This nicely built mare is looking for an quality long term home. Lady has had extensive ground work done, spent some time on an obstacle course, and has been sacked out, tacked up, and laid over. She has a big beautiful efficient trot and the body to take an endurance rider on down the trail.

Lady is ready for her next step in life with a qualified home that can reap the full benefits of her potential!

You love your horse. Their very footfalls speak of freedom, grace, and a bond that makes you shake your head in disbelief when people don’t get it. You spend hours on them, hours on the ground, hours riding, hours reading. You have this goal called Endurance riding and people are sharing and posting and networking about it, touting miles covered and hills climbed and goals met. With the very best of intentions you heap steaming forkful after endless shovel load of advice, some worthy some not, who know’s at this stage, into a mountain of Maybe-Knowledge at your back.

Your horse starts to look a bit fitter. Maybe starts moving a little faster. Oh, yes, this is endurance right, this grab and go and trottrotrot for miles thing?! Ideas, hopes, goals, and miles, yes, miles. More reading, notions of appropriate riding, changing diagonals, hoof angles, the right feed, chiropractic care. Your nose is to the ground and you are chasing this thrilling whiff of Endurance.

 One morning you go to catch your steed and notice that your beloved glances at you askance, staring at the halter in your hand, perhaps taking a a step or two away from you. You’re surprised, or sad, or mad. You love them, you’re doing your best, what could be in their head? It probably happens more than just the one time, and your brain kicks over, cranking but refusing to catch.

There are many possibilities to investigate of course, including discomfort of some kind (tack fit, chiropractic care, ulcers, etc). If you’ve sorted all that out and are still scratching your head, it may be time to sit down and take a wide angle lens look at your riding schedule.

Not just how much did you ride this week. Or last.

  Where did you start–and where are you now? 

We have this wonderful ability as humans to embrace and relax into routine, especially when it has good results, like a comfortable conditioning ride happily accomplished. The longer I own horses and more personalities I have around, the more I realize that routine is both essential and deadly, a delicate balancing act to be danced along the rim of Safe and Unknown.

Routine saves us, by teaching these animals we’ve taken out of their element and turned to our purposes that meals come at a certain time, certain words and gestures mean certain things, even particular tack items can have a particular emphasis to a horse, let alone the same time spent in the trailer every time, or same trail ridden every time.

Routine also endangers us, by lulling us down a comfortable road until suddenly a proverbial tire flies off and we pull up short and think, Wait, What?  How did I get here? Why is this happening?
Here are a few “bigger picture” baselines I find helpful to go back and look at and assess your situation with.

1.your starting place with your horse (were they unbroke, green, fit, experienced endurance horses, etc)
2. your methods so far (mileage, frequency, duration, speed, as well as care: diet, hoof trim and angles, chiropractic, dental, saddle fit, bit fit, etc)
3. the horse you have currently on your hands (may well be very different than the horse from #1)
4. your current strategy (may need to change!)
5. your long term goals

Why do I list your long term goals last? Because it is my experience that if you START at your long term goals, you are far more likely to discount or gloss over some detail of the first 4 questions. There are uncountable things that could come up and be addressed within those 5 questions, but bottom line is you are asking them because your horse is *just not thrilled to see you coming anymore.*

By assessing the questions above in the context of that horse, you may well discover that you’re gleefully riding your 2nd or 3rd or 4th season horse 3 or 4 days a week.. Or even one or 2 days, every single week.  Don’t think this only goes for experienced horses, while new horses to the sport must build fitness, there is *so much more* to the endurance equation, and a few years of physical prep is the easy part in my opinion. It might be high mileage or low, slow or fast, and every scenario varies a little bit, but I would submit to the rider that if all else fails, all other signs are accounted for and good, but the steed just isn’t giving you enthusiasm–hang up that halter for a few weeks and just let it be.

I know, I know.

But we’re on a fitness schedule! But Fluffy will lose condition! But I love to ride! 

Ideally I would encourage you to get a second horse to alleviate the understandable, passionate desire to essentially ride the legs off the one you have, but I completely recognize that’s not always possible. If it’s not, there are myriad ways to get your horsey fix while letting your steed just be a horse, from volunteering at programs and stables to harassing your buddies with extra horses. It might not be the easiest thing or the thing that you exactly want to do, but expanding your own horizons away from the routine of your conditioning schedule can have wonderful consequences for your horse.

Just ask Scrappy, who is never happier to see a saddle than after 4 weeks of just being a horse.

Once upon a time my step dad sent me off into the world with a med kit he had put together for me. I guess it’s sort of tradition now, plus I don’t think the pre made all-in-1 kits are all that great. They give you a few tiny things but we aren’t getting paper cuts out in the woods adventuring, we need rolls of vet wrap and gauze and sloshes of betadine.Well, hopefully not, but we damn sure want to be prepared if we do need it.

Since I have grand schemes of hauling out to an approaching 4 day ride that involves 20 hours round trip of driving, my USRider is current, I’m pulling mats and assessing my trailer floor as well as tires thoroughly, and the medical kit needed to be updated for the year.

I bought a $25 3-boxes-in-1 fishing box from Sportsman’s Warehouse, and spent about $150 on all the supplies for what ended up being 3 well stocked kits:  one large one for my truck, 2 smaller, one each for the crew bag and trailer. I don’t totally redo these kits every year by any means but what I had was on the tail end of a few years use and depleted, so here’s my chance to show it started over from scratch. While these are technically human med kits, a lot of this stuff crosses over for horse use just as my horse use often gets utilized for us humans (patched my husband up with vetericyn and vet wrap not long ago!).

Now that you’re prepared, hopefully you won’t need any of it!

The terrain of our regular riding doesn’t permit a whole lot of sustained mileage trotting unless you really make it, and in the last few months I’ve been very aware of (and slightly entertained by) how difficult it is for us both to hold it together in unison for prolonged rated trotting. So that’s what we practiced, along with my endless pursuit of remembering to be consistent in diagonal changing throughout.

sluurrrp

 Meanwhile, my girthless hike with Scrap the other day inspired me to spend a few hours this morning hauling Sheza to the lake and just cruising around with her on foot, taking in the sights and covering about 3 miles all told. She reassured herself with lots of eating, took an epic pee, pooped like a trooper, and just generally did all the things brave good little coming 4 year olds should.

As much as it should be raining to hopefully boost us from this drought, the weather really has been phenomenal and I’m pretty proud of my ponies. It’s supposed to be even warmer over the next few days and my grand plans include baths for the herd and some quality time under the old oak with a good book. Wishing you all a happy weekend!

My old plastic station wagon has been keeping things interesting lately, trifling with me and bidding me adeiu from the back of tow tuck at least 5 times in the last year and a half. Wednesday afternoon encompassed it’s latest bid for freedom from humanity, and after abandoning it at the mechanic’s for the weekend I was seriously ready for a proper long ride at the lake this morning. And so of course, in the spirit of keeping things Interesting, I threw everything but the kitchen sink in the trailer and headed out for the lake. Everything but the kitchen sink–& a girth!

Since I was wearing new hiking boots that needed breaking in and my cardio needed more work than my bareback seat I figured Scrap and I could still go hiking and it would be a worthwhile trip. The next immediate obstacle was how to carry water along, as I’m a dry-mouth-overheater-must-have-water type. After a futile search I nearly gave in but remembered the little stringy backpack bag I got for attending Lake Oroville ride in 2009. Never used it, never moved it from corner of the trailer tack I crunched it into, and just like that the hike was totally doable. I stole the fuzzy tubes off the bottom of my stirrup leathers to make the shoulder “straps” more comfortable and with water, keys, carrots, and my phone on board, off we went!

No 20 miles recorded but a good few for the human, including jogging hills, and I still got a “between the ears” shot!

 I was seriously entertained by the reactions of the weekend warriors we encountered along the way. They’d first see a “tackless” grey coming toward them through the trees, then see me on foot, wearing a pack, & sweating more than the horse. The women mostly managed to mumble something about how dirty my grey was while the men seemed singularly struck by the notion of hand walking a horse and both getting exercised. Meanwhile I realized this was the *perfect* thing to be doing with coming 4 yr old Sheza. Mimicking this day with Sheza would include leaving the herd, trailer time, trail time, different things to see, people and horses to encounter, variable loops to take, a round pen partway to use as necessary, fitness for me to be gained, bonding time for the 2 of us, and no escort needed!

You know you’ve been “endurancing” a while when things go totally south –often because of your own decisions–but Plan Z comes to mind and is utilized quite successfully enough, with enjoyment, work, and something to learn along the way.