January was a personally busy month. My company ran a reading challenge fundraiser and I got sucked in wholeheartedly. I thought it would be fairly easy. But the first week, someone had read 500 pages more than me and I’d read nearly 1000 in 4 days. So I turned on the turbo and tried to hold onto second place. I ended up doing so, though I lost to 1st by nearly 5000 pages and won over 3rd by 3000 pages. But that required me to read nearly 39 whole books and basically just work, sleep, animal care and read.
So no updates from me for a while due to having no free time. I’m proud I did it but I will never do that again. Its a special form of torture to read a book and then have to read another one immediately after and go go go. It was difficult. I’ve never felt like I don’t want to read before and I definitely ended the month not wanting to read.
During January, we still struggled to the right. We had lots of longing due to the rain and I ended up doing very small longe circles to the right and had more success at stopping him from pulling away. So I translated that thought through to riding. I’d been over bending him to the right, which worked somewhat but I also think he was using his floaty left shoulder to dive outward. It’s a lot harder to float the shoulder or not bend in a small circle and it looks to be working.
My plan with that is to walk a lot to the right but mostly trot to the left right now. I’ll keep doing the small right circles, riding them fairly defensively until the habit of trying to run out had been overwritten somewhat. Then we will work our way up to larger circles and more trotting.
February I decided that I won’t be doing training since we were starting the first 10 days of Feb likely not having the arenas open. We had nearly a full week of rain to start the month and it was a lot. So the arenas needed time to dry off. I’ve basically written off improving during Feb. All I want is to maintain as well as possible. He’s actually been doing better than I expected. He needs some long ass longes right after we get any arena use back. Usually two days, because the first day is mostly walk and explosions, no actual productive work. But after that, he might need another longe, he might not. It depends on the day.
Recently, he has been doing very well on holding himself together for riding. This last Thursday was his birthday and my first ride on him after the rain. He’d had two days of longing and one trainer ride. So I thought he was good. And he kept himself together but I felt something weird in him. There was just a bit of energy and it felt like his neck and his butt were riding high and I was riding low. I only did a bit of trot because he got a bit worked up. But I was very proud of him for keeping it together. Because I got off him and was planning on longing but managed to get the arena to myself so I let him off to run. And run he did. He ran so hard he slid over sideways when he tried to turn. He ran himself hard up and down the fence line after so I wasn’t too worried about him hurting himself. But given he had all that run and bucks in there, the fact that he didn’t do that under saddle made me very proud.
I’m mostly just waiting for consistency of riding to come back before doing much but I’m pretty pleased with how he is reacting with all this time off. I don’t have to start back from zero and he’s much better than some of the older horses at the barn. Once we get consistency back, I’ll be very happy to work more.
The Horse Dream 