Well, Ride For Success Champions…here is to the start of something moving, motivating and multifaceted! When asked by my web-designer to submit my first blog post I thought “Sure, no problem. I already have it!”. Then my mother brought me a gift from my past. This completely changed my first blog. I mean, why was I really doing this?
I grew up having to work hard for everything. I worked off my riding lessons, I practiced ballet by myself on a plastic bar tied to my bedroom door, I learned to walk with a bar attached to both my feet, and I typed…on a typewriter. I was born in 1982 and graduated high school in 2000. I was well into the age of computers or at least electric type writers, but I typed job applications, scholarship applications, horse 4-H Record books, school work, college apps and my horseback riding hours log, on a 1954 Gossen-Tippa typewriter that was not electric. I bought this typewriter for a few dollars at a garage sale at a time when my family lived without indoor electric. So what gift did my mom bring me? She brought me said typewriter, dug out from the depths of her garage.
What does this have to do with horses? What does it have to do with Ride For Success? Effort. It has to do with effort. It’s a symbol of the force that drives you when no one else if behind you pushing. It’s every time you’ve failed or fallen off and had to get back on. It’s looking in the mirror and wanting more but not knowing what more looks like so you keep mounting up and you keep crunching. It’s running in the morning and cramping up, taking a breather and getting back to it. It’s the physical therapy you do for your broken bone and the stalls you muck that fill back up with manure the next day. It’s the typewriter you typed on that didn’t have auto-correct so you had to keep starting over. It’s a symbol of this girls’ dream to reach the masses about a sport she is passionate about but didn’t have the means to climb the ladder fast. One key at a time, one riding lesson, one book read, one meditation, one word, Effort.
Ride For Success is for everyone who is their own driving force. It is for every age and every body type. It’s for those wanting to set goals. It is for building a community one key stroke and picture upload at a time. It’s someone saying “I see you”, “I got you” and “I reward you”. It’s for the little girl that bought a type writer and put in her effort to find her success and wants to share it with the equestrian world.
