My Riding Instructor

When I was younger (by about 20 years) I used to horseback ride. There are two things I remember my instructor telling me (or yelling at me) while I was riding that I actually hear in my head while I'm running. I thought about them both today:
"Dont cut those corners!" My instructor would yell this to us while we rode around the ring doing circles and firgure eights. Apparently, every horse in the barn was inherently lazy and liked to do the least amount of work possible. As school horses they were used to all the drills we had to learn as riders. I had to push the horse into the corner with my leg while riding at whatever speed was required. If the horse cut the corner sometimes I'd have to circle back and do it again (the old "teach him who's boss" routine). While I'm out jogging around I hear that woman in my head saying "Don't cut those corners!" when I see a line in my path up ahead that curves. I have to teach myself to run every inch of the way down to the corner or around wherever it may be.
""Don't lose your form" I was in a riding competition one time when I was twelve that I still remember to this day. I had completed a two-week riding camp and we (the campers) had a show (a competition) for all the parents. I spent two weeks with other intermediate-level riders learning all kinds of stuff and having tons of fun riding twice a day. On the day of the show my instructors decided to bump me to the advanced group for the competition. I should have taken it as a compliment but instead it made me lose all my nerve (since I would be competing with other girls who had brought their own horses to the camp and were all older than me). One of the tasks the advanced group had to do was individually make your horse canter from one end of the ring to the other and change the lead halfway down. I'm not going to waste space explaining what that means. Suffice it to say, I wasn't prepared for this level of competition and I'm just glad that I stayed on my horse for the class. The feedback from the judge was simply "Good work, even though this was a tough group, and remember not to lose your form when the horse is cantering--you still need to be in charge." (A side note, the canter, or lope, is my favorite gait on a horse because it's like a rocking chair.) In hind sight I realized that I relaxed way too much in the canter and just looked sloppy. Not the way to compete. What on earth does this have to do with running? There was a little hill on the last part of my jog this morning that I got to go down. And while I was excited to get a break on my legs (yes, running on flat surfaces is still pretty hard for me--let's not even mention going up hill) I remembered that judge saying "don't lose your form," which convinced me that the best way to finish my jog was to do it right, not sloppy. We'll see if my legs thank me for that tomorrow when I'm going to do the same run--and I have to make it a little bit longer.