The Concept "Controlling The Variables"

At left, Jeckimba Bay, my first horse.

I can remember sitting one sunny, most pleasant morning in August 1992 watching JB galloping around the race track with a new female rider in the first days of the 1992 Woodlands meet. I was leaning back in tall grass on side of a steep hill but I was uneasy and discouraged on a morning when all should have been right with the world.

I'd owned three horses. Two had career ending injuries, and JB, a 1985 model, was coming back from a pelvic fracture after falling in the wash rack.

Three horses, three major injuries, and, I was thinking, three isolated events that caused them, amid countless untold miles of galloping by all three animals. Did it just seem like bad luck after all that effort, time, and money that three separate isolated stupid mistake had done us in?

This is exactly what I was thinking that day as JB was approaching the back stretch. By the time he'd left the back stretch the light bulb suddenly came on, and it hit me like a jack hammer. Seems so simple, as it the thoughts unfolded. I was thinking errors, mistakes...I was recounting them in my head. There were so few, but everyone had come to bite me where it hurts. My mind was putting it together...unable to make mistakes in this business, ever.

The zero mistakes, though was only Part I of the epiphany. The really big part I'll get to next post.

Training: another day off. I have another of those photos of our wet farm which I decline to post yet again. I'll have a training summary in a few days.