When I was young my Dad and I would hunt elk in the early winter. We’d hike through snow for hours, crossing timbered hills and gullies, skirting the edge of a huge canyon that stretched for many miles.  We might come across elk tracks, or nothing at all, or find herd of a hundred long-legged, rich-brown animals, their whistling calls piercing the air as they caught wind of us and retreated at a long trot, heads high.

What I remember as much as the pounding of my heart when we saw the elk, or the cold in my hands, or surviving off my pocketful of chocolates, is the long tedium of walking and walking and walking.

The forest was beautiful in its stark winter purity, the air was never so clean, the solitude complete except for his figure ahead of me, breaking trail. And yet there were times it felt endless, and like I was missing things only he could see.

No one says much about the bleak winter of plateaus in your performance, how they will cause you to wonder if you have reached your limits of potential, if you have maxed out your capability. They talk endlessly about small gains, about showing up and working hard for the next one percent of improvement, even if it takes 99 percent more effort than it used to.

But what if you do show up and you do work hard and nothing is changing? You feel something odd about the thing that you are passionate about and usually look forward to. Is it monotony? Are you discouraged? You know about deliberate practice, the idea developed by Anders Ericsson et al, and made famous by the author Malcolm Gladwell. Deliberate practice is founded on the idea that we can all improve if we focus on the quality, not quantity, of our practice time.

Deliberate practice is focused practice, structured, intensive, detailed, measured, not casual. You’re committed to getting outside of your comfort zone, and to receiving regular feedback. It is the opposite of strolling with your horse on the buckle, while you check a text on your phone. I would say that my everyday riding is pretty deliberate practice. And yet, I felt stuck.

In one of my lessons when Paul was helping me with a horse, succeeding where I had not – I heard a question very clearly in my mind, “What am I not seeing?” When I was on the horse, the question became “What am I not feeling?”

I was watching him, and I already knew that when I mimicked him it was not enough. I had been doing that. I knew what he was doing, technically and theoretically. I wasn’t exactly having a skill-based failure. I am certainly fit enough and I understand the premises of our dressage training, which has led to many FEI horses. I felt like I had all the puzzle pieces in position but all the pieces were hovering a millimeter apart from one another.

I could not take this trudge across the frozen tundra of dressage plateau much longer.  As the days went by words marched in all capital letters across the front of my brain. YOU ARE NOT PAYING ENOUGH ATTENTION. It felt odd, but I didn’t know what else to do.

I went to the arena with my stallion on the lunge, and I felt like an owl. I looked so hard I swear my eyes got larger. And then I started to see things. I wasn’t paying enough attention to tiny changes in the horse’s posture, I wasn’t catching the change in tempo quickly enough.  When I rode I wasn’t moving from a braced back to swinging hips with enough dexterity.

Another day, I watched Paul school a young horse in half steps in hand. I stared intensely at the pair and saw something I hadn’t seen before, something about the way the horse stepped under himself at a slightly different angle, compared to when I asked him. Suddenly I understood what I had been missing about that horse. It was so subtle, but it was the key to how he would carry himself, and me, with more cadence and suppleness.

Like a strange dream, the wintry plateau of my dressage purgatory began to show patches of bare ground, became less flat and featureless, a streak of blue appeared in clouds. My heart lifted, and I felt my shoulders relax. An old feeling of excitement ran through me, and energy hummed in my muscles.

Coincidentally, dear reader, the grip of winter is relaxing in reality as well. The snow is receding here on the farm, revealing the next season – that of mud! Until next week, remember that the only way through is forward, and the only way forward is through.