Travis races horses. Twenty-five miles at a stretch, on weekends that start at 4:30 in the morning hauling saddles and five-gallon water buckets out to the horses every couple of hours.
He also starts young horses, which means getting on animals that would rather throw him.
Effort was never his problem.
He did CrossFit for years before any of this. He’d leave the office, sit in an hour and a half of traffic, and go straight to the box to throw slam balls until the day was out of his system.
Then his gym closed during COVID. That was six years ago.
He bought equipment for the garage in 2021. Here’s how he describes what happened with it:
“I could go in the garage. It was a mess. If I need to work out, I gotta go move five freaking things to deal with that.”
And when he went looking for a gym here, he walked into a few of them, looked at who was already in the room, and left.
What he said about those rooms: “These guys are all like demigods. That is not me.”
Somebody who rides twenty-five miles on a horse and gets back on the ones that throw him, standing inside a gym and deciding not to stay.
He didn’t need anyone to tell him to work hard. He needed two things he wasn’t getting anywhere else.
The first was somebody expecting him on a specific day:
“I’ve got this on my calendar. I’m just going to go.”
The second was a program that had something to do with his actual life. The gyms he tried ran the same workout for everybody, week after week, and none of it had anything to do with
sitting on a horse for six hours.
So we built his around the riding.
Knee stability, because knees are what end endurance riders.
Hip mobility with a lot of external rotation, because that’s what it takes to get in the saddle.
Trap and upper back endurance, because holding tension over a long ride leaves him sore for days.
Farmer’s carries, because of those water buckets.
In August I sat down with him for his quarterly review and asked how it was going. On the knees:
“I’m starting to feel less knee pain.”
Then he told me about a wedding he’d been to two weeks earlier.
“I’m a terrible dancer, but at this stage I will get on the dance floor just to contribute. We weren’t the oldest ones there, but we got ten or fifteen years on most of that crowd.”
“But I didn’t get gassed. I danced for an hour.”
“I made my wife happy, because she likes to dance. I’m out there just to keep her happy.”
Out of three months of work, with a race coming in October, that’s the thing he chose to tell me about.
I got a little emotional in that room, and I told him why. Yes, we’re doing this for the horses. Yes, we’re doing it to live longer. But he was able to do something physical that made his wife happy, and that is the whole point.
Your body stops getting in the way of your life.
He’s back in now. Pulling a loaded barbell off the floor up onto his shoulders. The other day he finished the conditioning piece at the end of his session and got down on the floor, wrecked,
grinning about it.
We call that prideful exhaustion around here.
He’s not where he was six years ago. He’s also not who he was six years ago.
He’s where he needs to be now, and he’s getting at the things he loves in a way he’d stopped expecting to.
