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whichchick · 8 years ago

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Took Bird for a spin after during work yesterday. I played hooky after lunch because honestly, self-employment should be about BOTH 3 AM “I got no heat” and Saturday morning “My apartment is flooded and I have no hot water” calls AND ALSO about “My god it’s 50F in January in PA, Get The Fuck Out Of The Office And Sit Thy Ass On A Pony”.

Conditioning continues for the planned April Competitive Ride Extravaganza. Other prep for this event will include Fixing The Oil Leak On The Diesel, which is $$$ that I don’t really have yet. I’m working on it.

Oh, and Losing Weight. I am so fucking tired of being fat and da Bird does not really need to be schlepping 180 lbs of my fat ass all over the countryside. So now he’s schlepping 167 lbs of my fat ass all over the countryside with, I certainly hope, less to follow. Watch this space for updates.

But right now we are talking about our glorious six miles of outing in unseasonably pleasant weather. We did the Covered Bridge Loop, which is a six mile trek with some pretty solid hills in it. Most of the distance was covered at a marching walk, took about an hour and a half, horse sweated up chest, girth area, and about half of the under-saddle part (where the leg flaps go, not the seat). It was warm and he’s in winter coat and still kinda non-fit, so we didn’t go hard. It’s not time yet for going hard.

I did do all four easyboots but I’m going to have to adjust the clippy settings on the left front because it kept popping up. (I’ve used cotter pins in the past to keep the clips down but damn, that’s a pain in the ass for everyday use.) Also, we need to practice with them every ride so that he gets used to them and can truck down the road at speed in his bootieboots. (We refer to them as bootieboots. Just deal. They are also “not so easy boots”. Probably I’m going to get a nasty letter from EasyCare, Inc. about maligning their trademark. Whatevs.)

He started out in the usual slowness of “Meh, I don’t really go... forward.” which I am used to slogging through for about twenty minutes. And then... he was like “Oh, right. We’re riding.” and perked up (this was about when we went across the Jackson’s Mill bridge) to march up the hill reasonably well. We turned right at the top of the hill and headed down towards Dee’s and he was fine, nothing special, but when we’d got down the hill and across the bridge at Felton’s (where the old Felton bridge is visible just upstream), he was like “Right. Game On!” and then I had The Walk. The clippity-cloppity, reins-swinging, let’s-go-places walk, the one that is just amazing and lovely. He held that walk until we got home, with brief trotting intervals (about 1/4 mile hunks) on flat sections with good shoulder.

We haven’t been doing huge trot sets yet because he’s not fit and he’s in winter fur and it’s been 45 or 50 out... there’s just no way to ride at speed in winter fur in 50F on an unfit horse and keep him from getting sweated up. You can’t do it.

So, we’re doing marching walks and getting used to the bootieboots and logging some low-impact mileage and working on boring shit like “Thou shalt not cross the yellow line to escape from culvert cuts” and “Please to be staying on the shoulder of the road” and “Lo, those are sheep, not carnivores” and “Verily, though the large beeves are quite interested in you, they are not harmful” and “The guard rail is not actually electrified.” Super-exciting stuff, I’m sure, but needful.

The thirty we’re aiming at, in case anyone is interested, is April 21-22, the No Frills Ride down in Fort Valley, VA. It’s a 30 -- the internets say it’s a “hard” 30 -- but it’s in the mountains. People who do not have mountains underestimate how damn hard mountains can be for horses and I am counting on them being pussies. Also, there are lots of rocks on mountains. So Many Rocks. Flatlanders are pussies about rocks and they don’t practice over them and then their horses are all owie/hardwork/feethurt/musclestired because omg, there are so many fucking rocks.

Now, I have mountains available to me, so we SHALL climb mountains. We need to be practicing our mountains, over here. Noted. Many mountains are needed before we go to Virginia.

Mostly my mountains will be Ray’s Hill and Sideling Hill. (Yeah, I know it says “hill” in the name and so you think they are not proper mountains. Fuck you. This is the best I’ve got, here. Ray’s Hill goes from about 1300 feet (at my house) to 1800 feet (at the local top) in a distance of 8/10ths of a mile. It’s a decent climb. Sideling Hill runs from about 1100 (pleasant valley/betsey) to 2000 feet (betsey/bark) over the space of a mile and a half, also a pretty decent climb. Since my mountains do not go up forever, I will do them multiple times to make up for the lack of height.)

I feel like a thirty is a reasonable outing for a coming-six arab gelding and I’m planning to do it slowly to get him into the idea of doing competitive rides. I really would like to see how he handles the work before trying to accomplish more than “finishing”. Eventually I’d like to work up to the Beast of the East. But y’know, that’s two or three years away. He’s a baby. We’re beginners. We need to do beginner-level stuff before we do expert-level stuff. One step at a time, over here.

#Bird #conditioning ride #no frills #getting The Walk

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