Competing against yourself

Even though I am a super competitive person who loves to win, when I horse show, I try to focus on competing against myself.  That is to say, I want to perform to the best of my and my horse's current abilities and not worry about what anyone else is doing.  Today, Tucker took the "competing against yourself" idea to a different place, and decided it would be a wonderful opportunity to show Paige that he can go really fast and jump the jumps from this far away. 

It's like the racehorse in him finally came out.  He was annoyed he didn't get to go home after the hack, so some sort of light bulb went off in his head and he decided to get the courses over with as quickly as possible.  If there was a 2'6 hunter speed round, he would have won.  In his head, these were the accolades he was going to get.

2015 WEF 2'6 steeplechase champion

In reality, he was doing a normal, non-timed hunter division in which leaving out strides and going for the long jump is not particularly rewarded.

What actually happened

Poor Paige who has a real job riding real horses who have better things to do than play make believe was relegated to trotting into the lines and doing the adds in an effort to tame the beast.  I would equate it with taking a break from your job co-authoring papers with PhD candidates to play checkers with a kindergartener who ignores the rules and declares victory.  I plan to give him a long talking-to tomorrow and ask if he wants to be a jumper when he grows up.  He certainly has that option, but I don't know if he understands that he would still not be allowed to go as fast as he wants, when he wants.  I have a feeling he is a hunter at heart and was just trying to show Paige how cool he is.  Note to Tucker:  uncool.  Significantly uncool.  What was even less cool was GETTING ALL OF HIS LEADS TODAY.  I mean, yes, that is progress, but it would have been great if he could have done that yesterday during his beautiful non-steeplechasing trips.