Provo
and I have been busy training all year for the American River 50 at the
end of April. This has been of mixed success. We've covered a lot of miles,
and learnt a lot about what we can do. I learnt a lot about how Provo has
my number perfectly and can send me into a paranoid panic simply by tripping
a few times and then acting like he's about to drop dead.
After one particularly memorable ride, when we rode about 5 miles in the pouring rain before Provo convinced me that he was on his last legs and caused me to phone Patrick and ask him to come and move the trailer to the closest exit off the trails (and then Provo promptly trotted out beautifully as soon as there was space to do so, and then proceeded to trot in a wonderfully balanced manner all the way to the place he thought the trailer ought to be - and magically, it was!), I bought us a heart rate monitor at the AERC convention in February. A wonderful tool... no more making Lucy look like a fool. Hah.
Except for this ride show above (when we rode from just outside Granite Bay to Auburn - ~18 miles), we've ridden all year on our own. This has mixed results. It's very quiet and calm, but Provo enjoys company and gets to the stage where he'll race anything with legs - be it bicyclists or hikers. Now and again we'll get a tow from passing innocents, when he'll race to beat them... But he has gone from a scaredy horse - where he would either have a tizzy fit if the accompanying horse moved further than six foot away, or, if ridden on his own, he would have to stop every ten feet, to listen intently to every dog bark, every chainsaw whirl, every pheasant bleat - to a mature, settled, quiet horse... well, kind of, anyway. He still suffers from an overactive imagination at times, but has learnt just to gawp and lean away from any scarey object (usually a tree stump).
It's been fun though, and despite it's ups and downs it'll be interesting to see if we managed to do our homework properly and can actually finish the ride, and if we do, finish it in good shape.