Wednesday, March 13, 2019

First Rides Post Injections

Peebs was cleared to ride last Wednesday, 4 days after his injections.  Unfortunately that was farrier day, and after holding him and Cinder for the farrier in 36* I was too frozen to ride. So Peebs got a light lunge and I bumped our first ride back to Thursday.

Missed that view
We had a nice long walk warm-up, with lots of lateral work because someone was feeling a bit fresh and needed to engage his brain. We did about 30 mins of walk-trot, mostly walk, and the whole time I was second and third guessing myself about his soundness. He did feel stiff, but it was more of the "its cold and I haven't loosened up yet" type of stiffness than the "I'm lame" type.  Peebs did get a lunge before we rode Friday, and felt much better.

Used to be terrified of puddles.  No fucks given Saturday
Saturday I hauled him over to friend A's to ride and spend the night as we were having lessons on Sunday. I had to work last weekend and wouldn't have time to work and haul over before my lesson so A was kind enough to let Peebs spend the night. It has snowed and rained Friday and A's arena was wet and a bit deep in spots, but it worked great for us.  The footing was just deep enough to make Peebs work a bit harder and tire him out, but not deep enough to be unsafe. Also, he apparently has gotten over his phobia of puddles, splashing through them without a care in the world and standing in one so I could get a pic.






We kept the jumps small for our lesson Sunday, mostly trotting cross rails. Peebs still wanted to get crooked and bulge right while tracking left cantering away from some of the jumps but it was better than our last few jump sessions.  My instructions was to disengage during those moments, let him be, then continue on like normal.  My normal reaction is to ride hard and try and correct him which usually makes him more upset, so trying the less is more approach is hard for me.  But I did it and we had some decent rounds.  We managed to string together a little trot course including cantering through a line on the left lead without incident.

BFF for lyfe!!
My original plan was to take Peebs home Sunday after lessons, but the weather was supposed to be nice Monday and A offered to let me stay another day to take advantage of her arena. She also wanted to use Peebs for an experiment. Her gelding Scottie can be a little herd bound when turned out with other horses so he's been on solo turnout for a while now.  She wants to try him back with other horses and since he and Peebs are BFFs we put them out together. Scottie really wanted to play with Peebs, but Peebs was more interested in eating.

When I got to A's Monday and took Peebs out of the paddock he and Scottie called to each other once, then both seemed fine.  In the past Scottie would call and pace almost nonstop but the couple of times I checked on him he wasn't pacing and seemed fine alone.  Hopefully he can start getting turned out with buddies again.

It felt like spring for a day
I'm so happy A let me stay for an extra day because Monday afternoon was perfect!  It was 60* and sunny and felt like spring might actually be on it's way. I took advantage of the jumps being up and did the same course we had done the day before then put a couple of the fences up to verticals.  We still didn't have issues cantering through the line, but Peebs wanted to get crooked cantering to singles so we went back to trotting.  Cantering off the right is fine, so we did some fences that way.  We have another lesson at A's this weekend and I have a couple ideas I want to bonce off my trainer about our left lead issues.

2 comments:

  1. Sounds like a fun weekend! Glad he's over his puddle angst. Eros just WILL NOT with the puddles (eye roll).

    ReplyDelete
  2. I get super paranoid with soundness too - trying not to overthink rides is also very, very, hard.

    ReplyDelete