My not-a-resolution this year was to ride every day that I’m home. Here’s how I’m doing, in the 64 days this year so far.

In percentages, here’s how it breaks down:

• Rides (always includes ground time as well) – 45.3%
• Ground time – 23.4%
• Out of town – 31.3%

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A ride can be 30 seconds of sitting on River’s back just to claim it as a riding day, but that still totally counts as it practices mounting and dismounting and relaxing and not getting hung up on a number. Most of the time however my rides have been around 5-10 minutes for the first few weeks and 15-20 minutes ever since, with a few longer rides of just walking around the ranch.

On River, I started out bareback, then bareback and bridleless, and now bareback pad with reins. On Rocky, for a while I was getting in a minute or two of cantering (not consecutively), but then Rocky did something to his left shoulder and his left navicular area is a bit tender. He’s on Turnout Rest and Previcox for a couple weeks and then we’ll see what to do for him next.

Here’s why I decided to make this non-resolution this year.

• Develop my riding skills through consistent practice.
• Stop waiting to be [[fit, thin, skilled, deserving, organized, financially sound]] before I live my life and do what I love.
• Prioritize my healthmanship, with a residual effect of having to be more disciplined with work and social commitments, so that prioritizing healthmanship doesn’t cause me to miss deadlines.
• Stop holding myself back out of guilt that Other People, including people I love, don’t have the same opportunities I do.
• Improve my mental and emotional fitness so that I can get back into more regular exercise of many kinds, to improve my physical fitness for the horses.
• Break the cycle of progressing up to being able to post for 3 – 5 consecutive minutes and then Something Happens and I’m grounded for 2 months and have to start over at 5-minute walks. (The Something Happens has usually, historically, been Rocky going lame. But sometimes it’s a business trip or heavy workload or weeks of wet/cold, which we desperately need to have again, or other factors that knock me out of the habit of going out.)