Hello to a special lurker

I am told that we have a very special lurker. We'll call her WPO, Woody's previous owner, who is checking in on his progress. I know everyone will wish her well for having made me so happy by giving me Woody. He makes me smile so much! He has ALL Jazz's neediness and childlike character, without the excesses that made him so difficult to manage. I could no more imagine him savaging a Shetland pony than jumping over the moon.

I have lunged him today, and he is moving very well. Better than he lunged after his hack two days before. So nothing is being damaged by increasing his work, and things are all heading in a good direction. It is entirely possible that at some point in the next few weeks, he will go lame. This won't be a disaster. His tendons and ligaments inside his feet are quite likely to have healed with adhesions, and if they have, and we snap one by working him (as we must) then temporarily it will lame him, but in the long run it will make him more sound.

My strategy is one day hack and 48 hours to recover, with a few minutes on the lunge just to stretch anything that is tightening up. Tomorrow he will do a "proper" hack of 40 minutes and I will introduce a little trot, and then we will stay at that for a while. In anticipation of the weather I have bought a waterproof high viz exercise sheet that I can put over my own legs as well, because this is work that just has to be done, no matter what the weather. 

Radar did a good session today and is holding it together mentally much better than he used to.

Ace is very interesting at the moment. I decided to take him for a hack. I didn't lunge first, because he has never set his back when tacked up for a hack with a hi viz 1/4 sheet and mounted in the yard and not on the arena. And he didn't this time either. What he did do was swing for the gate and march straight out down the road.

It took every bit of gumption I have, on a horse as sharp and spooky as he is, but I gave him a loose rein. A very loose rein. I had no practical control whatsoever had he decided to be really stupid. What he did instead was reduce his spooking to the level of just suddenly snapping one front leg straight, then relaxing and carrying on. It was very, very instructive. It may have taken me 2 years to find that Ace does not like to be "supported" by the rider, and that it actually makes him worse. That would explain completely why he only used to shy at letters in a competition - where I tried to keep him to the test, to get a decent mark. It would also explain why when I set a strategy to provoke him to spook at home, with a view to proving to him that he would not "win", that it turned into a disaster of escalating confrontation.

At the moment, "free in the back" in the arena also means "long, low and overbent". Over the next few weeks it will be interesting to see if my new and non-confrontational strategy will allow us to work "up and round" without tension as well. I will continue the lunging and blanket for work in the arena, but it does look as though hacking will also be part of the mix again.

Talking of hacking, I can  hardly wait to get out tomorrow on Woody :-)

C