Friday 4th November
Alive Again

After a three+ month hiatus, here I am again.

Uno

What have I been doing for three months? Riding mostly - doing Uno's regular rehab ride and squishing in the rest of life. Not too successful (witness the lack of writing), but the rehab part is getting done which was my main goal.

This weekend the clocks go back, so hopefully that'll give me an hour of space in the mornings. Right now I get up at six a.m. and try to be on the trail about 15 minutes before sunrise with mixed results. The last couple of mornings the temps have been at or below freezing, so it's very, er, brisk out there.

Strangely, for a non-morning person, I'm loving getting to ride every morning. Less good is the lack of sleep/time to get anything else done, but at least I get out there every morning.

Uno feels good - not great, but good. After a bad couple of weeks when I couldn't do a lot with him because of whacked-out behaviour, I concluded that part of the problem was local visiting wildlife (neighbour Wendi reported bear prints around her trash cans one week and a mountain lion hanging around the area the next - two things that Uno seems to be especially sensitive to) and part was just extreme boredom with going up and down the lane. We gradually worked up to four sessions x 6 minutes of trotting each interspersed with a 5-minute walking session and it was starting to get repetitive.

Towards the end of October, we graduated to "adding terrain", which means that I am to add hills and rough footing into the mix. What that has actually done has limited the trotting somewhat (hard to trot that long on local trails), so I try to switch out a trotting session with a hill or clambering down over rocks.

Initially the change of scenery seemed to enthuse Uno (and at least he calmed down), but now he has veered the other direction and has settled into slug-mode. Yesterday I felt kind of bummed. Uno just felt weird that morning. Not lame, but doing everything in sloooow motion. I’m hoping he just needs a buddy to ride with and that would cheer him up, but worry that his slow motion is indicative of achy-pain, even though I can’t find any pain when I poke him in his bad leg. To date, I still feel like I have to really push him to get him to do more than a dib-dib-dib trot. The dib-dib-dib is nice and comfy, but I can’t see it working for endurance (it’ll be too slow to ride with most people). Similarly, I worry that the dib-dib-dib is because it hurts when he stretches out more.

Small Thing

Jackit hasn't been getting much riding recently. We took two trips up to Faith Valley in the Sierra in the summer and had a blast. The rougher the trail, the better he seemed to respond. He's still the most fun of any of them and I'm getting better and better at riding him - staying in that sweet spot requires a great deal of balance, muscle, and fast reactions. Interestingly, riding him improved my overall riding and confidence. A side-result was me riding Roo bare-back (haven't ridden bareback since I was about 13) - even moonlight bareback rides while ponying Uno.

Roo

My princess pony had been accompanying Uno on his rehab rides, being ponied, and being the ponier a couple of times a week. Things seemed to be going swimmingly and I was planning a day at DVE with him - and then in October he came up lame in the rear end. I have been too bummed and preoccupied to do anything about this, so he is just hanging out.

Hopi

With Roo's indisposition, I decided it was time to get Hopi going properly. Today I called at trainer who had been recommended to me, Jodi Tuft, and have booked him in with her. I'm handing him off tomorrow and she is going to take work with him and see if she can fill some of the holes that are apparently gaping in his original ground training. With luck, around Christmas-time he'll be back and ready to become a useful member of society.