Mongol Derby 2019: Poetry or Prose?

2019 Mongol Derby: Poetry or Prose?

**Five days to go!**

Watching one rider pack nothing much more than a book of poems, while another packed breakfast, lunch and dinner for every day of the race made me laugh. And which is better preparation?
Riders come to ride the derby for all sorts of reasons. Some want to win, some have experienced personal tragedy, some want to escape the modern world, some want to test themselves and some just love horses and dream of galloping across wide open spaces. The nature of the intention towards the goal of the race doesn’t matter so much as long as there is genuine intention; a right resolve that moves them towards their particular goal.

To achieve that goal, the riders must make the right effort. Which is to say they must make a moment by moment, continuously good effort. Preparation IS important, but the right preparation is slow and steady strength and fitness work, becoming as good a rider as you can be and letting go of your ego. 

I’m not sure that the right effort needs to come before or after the right resolve. I have no doubt that some riders only learn how to make the right effort after they have got on their first horse of the race, but their resolve is very genuine. Some riders may make the right effort at home, but only learn right resolve once they are sitting one of the wonderful little horses thanks to the generosity of their Mongolian hosts. 

Horses are very good at teaching the art of living in the present, but generosity is also helpful; giving allows you to be free of attachment and the more you give, the freer you will be. The Derby is almost the perfect lesson, or introduction, entirely by accident.
Perhaps the rider with only a book of poems, relying on the generosity of the herders, has the right idea? Perhaps the rider who takes the kitchen sink, but gives it all away once he gets to Mongolia (and realises the scale of the generosity he is receiving on a daily basis) also has the right idea (god knows whether he did this, or whether he refused every hot meal in favour of a shrink wrapped bit of horror)? Or maybe this post is a load of nonsense, because this is just a horse race...  

I’m not precious - what do you think?

If you’ve done the derby, why did you do it? Did you take a book of poems or everything you could possibly cram in to your five kilos? And most importantly if you were to do it again, what would you take?

*PHOTO CREDIT: me. Today’s competition: what ingenious weight saving idea did Ann-Therese come up with in 2014? No points to you Ann-Therese for remembering tho**