They say when you turn 30, a lot changes. One of those things is definitely losing the ability to bounce back after a fall.

I wish this was an April Fool’s Joke, but my body is telling me that nothing about this is funny. Well, mildly funny, considering I am walking like this:

Which even I find funny, except that it hurts.

While I also fell off a week before the show, that was a dumb fall. That was a fall where if I had really wanted it, I could have fought and stayed on. But I was lazy, and I fell. It was one of those dumb slow motion falls, but even so, falling from a 17h horse is a long way, and so I was pretty busted for a while. In face, despite chiropractic sessions for myself just the day before, my right hip was already killing me on the drive down to XC on Saturday… and that was before fall #2.

Saturday’s adventure included a lesson with Bobby Costello at Will Faudree’s gorgeous Gavilon Farm. I had never been there before, but after seeing Mark Weisbrecker’s place (Winterbook), I had a pretty good notion that smaller fences would be few and far between.

And I was right.

So we started out over a Novice-ish hanging log to warm up, going over it once each way, then up a hill to a Novice table, and circled back to a max Novice cabin.

Whereupon I bit the dust.

The first couple jumps had actually gone quite well, despite departing from our normal start-small-and-get-bigger warm up not being an option. So on the approach to the cabin, I was thinking he would take it no problem- I mean, the creature has jumped plenty of fences like this. You see where this is going…

…because he didn’t. He half-jumped it/half tried to run out right, which sent him doing that horrible flailing/twisting thing with his body over the right corner of the house and promptly landed me in the dirt, falling exactly on the same shoulder and hip as I had a month ago.

I did, of course, get back on, conquered that fence, and then some. It was actually a pretty amazing lesson- hard, but amazing.

Jack jumped his first max training fence, training up/down banks, did well over the ditch, and even did his first drop into water. The last of which I am so effing stoked about, since the last time we tried that it was a massive fail. So, all in all, a super day.

Since I’ve gotten home though, the pain has set in. I can’t lift my right arm up all the way (the shoulder I landed on), and I walk like I had a peg leg. Sitting makes this way worse, and I’m wearing enough pain patches that I basically look like a walking censor bar.

I definitely don’t remember having this hard of a time recovering. I mean, that I felt the repercussions of the last fall for a whole month, is just insane.

I’ve done the epsom salt bath, the constant Advil, the self-doctoring (wine + Salonpas patches), and I’m still a bit crunchy and groaning. Tonight I’m going to the chiro, and tomorrow I have a massage (and not the fun kind) planned.

Help, friends of a similar age! What do I do?! Other than the obvious…

Not fall off.