Yep, number 100! I have managed to continue to find things that I feel are interesting enough to talk about for 100 posts! Well I find them interesting anyway! Hehe!
So rather then talking about one specific thing lets take a look back over 2009 and then just talk a little bit about what is going on right now.
Winter 2009: Started brining Lucy back into work, very slowly. At that time she couldn’t really go for more then a 5 mile ride without being too out of breath. We never even thought about trotting up hills and her hill work was extremely limited. Mostly I rode her on my short 3 mile trail at home that is very flat.
Kezi was lame on and off. I took her to see the last vet we worked with.
Spring 2009: Looked at a beautiful Anglo-Arab gelding while I was seriously considering putting Kezi down. I still kinda wish I had gotten him, he was quite a horse. But I wasn’t ready to give up on Kezi and I have since learned that I truly am a mare person.
I put Kezi on anti-inflamitories for a very long time too see if it helped at all.
I continued working Lucy on the trails, upping her mileage but rarely her speed. She didn’t seem as into trotting as before she got sick.
Summer 2009: Continued Kezi’s time off. She stayed sound for the longest time since owning her.
I really buckled down with the conditioning with Lucy. I took her to an endurance seminar where I learned that Lucy is rather competitive. I started asking for more trot, just not on our longer rides. She was still doing well on our longer rides but not so much when I asked her to trot a lot.
I took her for one very long ride on a hot day, deffinatly shouldn’t have and she really resented me for it. She refused to let me touch her in the pasture and so I stopped riding to repair our relationship.
Kezi went very, very lame at the end of summer.
Fall 2009: I struggled with the decision to put Kez down. I also struggled with the decision to buy an endurance horse. I saw what I did to Lucy over the summer as a failure. I had seen that she was not as into our longer, faster rides as she was before she was sick. I came to the conclusion that she needed more time off after her sickness. I shouldn’t have put her back into work so soon after she got better, even though she did have a whole year off it was while her body was repairing. I made the absolute decision that Lucy would never be an endurance horse because she did not like it. Yet I think I may have overlooked a lot of things. I’ll post about soon.
I made the decision to put Keziah down. I miss her like hell, but I do still feel like I made the right choice.
I decided to try a really nice endurance horse on trail. While being a drop dead gorgeous horse (he even made Lucy look scrawny and unpretty by comparison, and LOVE Lucy) and just full to the brim with talent, the horse just turned out to be an ass. No easier way to put it. I worked with him and I was patient, but in the end it was his attitude that made me not like him. He just didn’t care about anything be going fast, always. I didn’t feel secure around him at all. His behavior at the endurance ride was bordering on some major disrespect and was just not something I wanted to have to deal with, especially for $4500!!
I met Mel! And Farley of course! I loved them both! I hope I get to continue going for rides with them both! It turns out we have ton in common.
I went to my first endurance ride. After two years of doing little else but push towards doing endurance, it all seemed to come crashing down around me. I found little that I enjoyed. Mel and many of the other riders were pretty awesome, I am glad I got to spend time with them. But I am not an “on my own” kind of person. I really like my home life and it takes a lot to drag me away from that, apparently endurance was not enough. Had I had Lucy there I imagine that things would have been a lot different. I wouldn’t have been alone at the ride (unfortunity Mel doesn’t count since I only just met her), I would have had a good friend who would have been there for me. Instead I was camping with an idiot!
If things hadn’t come to such a culmination with the idiot things again would have been better, but still not great. I got the sense that many of these people have little time for people who are new, or just are not used to it happening. It certainly didn’t help getting yelled at by the in timer, but I wasn’t her only victim, other rides were getting it too. I understand having a bad day, but I am NEVER that way to people I don’t know on a bad day! Its almost like since they all know each other (for the most part) they feel like they can be kinda titchy and no one will care.
There was also a deffinatly feeling of just not belonging there. I don’t know why, I can’t really explain it, yet when I left it was a huge relief to get away. I guess there is a part of me that sees bit fancy trailers and what I know are very expensive horses and saddles and go back to schooling days when we HATED those riders. I know these ones are not the same, but its hard to stop thinking that way. I love that everything about me and my horse is mismatched and hand me downs and just well, whatever works! I always prided myself on having raised (pardon the expression, its the only one that suites) a wonderful mare that I am always finding new reasons to love and wonder at! Besides the fact that she is practically a medical miracle (she repaired nerves she should never have, and came back from something that NONE of the vets thought she would) she has always been an exceptional horse (unless you need to cross a bridge! Hehe!) and well, she loves and trusts me. Because I had Lucy nothing else ever seemed to matter. But with the idiot, everything seemed different. Like I needed to live up to the rider he was supposed to have, or that now that I had an endurance horse, I needed to be an endurance rider. I don’t know, its hard to explain. I wasn’t there to try my best with my own horse that I had worked so hard with, I was there to try out a horse that I expected to behave a wee bit better (as per what his owner said).
Well I could go on moralizing this experience to death, but really the bottom line is that I need Lucy, and Lucy only. Maybe she will turn out to be more into endurance after she had had some time off, maybe not. But I would rather be out on a boring slow ride with Lucy, then a fast paced conditioning ride on a horse that I haven’t had the same life experiences with.
One does not go through losing their mother (and best friend) with a friend, who you then have to almost lose just a year later without it leaving some kind of mark. Lucy has left a mark on me that will never go away, the mark of love.
So, now that I have been through all sentimental and crap, now what? What will 2010 bring (other then the winter Olympics and a lot of confused people trying to figure out if they should say oh ten or twenty ten!)?
Well I really don’t know! And guess what? I also don’t care! Not right now anyway! I have spent the last two years desperately wanting to get involved with a sport I hardly knew anything about. Now that I know that that can be put aside for now, in order for me to repair things with Lucy and get a handle on my life outside horse, the options are limitless.
It feels weird, so abruptly letting endurance go. It constitutes a huge change in my life, not only have I tried it and not liked it, thereby changing all my horsey habits and ways of thinking, but I also got really close to something then was ok with letting it go at the last minute. Normally once I get involved in something like buying a horse, I stick with it just because its what is easiest and I assume that it is what I want. Although admittly I have never been in this exact situation before.
Ever since Friday I have had my nose in a book, and have mostly not thought about horses. I pulled out one of my old notebooks with one of my favorite stories in it and started thinking about improving on it and extending my database of the world I am trying to create. I get my best ideas while driving so I will need to implement the recorder on my phone.
I know Alicia really wants to drive Lucy, so that will be down as a major to do. I don’t know if I will ever be comfortable driving Lucy in town, but you never know.
The tree lighting is next Friday, so it may be time to pull Huck out of semi-retirement and get him out for a Christmas kickoff drive (we love to deck the boys out in Christmas decor, its pretty darn cute!). Alicia would be happy!
I am kinda looking forward to some time off from horses, not worrying about there health, or trying to keep up on a conditioning schedule, or trying to figure out how I am going to afford that new saddle or new horse or new anything! I can stop being on the edge of something, be it the end of one horses life, buying a new one, or getting into a new sport. Instead I can just sit back and enjoy what I have created over the past eight years. My wonderful girl. I know I will still have days when I will scream and yell at her, and think that she will never be useful as a riding horse again. But its much nicer screaming and yelling at her knowing that the next day we will be back to normal again.
Hopefully the next post will be back to being a little bit more normal! I am just in a really reflective mood right now. Knowing that for the present I have given up endurance (its not entirely off the board yet, in essence nothing really ever is) is so weird and almost alien that it was board to spark some interesting and deep thoughts.
Well, thats all folks!
