said, “Fancy may not be the best horse, but she’s the horse that needs me the most”. She spent months getting Fancy built up and ready to ride, and years riding, grooming, and just hanging out with her horse buddy.
Fancy could be an absolute brat who made me chase her for hours when she didn’t feel like being caught. She was the most un-herd-like herd animal I ever ran across, preferring to be at the far end of the field from every other horse. She also loved to jump and worked hard to be a good dressage horse. One of the biggest compliments you can make about a horse is that they had a lot of heart. Fancy’s heart was huge.
Twelve pictures of Fancy over the years. Some are professional photos, some are quick snapshots of my daughter or I riding or just hanging out with her. A few are of her being silly.
She was a big part of our lives for 11 1/2 years. It wasn’t long enough. It never is.
I went for a ride last week. It has been almost two years since I got on a horse. I haven’t even bothered visiting my horse Fancy very often because it’s no fun watching her run around the field avoiding me.
A couple of weeks ago I posted a picture of her on FB and said something about not riding any more. The manager of the barn where she lives offered to let me ride her horse Stella. My daughter made the scheduling arrangements and she joined me on Fancy.
Stella is a lovely placid (lazy) horse and was just perfect. I spent about half an hour ambling around the outdoor arena remembering my posture and how to use my legs and bun to steer. I even got a tiny trot out of her. Her person said that next time I should bring a crop to make her pay attention. There will be a next time – yay!
I board my elderly horse Fancy in a rural part of Ottawa. She lives outdoors and someone else feeds her daily so I don’t get out there very often these days. The exception is haying season, when it’s all hands on deck to get enough hay stored to keep the horses who live inside fed through the winter.
Farm math: over 30 percent of farm workers in Canada are women. The real number may be higher as many women may still be taking on informal roles alongside male operators. But the number is increasing and being documented as more women get operations and bank loans in their own names.
The place where Fancy boards is almost entirely women-run. Ingrid owns the operation. Jen is the manager. It’s a co-op where almost all the boarders are women, so they pitch in every day to do chores.
More farm math: on Saturday we stored the last of the small bales of hay for the season. Ingrid and Jen had to figure out how much to order to keep all the indoor horses fed until next year. They got just shy of 3,600 bales, or six big trailer loads worth. Then they had to figure out the odds it can be cut, baled, delivered and stored before it rains, coordinate all that with the farmers growing hay, and with the people who were going to put it away.
Once it was delivered the team needed to figure out the geometry to get it stacked with no collapses, how many people we needed to get hay off the trailer, up the elevator and into the barn, and how many doing the stacking with minimal waiting around.
Diane in a pink shirt with part of a trailer full of hay to her right. In the background, you can see the elevator leading to the barn. There is a single bale of hay at the top. She looks very hot and is grateful to have a break while the trailer is moved into place for unloading.
I’m glad I only had to do a couple of hours of grunt work. Even if it was hot, sweaty, dusty grunt work.
Saturday’s delivery was two trailers full of hay, so probably a little under 1,200 bales. Each of those bales weight 40-60 pounds. It took 11 of us (8 women and three men) a little under 2 hours to unload both trailers, move it up to the top of the barn using the elevator, then stack it.
I couldn’t lift the bales much higher than my waist. I am in awe of the people who were able to toss them to people working up higher.
A backlit view of team barn after the last bale was in place. If you look closely, you can see just how sweaty the two people in the front are: their shirts are soaked. Photo by Mel Donskov.
In case anyone is wondering, the outdoor horses get those giant round bales that need to be moved by tractor. How many bales, and the cost of a tractor, is a whole other set of farm math.
Last weekend I was at a party for the people who board their horses at a local barn. We started talking with the owner about its evolution as she is now almost 80, and I realized it is 20 years since I first started riding.
At the time, it was a school barn and I had a horse-mad six year old daughter, so she started taking lessons some time in the fall of 2014. I sat in the unheated barn in layers of winter gear plus the horse’s blanket, trying to stay warm. Some time around Christmas or early January, I decided it had to be warmer on a horse, so I signed up for lessons too.
I do not come from a horse family – at all. My mom, who grew up with horses as work animals on her prairie farm (and who fought with her brothers about who got to ride a bike to school and who was stuck riding a horse), thinks we are crazy.
She’s not entirely wrong, as horses are definitely a financial investment. But they can also bring some pretty cool benefits. For my daughter, it was better mental health because it got her out of the ballet studio and into fresh air and sunshine. It was also a great confidence builder for a tiny child who struggled at school to be able to get a 2,000 pound animal to do what she wanted. Reading everything she could about horse breeds and horse care turned her into a reader.
For me, it was an activity I could share with my daughter, but also a way to get brave while doing a sport. I never loved it, but I learned to jump. When I fell off my horse the first time and suffered a concussion, I got back on a few weeks later, instead of quitting the sport. When I fell off the second time (going over a jump), I had time to think about landing so I wasn’t injured and got right back on and did the jump again – successfully. I have since learned how to stay on during noisy rainstorms when my horse gets scared, and when to get off because I don’t feel confident.
This June will be the 10th anniversary of buying our first horse, Fancy. These days, I rarely ride as Fancy is getting older and suffers from some arthritis, so it is uncomfortable for her to have my weight on her back. Instead, a teenager and my daughter share the riding duties while I mostly just go out for visits to feed and groom her. I have not yet been given permission to try riding Karma, the younger horse my daughter bought two years ago.
Fancy, a very dark brown mare wearing her winter blanket and sprinkled with a bit of snow last weekend. She loves being outdoors year-round, as long as she is bundled up, has her shelter, her friends, and a steady supply of hay and water.
Karma, a dark brown horse with a heart-shaped blaze, photobombs Fancy, who is standing in a green field with dark brown horses on either side.
A few years ago, my friend Bess came to visit and I took her to my ballet class. She has zero interest in ballet but was fascinated to hear the feedback we were getting: it was just like what she uses when heavy weapons fighting.
Bess, on the right in a red surcoat and holding a sword and shield, has her feet ready to advance on her opponent, who is wearing a black surcoat.
Use your core muscles. Keep your spine aligned. Bend your knees so you can spring up and land without injury. Engage those quick twitch muscles so you can move around the floor. Pay attention to the angle of your wrists: it can mean the difference between a “killing” blow and a wasted hit with the flat of your sword. Or if you are dancing, it’s the difference between a graceful line and strong back muscles vs looking like you have chicken wings for arms.
A woman in a long flowing blue dress holds her arms above her head with her elbows bent. To the left is a pair of white chicken wings with the words “chicken wings” below the,. Image: Zarely.co
That experience has stuck with me, especially when I realized it applies to other sports.
When riding my horse, all those instructions about core, posture, and arm position also apply. Swimming is also all about core, alignment and precise use Of arms and wrists for maximum efficiency when moving through the water.
From watching other sports, especially things like martial arts, it appears these principles are pretty universal.
This discovery has allowed me to take feedback from one sport and apply it to another. Mental images that helped in ballet turned out to be really useful for correcting my riding. Figuring out how certain muscles feel when properly engaged helped me recognize when I was working my core in the pool.
Equally important was the recognition that those translatable skills can make it possible to try a new sport with less fear of the unknown. This is probably that magical knowledge (whether conscious or unconscious) that makes natural athletes “natural”.
I haven’t yet decided to take up anything new, but I like the idea that I could do so and not be starting at absolute zero. In my heart, I’m like the character in the children’s book Brianna Bright, Ballerina Knight, who isn’t very good at ballet but bumbles and stumbles her way through other sports until she discovers fencing,
Brianna Bright, a cartoon girl with long brown hair in a pony tail, eats dinner while images of her as a ballerina and a fencer float above her head. Image copyright Liana Hee, 2018, text copyright Pam Calvert, 2018. Courtesy of Two Lions.
I have been thinking a lot lately about how sports perceived as “more for girls” are undervalued, even in sports where they dominate.
In North America, at least, the vast majority of amateur equestrians are girls and women, yet the story is much different at the elite level. Since 1964 women and men have competed together at the Olympics, but no woman has won a gold in show jumping or eventing, though almost as many women as men have won at dressage. Dressage is widely seen as the “girliest” of the disciplines.
A consequence of this may have been the undervaluing of equestrian as a “real” sport. No, the horse doesn’t do all the work; riding is intense and demanding, and it requires strength and bravery as well as athleticism, a good connection with the horse, and many many hours of hauling tack, shoveling manure, and getting 400-600 kg horses to go where you want, even when you aren’t riding. The size of the rider doesn’t seem to be a major factor; the key is how well they can manage their horse.
Other sports have also suffered from male flight (the term for men and boys being less likely to enter a domain once it becomes associated with femininity). They include cheerleading, which was a male sport as valued as football before women took it on during WWI, gymnastics, figure skating, dance and artistic (formerly synchronized) swimming.
These athletes all must all be strong and flexible; most compete in close formation so precision matters, and artistic swimmers do half of their their four-minute routines under water. Concussions and other injuries are common. But because they are women-dominated sports where costumes and make-up have a role, they are routinely mocked as not being true sports. Interestingly, all, including equestrian, are places that have traditionally been more welcoming of LGBTQ+ athletes, as well.
However, the most egregious undervaluing of women’s sport this week was at the men’s World Cup.
Soccer is not gendered at the early stages of learning the game; over 40% of all players in Canada are girls, and boys and girls play together on the same teams. As they age and become more skilled, the girls and women are relegated to a distant second place in the minds of some (check out Wikipedia to see just how little attention the women get). At the same time, the most-watched event of the 2020 Olympics in Canada was the gold medal women’s soccer game won by Canada, led by Christine Sinclair. Sinclair is the world’s all-time leading international play goal scorer among both men and women, and the second player in history to score in five World Cups (after Brazilian legend Marta).
The Canadian women have played in every women’s World Cup since 1995, reaching 4th place in 2003. They scored twice in their very first game in 1995, against England. In total, they have scored 34 goals. So when a TSN sportscaster gushed about the first goal for Canada at the men’s World Cup the “greatest moment in Canadian soccer history” while sitting beside Janine Beckie, a member of gold medal Olympic team, it’s not surprising this was her reaction:
Janine Beckie gives her co-host some well-deserved side-eye.
We all need to be more like Janine Beckie, every time we hear such nonsense.
Diane Harper lives in Ottawa. She grew up watching or attempting every one of these sports, and still does some of them, so she knows just how hard they are.
This week, someone asked for suggestions on keeping motivated to do fitness activities. There plenty of good suggestions about scheduling workouts into your day so they become a priority, finding activities that work for you, setting goals such as competing in a race, etc.
My best hint is to have fitness buddies. Over the years, I have gravitated to activities I can do with friends. As an introvert who is highly susceptible to peer pressure, it’s perfect.
I can get some social time but don’t actually have to be too social; mostly we are doing our own thing, and there is a time limit. Since most of my fitness buddies are extroverts, they are really good at setting up times to meet; I will happily join them whenever possible.
The social aspect is really good for mental health too. I have friends associated with each activity. In most cases, we met at ballet, or a swim club, or at the barn, but many of those friendships go well beyond that specific sport. One example is my ballet buddy who morphed into a walkng buddy, and now we are simply friends (who still do classes and walk and swim together). I don’t have a lot of friends from work, and my family is small, so I really value these social connections.
My newest fitness buddy is also one of my oldest. I took up adult ballet when my daughter was an enthusiastic young dancer. I learned to ride a horse because it was warmer than sitting in an unheated arena during her lessons. We took lessons together until she was in her teens and I bought Fancy for her.
We have shared Fancy for seven years now, which has meant only one of us could ride at a time. Priority went to my daughter, and I got out of the habit of going more than once a week. That got even worse when the pandemic hit and my weekly lessons ended. But now she is riding another horse for a friend, so I have taken to joining her for morning rides. I am really enjoying the time with her. Secretly, I hope she buys Mickey so we can keep riding together.
My daughter in an outdoor arena under a bright blue sky, riding Mickey, a brown horse, with the shadow from my horse and me in the foreground.
Sam recently shared an article on the links between too much time and mental health, with the comment that this was not her problem. My immediate thought was “Ha! I’m willing to test this hypothesis!” The study looked at perceptions of well-being and how that rose or fell depending on the amount of free time, controlling for scenarios such as depression, which might leave a person with too much free time.
The basic result was that the sense of well-being rose with about 2 hours of free time, but dropped if the person had more than about 5 hours of free time. But, what counts as free time matters. The sense of well-being came primarily with productive free time, for meaningful activities such as hobbies, social activities, etc. “Wasted” time (undefined in the article, but for me it means things like doomscrolling, social media, and playing computer games) does not have the same effect.
So what is my takeaway on this? I’m mostly doing okay with making time for things I enjoy. I get enough fitness activities to be healthy. If anything, I need to start paying more attention to possible overuse injuries. Right now, I am dealing with what appears to be swimmers elbow. This may be a perfect time to rebalance my activities a bit, especially since the weather is cooling so I will be swimming outdoors less over the next few months.
My rebalance will probably involve more horse time. My daughter is looking seriously at a younger horse for her own riding, since she likes to jump and Fancy, though still healthy and eager, is 19. Like me, she is getting to an age where we need to pay more attention to the risk of injury.
She is still great for flat work though, which suits me fine. Until now, I have been riding about once a week so that my daughter could get as much time in as possible. However, I will likely increase that to two or even three times a week over the next little while. Will I ever reach the 5-6 rides a week that would be optimal for her? Probably not. That is a big time commitment, and would move this leisure activity into the category of becoming a real chore. Besides, as we continue to age, we are both going to need more recovery time between outings.
Fancy, a dark brown thoroughbred mare. The first picture is of her walking away, showing off her shiny coat. The second shows her relaxing after a ride by rolling in the dirt. The is a picture taken while I was riding. It shows her head and a long shadow of both of us in the sand of the arena.
And I’ll need that recovery time to do all the other things that are meaningful to me – gardening, elder care, cooking, sewing, spending time at my cottage property, possibly even some home renovations. More and more lately, I have been thinking about retirement. Unlike Sam, I don’t find my job as fulfilling as I once did, and I am definitely not as busy. Time spent on work increasingly feels like something that is crowding out the things I enjoy, and I work hard to cram them all in before or after work. Maybe my sense well-being will will improve if I make more free time.
Hmm… this post has taken a strange turn. How about you readers? Are getting enough free time to make you happy? If not, what might you do to adjust?
Diane Harper lives and swims in Ottawa (among many other activities).
The heat waves this summer are making think about my fitness activities and how to do better. First, how to do better about staying active in the heat, but also how to do fitness better to minimize my contribution to climate change.
Staying active – I am lucky enough to live near an old quarry and an outdoor swimming pool I can walk or bike to every day. For me, both are great ways to exercise and stay cool. I can go to the quarry early enough in the day that I don’t even worry about sunscreen, which is good because it is in a conservation area and most sunscreens are harmful to water creatures.
Beyond that, it gets trickier. It’s too hot to ride my horse by the time I am done work most days, and she lives too far away for me to contemplate a ride before work. I still do my Zoom ballet classes, and there are video options for yoga, HIIT, pilates, various dance forms etc.
But how to do fitness better? One of the biggest pieces may be travel to do activities. At the Tokyo Olympics, there were lots of measures to minimize the carbon footprint, but COVID turned out to be the game changer. Without spectators to feed, house, and entertain, the carbon emissions dropped an estimated 12%. The carbon emissions from all the airline travel for fans to get to Tokyo appears to be on top of that.
That is something I have started discussing with my swim buddies. We meet about once a week at a beach that is relatively central for all of us. But all but one of us drives a car to get there. Public transit isn’t really a viable option given the times we swim and the awful cross-town bus service. I try to minimize my impact by combining that swim with other errands in that part of town, plus grocery shopping on the way home. It does have us questioning whether we will go further south for cold water swims as we have done in the past. And of course, we will all be back at the indoor pools once our swim clubs start up again in the fall; not exactly a low-carbon activity.
Biking is also an option that I want to explore more. Right now, I use it mostly for short commutes to do errands, but lately it has been too hot even for that. I joke that learning to ride a horse would help me survive an apocalypse, at the same time as driving to her barn in the country contributes to that apocalypse. Could I bike, then swim (or ride my horse), then bike home? Probably not, at least not yet. The spirit is willing but the legs are weak. Maybe in a couple of years, once there is a decent train service where I can bring my bike and just cycle the last few kilometres.
I understand the desire to travel in order to do interesting sports; I am currently living vicariously through Cate as she cycles her way around Bulgaria. I thoroughly enjoy all the posts about cycling in Prince Edward County or along the Guelph to Goderich trail, or canoeing in places like Algonquin Park. My bucket list has included a trip to Peru so I can hike to Machu Picchu for decades, and more recently I have dreamed of a swim trek through Croatia. Or even a trip back to British Columbia, which has so many sports options, including canoeing along the Sunshine Coast like these two women.
Photo by Chris Montgomery, via Unsplash
Then there are all the gear questions. Microfibres, miracle knits, water-resistant clothing versus old-school linen and leather. Most days it doesn’t seem like much of a choice. I won’t give up my comfy streamlined bathing suits or goggles and caps, but I can at least limit my purchases to essentials. Just this week I reluctantly threw out a suit I have worn for a decade because the latest repairs were giving me sores when I swam. I have started looking for companies that sell gear made from recycled plastics. So far I haven’t found a swimsuit I love, but I do have gorgeous comfy leggings that get a lot of use.
I wish I had some snappy conclusion, but this is a complicated issue. Getting out and being active allows us to both notice what is happening in our environment, and to be more resilient to its negative effects. At the same time, I live in a city with Canadian winters, so it is hard to do all the things I would like without getting into a car. I am not brave enough for winter cycling. I could focus on more seasonal sports such as cross-country skiing along the nearby river, and give up pool swimming, but that would mean giving up on both friends and an activity where I feel strong.
Do you ever think about how your sports affect the environment? What are you doing to adapt as the world gets hotter and the weather more unpredictable? What trade-offs are you willing to make and what is too important to give up?
This year has been full of adaptions and adjustments, not least to our fitness routines. Some adaptations have been relatively small; when the pools closed in March, it was no big deal to move outdoors once it got a bit warmer, because I swim outdoors year-round. When the roads to our favourite swim spot became impossible because everyone else suddenly discovered the lake, my group pivoted quickly to staying at the river spot we normally use in spring and fall, and we figured out longer swims to get some distance in. When I didn’t need to cycle to work every day because I was working from home, I developed after work walking routines and even took up cycling to buy groceries.
Other adaptations have been more challenging. Ballet class in my living room means no more big movements across a huge studio floor. For months my barre was the back of a chair. Most jumping and pirouettes are gone – partly so we don’t crash into furniture, and partly because it’s hard for a teacher on Zoom to give individual corrections to people in tiny squares, all moving at slightly different times because of lags in the music.
So far in 2021, adaptations to my routine have become more important than ever. Like many I started January with Yoga With Adriene 30 days series on YouTube. I can’t do crow. I couldn’t do crow last year, either, and I gave up on the series because the failure intimidated me so much. Despite last year’s failure, I dipped in and out of yoga practice throughout the year, and joined a lunch-hour chair yoga series offered through my work this fall. That instructor offers lots of adaptations for people who might not be up to doing certain stretches. I was intrigued to hear her reminding us, twice a week, that we could switch things up in ways that were more suited to how we were feeling that day. That acknowledgement of alternate possibilities has been really helpful. This year, despite that dreaded crow pose showing up around day 19, I kept right on going with Adriene. I simply decided that crouching with my hands on the floor is a good alternative to crow (just getting to a crouch was plenty for me). Similarly, her happy hop to the front of the mat for forward fold, and graceful moves to lunge then plank are all ungainly scrambles for me, but just fine because I’m still showing up and having fun.
Some of the adaptations are dictated by our physical abilities. I started a dryland training program with a local swim club in January; it is an hour of HIIT led by an athletic youngster. I had never done a HIIT workout before the Christmas break, so I am learning to take advantage of every adaptation she offers in order to make it through the hour without collapsing in a puddle. Other adaptations are more mental. Due to the latest lockdowns in Ontario, I get a two hour window to ride my horse just once a week (she lives at a horse boarding facility on the edge of town). For several weeks in a row, Fancy didn’t want to be caught, so I spent an hour or more circling the haybale trying to get close enough to put her halter on. I couldn’t ride, so I counted steps instead. It wasn’t the workout I had planned, but I was outside and moving in the fresh air.
Has COVID forced you to adapt your fitness routines too? What have you changed and how has it worked for you?
Image: Diane in a colourful face mask, with Fancy, a bay horse wearing a blue halter.
Diane Harper is an aging athlete in Ottawa, who is slowly reconciling herself to the fact that she may never be able to do all the things.
