As I've been saying, I'm returning once again to vaulting, and that's going to take a lot of work. Why am I doing this I ask myself? Well, first of all, I love it. There's nothing else that really gets to me the way this beautiful sport does. And the brief brilliant moments when I experience truly dancing with the horse are the most incredible highs. Second of all, I have to get back into shape. Having just turned 45, I feel that I'm at a bit of a crossroads here. That it's either do or die. Well, that's what my vaulting instructor—a woman who's spent a lot of her life practicing fitness, horsemanship and ballet—tells me, anyway, and I know she's right. I'm not speaking of literal death here, but the kind of death that people like myself experience when they are not truly alive and in their bodies, moving about. I need to remember the lesson I learned when I broke my back and was trussed up in a back brace for a year—you know, the one about not taking my healthy body for granted and being grateful that I can move.

My vaulting instructor, who is not one to mince words, told me that I'm an athlete—funny, I've never been called that before, but guess it makes sense as a description for a woman who has spent 4 years leaping on and off of a horse—and to lose all of that athleticism would be a shame. She also told me that if I quit again, she's going to be really mad at me!

Something to think about as I'm doing little jumps over the vaulting barrel for what sees like the 600th time this week. It is possible that this is some kind of mid-life crisis. Well, I can think of worse ones. And, whatever it is, I'm not going quietly into the night!