Close Shave

If you watched my “Close Shave” video, you already know what I mean by getting close.

The video got a lot of love right away, and the comments lit up with stories about bumping and rubbing in hazards. Someone even dropped the classic: “If you’re not rubbing, you’re not racing!”

I get it. There’s something thrilling about watching a driver who slides and bumps their way through to the top. But here’s what I think we sometimes get wrong — those drivers are succeeding despite the contact with the obstacles, not because of it.

In my mind, this clip is great because it shows you can push the edges of the envelope without tearing it. It’s kind of a “hero clip” but if I were half an inch to the left, I’d have called it a “zero clip.”

Close is cool, but collisions are cringey.

I didn’t always think this way.

There was a time when I was on the bandwagon of celebrating drivers who bumped and rubbed their way through hazards. Of course, I became one of those drivers. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

The real lesson came into focus when I was navigating for a student — a very good driver with a brilliantly forward and powerful pony. As their experience grew, their speed got better. But as they started to move up through the ranks, their times started to plateau.

It started to occur to me that the bumps and rubs may have been responsible. By the end of our last season together, I could feel a change. In the past it would feel like the pony was trying to rip the carriage right out of my hands — and that feeling had started to go missing. As her coach, I realized that I should have given clean driving a higher priority from the start.

Horses notice when you hit stuff.

They may keep trucking on, but they make a mental note of it. All those little mental notes begin to add up. They start to recognize what their driver’s top speed really is before things start going wrong, and very subtly, they build in a speed governor to keep everyone safe.

The biggest clue is usually the exit. You might be in that obstacle cajoling, encouraging, asking — eventually begging the horse to go faster — and you get the same measured speed throughout. Then you turn out of the obstacle, away from the hazard elements, and there’s a clear path to the exit. Suddenly old Stumblebritches finds the “GO” button.

That’s a horse that’s holding back. And honestly? They deserve a medal.

More Slowdowns

Hitting stuff slows you down in more ways than one. A light rub on the tail of the carriage probably won’t kill your momentum, but contact further forward puts real drag on the carriage. That’s part of what the horse feels, and part of what trains them to slow down.

There’s also the matter of knockdowns. In today’s sport, obstacles are littered with them — generally a ball balanced on a bottle cap. A little rubba dub dub on the fence and those tattle tales drop off, adding 2 points to your score. That doesn’t sound like much, but at a quarter point per second, it’s the equivalent of driving the obstacle 8 seconds slower. In a competitive field, that’s a big deal.

So the next time you watch a driver slide and bump their way to a fast time, appreciate the result — but know that the clock doesn’t tell the whole story. The fastest time might win the day, but doing it cleanly builds sustainable speed over a lifetime.

My experience with the power pony slowdown changed the way I looked at what a successful obstacle was. Finishing a full marathon contact-free is something I genuinely celebrate when it happens. I think I pulled it off at LOI — but it’s not a given every time.

That’s what I was going for in that video.

Follow our journey: Loretta’s story | Competition results