Achey Breaky

Lucie is still not quite right in the back end, so my trainer has said to give her a full week off with no work to see if whatever is going on works itself out. What's funny is that when I went out to see her earlier this week, she was practicing her cutting skills on her pasture mate. Odds of an abscess? Slim. Odds of her just running around like a gaunt idiot on four feet of thrush? Favorable. Eh, just gonna wait and see. I've been hand grazing her and putting conditioner on her feet as needed. We both seem to enjoy it.

Looking for snacks in the poop pile

That being said, I've been trying to . . . force myself to ride. For some reason, my motivation has gone down a lot. I never really felt okay after my last lesson since it didn't go too well. That compounded on top of school and work, and I just kind of sputtered out a bit. I was still going to the barn, just not riding. I forced myself to get on Molly since I'm allowed to ride her whenever Lucie isn't available. While getting my tack together, her martingale was nowhere to be found. I know she's still being ridden in one, I just couldn't find the darn thing. Unfortunately, she's much too large for Lucie's martingale, so I planned to just keep it to a walk if she got too uppity.

And what do ya know? She was mostly fine without it. We walked around for a bit to get those old joints going - referring to my joints, not hers - and in general to let her muscles warm up. She moseyed around on a dropped rein while I did some hip stretches. Then I picked up the reins and started asking her to soften and bend around the short side. Once all that was established, we started trotting. She's definitely not consistently going around soft, but she responds well when I ask her to soften. Apparently she has been holding herself together better, and there is a notable difference. Since I didn't have the martingale, I wanted to see how she was just walking and trotting before I even considered cantering her. Last time I rode her, it was the canter that really benefit from the martingale. It's clear that she was also taught how to do flying changes at some point and gets a bit frazzled when we cross the center line. When I first asked her to canter to the right, she was head up pretty much immediately, but in the next second she chilled out and did her best to keep it together. To the left, much more civil. She relaxed right into my hands almost immediately.

Much love for this old lady.