Recommitting, Reengaging and Revitalizing

So here I am post the summer from hell and I still haven't gotten back on the proverbial and literal horse. There are a lot of reasons I haven't gotten back in the saddle yet.  Some are easy to define, others not so much. 

My motivation to do more than just groom, pick hooves and feed treats just hasn't been there lately.  A lot of it had to do with coming down from the ultra-high stress bus that I had been riding for almost four months.  I lived with a high level of daily stress for so long that it took several weeks of little to no stress to bring me back to a baseline.  

Which is about when my desire to ride again began kicking in.  I started reading my Practical Horseman’s again, perusing the Dover/SmartPak catalogs, touching with longing all my good tack that is currently living in my bedroom as my tack room is also the guest bedroom. I started looking at my ponies with an eye towards what we need to work on, how we're going to get all the muscle we lost back and what we can do this winter to make riding easier. 

Essentially I found my riding mojo again, I found my riding love again, I found myself. 

I still have a month long training to do that will have me away from home from mid-November to mid-December. Which sort of sucks because I need to do the annual shaving of the wooly beast who, while he is definitely a Thoroughbred, is absolutely convinced that he is an Appaloosa/Welsh Pony cross. So while my other two, the OTTB mare and the actual Appy are just mildly fuzzy, Fox has nearly a full on winter coat already. 

So here I am laying it down in black and white. I am recommitting to my riding, reengaging with my passion and my pony and revitalizing my heart and my dreams.  This year we will go Beginner Novice, we will canter dressage worthy circles, we will do a clinic with someone great. We will go down to the North Carolina Horse Park and do the War Horse Eventing Trial.  We will be the partners that I know we can be.

I will commit to taking Cowboy to a horsemanship clinic and find our own partnership so that he can have a job and feel loved and needed. We will prance down centerline and wow everyone with how lovely a mover he is. We will do a cross rails jumping class and we will trail ride and have fun. 

I listen to a lot of audio books. Sometimes I listen to fiction, sometimes memoirs, and sometimes self-help.  There was one self-help book that talked about writing down or saying your goals out loud.  How these simple acts reinforce things in your mind and makes it easier and believable to achieve your goals. 

So here I am, this is the year we get off our butts and do all those things I've been dreaming of.  

Keep it Between the Flags everyone!

Why I Dropped Off the Earth Again

I realized after logging in today that I have not posted since April.  After the summer I have had it feels like years ago instead of months. So let me dive in to the reason I dropped off the earth again.

Way back in March I entered what I jokingly call the Second Circle of the Circus. In the Navy when you are an E6 (Its a rank) the next move is to E7, or Chief.  It's a big deal, a lot of changes and responsibility come with it.  It is not an easy move to make. First there is the exam (The first circle of the circus), then there is Making Board, meaning you've passed the exam and now your record will be looked at by a board of upper rank enlisted and officers to decide whether or not they will recommend you for Chief.

The Selected for Board results come out in March, this is the Second Circle.  As expected I made Board, but I didn't get excited at that point. I've made Board before and not been selected.  But I wanted to be prepared just in case so I started the Couch to 5K program using their app.  And I completed my second ever in my life 5K on Memorial day.  I actually did a trail run through a horse ranch which was pretty cool.

Then there is the long wait for the Selection results to come out.  For me the results come out usually in the first week or two of July. I took leave the first week of July so I could flip out in private if I didn't get selected again.  And the results were late so I ended up being at work the day they came out anyway.

And I was Selected, this is the end of the third circle of the circus and the beginning of the fourth.  The fourth circle is Initiation.  This is like extreme bootcamp. Lots of PT and other stuff to prepare you for being promoted.

So that is where I disappeared to for so long.  Now I'm on the other side.  And I only have one sound horse right now. Seneca as usual is happy in her permanent retirement.  Fox must have been feeling a bit jealous of this and realizing my preoccupation with work was about to come to an end and his cushy holiday with it, he contrived to be on the injured list.

A few weeks ago, in the dark, I went out to feed my three ponies.  Fox limped, three legged limped up to me out of the dark.  I quickly hung up the phone conversation I was having and went to check him out.  He'd cut up his left pastern, but he was actually limping on the right front foot.  That was strange all on it's own.   Later I saw the gate between the two pastures was wrecked.  Which explained the cut and I thought Fox must have gotten hung up on it and pulled his shoulder.  So I applied some first aid, did my best to make him comfortable and added some bute to his feed.

After several days his limping was less and and less though not gone.  Then the Farrier Fairy came out and when she went to trim that right front foot we discovered that he wasn't injured he had just contrived a massive sole abcess at the same time he'd cut himself. Sneaky pony.

So that leaves Fox on the injured list a while longer and I'm treating his recovering foot and to try to stave off thrush. Meanwhile this leaves Cowboy as my only sound horse.  Uhmm yea?
I have been trying to let go of the past lately and learn to love that big spotted beast.  I still see lots of lunging in our future but it's not out of the realm of possibility to see us swaggering down the centerline some time this winter.

Also stay tuned to the Reviews page for some updates on a new footing solution I added to one of my run-in sheds and the truly awesome haynets I got this year that even Fox hasn't managed to destroy!

Keep it between the flags everyone!

The Legacy of Fear

I don't know when, or why, or how but somewhere along the line between riding Seneca, her retirement and finding Fox I became afraid of speed.  Years ago before she became a pasture puff I had no problem cantering Seneca at home. In fact, right before the seemingly endless rounds of vet visits and time off, I was beginning to work on cantering fences. This precipitated the whole saddle fit debacle where I realized that my current saddle did not quite fit Her Majesty.


Later that year I did my last XC schooling with Seneca where we actually cantered a XC fence.  This was a big step for us and I hoped a bright spark for the future. Except a month later Seneca began the rounds of on again off again lameness that was the downward spiral towards her retirement.


Enter Thrill Factor, aka Fox, the slowest, most unmotivated OTTB on the planet. Which makes his registered name completely ironic. I loved him from the moment I saw him.  He was absolutely not what I was looking for. I wanted tall, elegant, flashy.  He was a small, decent mover and a very strange, ever changing chestnut color. But he was slow, quiet and a snuggler.  I think the snuggling is what really sold me.  He's very vocal and always comes to the fence when I walk out to see him. And off the property he behaves like a plow horse 99% of the time.


Yet I had this mental block about cantering him. Part of it is that he's hard to motivate in to a canter. Except that one time in front of a BNT when I was only asking for a trot. So at home for the last year I almost never cantered and only cantered occasionally when off the property.  He would trot nearly any kind of fence without looking twice at it unless I was nervous about it. Then it was more of a "are you sure Mom?"


But last week I was on vacation to do clean-up of the property after the nasty winter we've had. Which provided me the opportunity to ride my horse multiple times in a week. So I worked on letting go of my fear, of putting my trust in the red pony and just dealing with whatever shenanigans he might pull.  Except there were no shenanigans.  He gave me the canter fairly easily on both rides.   The first ride I only asked him for a few strides of canter a couple of times to see if the button was there. If he would give me the canter without doing anything naughty.


The second ride I made him give the canter for a lap of my make-shift arena. In both directions. Which he did, even though he tried to drop out of the canter a couple of times. I was so very happy with just those few moments of the ride. I mean he gave me other good things but I struggled with cantering Fox.


I'm not even sure why other than I hadn't cantered him consistently for a very long time.  He would occasionally give me the canter after a fence and I would praise him and ride it out when he did but again he's very lazy and getting the canter after a fence wasn't a given.


So where do we go from here? I'm working on arena exercises to strengthen Fox's topline, doing our dressage circles of death, and we will be working on cantering ground poles soon. I am tentatively planning on doing one of the War Horse Series shows this summer. I say tentative because I plan a lot but often the execution gets muddled.  I'm also planning on taking Fox to some lessons with a local eventer and hopefully some dressage lessons again with Sprieser Sporthorses.


Until then keep it between the flags!

You Do What You Gotta Do

So as my work life becomes more complicated, I inevitably get more stress in my life. Which means I need to ride more, groom more, be with my four legged stress reliever more.  So how do you make more time in an already crazy busy life? Sacrifice, my eventing friends, sacrifice. 


A very long time ago I was in Navy Boot Camp. Your sleep deprived, often sick with respiratory illness due to the close quarters and your day is schedule to within an inch of it's life. You have no privacy and no freedom.  It's just something you have to endure. Towards the end of Boot Camp there is an event called Battle Stations.  Basically you stay up all day, then when you should be going to sleep you go out and play war games all night, literally, you don't get to sleep until the evening of the NEXT night.  During Boot Camp I was a notoriously slow runner.  We would be in the drill hall doing aerobic exercises, then you pause and do a lap around the gym, come back and do more exercises.  By the time I got done doing my lap, it was time to do a lap again.


During Battle Stations, back in my day (They have an animatronic ship made by Disney now), you sprinted from each of the different buildings where various events were held to the next.  The worst was from the tunnel that passes under a road to the pool building.  It was a really long distance.  And as I stated I was a slow runner.  The rule was you had to stay in front of the last RDC (Recruit Division Chief), if you fell behind the last RDC you failed and had to return to your barracks building, wait 24 hours then try again.  After experiencing the first half, and coming up on the dreaded run to the pool building, there was NO WAY I was going to re-run Battle Stations.  So I made it my absolute mission to stay in front of the last RDC. Which is what I did.  On that last long run we lost half the girls in my Division. I conquered Battle Stations, got my Navy Ball Cap (the symbol that you were now a real sailor versus the Recruit Ball Cap) went to the celebratory breakfast and then went back to my building for the day's activities.


The first chance they got, two girls in my Division who didn't pass that night, and hadn't been very nice to me during the rest of Boot Camp, came over and asked me, sort of snottily.  "We just want to know, since you are such a slow runner, how you passed and we didn't."   Keep in mind, the entire division was made up almost entirely of babies straight from high school.  I was 25, married and had already lived out in the big bad world, with it's bills and crappy jobs.  I turned around, looked them in the eye and said "I wanted it more than you did."


So here we are, if I want to ride, I have to really, really want it. Because making time in my day to ride means giving up sleep and time spent with my daughter. Some days I will have to get up at 4AM, so I can ride before work.  I will have to get up early on the weekends that my husband closes at his store so that I can ride before he goes to work.  If I want it, I have to really want it.


Here are my motivations.  Between now and July/August, the Navy will be convening it's selection boards to decide who gets to be a Chief (E7, the next rank I need to achieve).  This is the time of year that I call The Circus.  Because it starts in January when we take the exam, then we have to wait to see if we made a high enough score to move on to the second phase. If we make the second phase in March then we have to wait until July/August to find out if we have been selected for the next rank. See?  A big, ugly circus that goes on for months.  On top of this I am now in charge of not just all the enlisted personnel in my depart, but two other divisions within that department.  Yippee! More work. 


Plus I'll be going in to what is called "My Window" in May. It means I can start trying to choose orders, or extend with my current command.  I don't know yet what I am going to do.


So there's all that craziness.  And then there is the goodness, something so great I can't even express how excited I am.  Kim Severson, 4* Eventer, and Olympian is coming to our little Eventing No Man's Land!  She's going to be doing several clinics here. That if nothing else is getting me out there and riding, no matter the weather, or hour of the morning. Yesterday it rained almost all day, after raining most of last week.  Usually I would take a pass on riding, because my pastures become a slippery swamp when it rains that much.  I sucked it up, brushed the mud of the Red Rogue pony and we walked for 30 minutes, doing nothing more strenuous than dressage circles of death, spiraling in and spiraling out again. I really want to ride with Kim.  She has been on my Dream to Ride With list for a long time.  Can't WAIT!


Keep it between the flags everyone!