Advice from a Bunny

For those who haven’t yet checked out Horse Nation, the time has come. It’s a compilation of entertaining horse-related randomness, mostly humorous in nature. Leslie Wylie is the HN editor-in-chief, and her Southern sarcasm is all over the site. I’m pretty sure she gets paid to scour the internet for every funny horse-related news story, YouTube video, meme, etc, that’s out there. Her personal blog was one of my favs, though it unfortunately has gone dark since HN premiered.

Anyway, in a recently-debuted monthly column on HN called Fit to Ride: Ask a Rabbit, yours truly submitted a question for cute little Pi to consider, and she graciously used my question for her first response post!

Pi, the advice-giving bunny of Horse Nation’s Fit to Ride column. Photo from HorseNation.com

Now, this advice makes perfectly good sense to me. But as I look back on what I normally do before shows, I realize that I pretty much to the opposite. Oftentimes I will:

• Not reduce my exercise the week of the show, with the idea that I want my stamina as high as possible.
• Spend more energy than normal the day or two before the show, usually putting in an extra ride or two, and doing errands, packing, and running around like a crazy person preparing. Kinda defeats the purpose of a day or two of rest.
• The week of a show I don’t change my normal diet routine at all. In fact, if anything, I probably eat less-healthy-than-normal by having more take-out and fast-food in between all the errands and packing and extra rides after work. 
• For the show cooler, I typically stock up on Cliff bars and breakfast shakes and call it a day (for one-day shows). For overnight shows I put in much more effort, cooking veggies, hard-boiled eggs, pesto pasta salad, and white bean muffins, etc. 
• On show days, breakfast is normally on-the-go, and I do snack a bit in lieu of an actual lunch, but I’ll have large dinners with friends and fellow riders. Mexican food never tastes as good as it does after a long day of cross country!  

Interesting to think about how my habits directly contradict sound, rational advice from a cute bunny. Good thing I asked the question, huh?