It's here!

I like This Time of Year. I don't like the cold or the snow. I don't like the fact that it is dark when I wake up, dim when I drive to work, and pitch-black when I drive home.

I don't like the 10 pounds of potatoes and pie that seem to have made their way onto my rear end.

But I do like that there is something waiting for me on the stoop almost every day.

Ooooh, what's this ginormous box?

It makes the other boxes look tiny.

Even the tree is intimidated.

This box is addressed to me, and in the interest of Really Wanting to Open It,  I have decided that it is a late birthday present and not an early Christmas present. Late presents must be opened immediately, even before the work shoes come off.  I mean, it might be perishable. There's not a moment to lose. This is a SAFETY issue.

Not impressed?

Voilà—it's out of the box! Still not impressed?

Oooh, ahhhh... The Kuda in all its glory.

Blue has a date with dressage tomorrow. In the meantime, many thanks are due to my parents for the wiggle room in my budget and to my long-suffering husband for being such a good sport. Without his tacit agreement (an eye roll is as good as a nod, right?), I never would have bought this saddle.

Excuses, excuses

Yesterday was my 30th birthday. The last time I set eyes on my horse was Sunday, Dec. 11—you know, back when I was in my 20's.

I did not ride Dec. 12 because I had to work late. Actually, I should clarify: I've been working late every working day since the week before Thanksgiving. I've also had to come in on Sunday. In December, this is pretty normal operating procedure; I anticipated the holiday rush. But just because you see the oncoming train doesn't mean you have the wherewithal to get out of the way.

I did not ride Dec. 13 because Heather was using the arena, and it was cold, and I'm lazy. Heather has been very diligent about using the arena at night ever since Gary put up the lights. She and I have talked about this. Basically, it is easy for her to get up the gumption to ride at night in winter because the arena is literally in her front yard. It is a 20-minute drive for me. And I'm a wimp in the cold darkness.

I did not ride Dec. 14 because of my company's Christmas party. 'Nuff said.

I did not ride Dec. 15 because of pub trivia. Our team won for the third consecutive week, probably because of the lack of sports questions.

I did not ride Dec. 16 because I was getting my hair colored. "Red, the color of 30th birthday denial."

I did not ride Dec. 17 because of my birthday party (phase 1). I suppose I could have pulled myself together and ridden in the morning before the festivities started. (But I didn't.)

I did not ride Dec. 18 because I was recovering from my birthday party. A certain local Mexican restaurant has a specialty called a cazuela, which translates roughly into "soup bowl full of rum and triple-sec." My birthday dinner was at that restaurant. Mistakes were made.

I did not ride Dec. 19 because of my birthday party (phase 2). Friends who did not make it to the Saturday birthday party invited Brian and me out for dinner and drinks. And it was my birthday, after all.

Today is Dec. 20, and I don't anticipate seeing Blue until the 23rd. I have made peace with that. One byproduct of age is accepting that you can't be everything to everyone. Right now, I can't be a gung-ho conditioning buddy. The past two weeks have been swallowed up in overtime, holiday parties, birthday festivities, nasty weather, and all the other effluvia of wintertime. So Blue got a little break, and I got a little older, and we're both OK. 

Also, I'll be making up for it. My office is closed from Dec. 26 through Jan. 2, and I plan to spend as many of those days riding as the weather will allow. I got an absolute STEAL on a Kuda MasterFlex on eBay over the weekend, and it should be here in time for my vacation.

All in all, things are shaping up nicely.

Dickensian Weather

...External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge...

...No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him...

...No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty...

   Foul weather didn't know where to have him. 

The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect.  They often "came down" handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house.  It was cold, bleak, biting weather...

...foggy withal...

...and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them...

...The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already—it had not been light all day...

...and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air...

...The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms...

...To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

My business is casual

You know those people who can't use a public restroom? I used to be one of them.

And I shouldn't say that I couldn't altogether. Given enough time—and complete solitude—I could do the deed. My specific problem was that I couldn't actually "go" unless I was alone. I was embarrassed to have others hear me tinkle. This was the usual order of events:

1. Realize I needed the restroom.
2. Arrive in the restroom (our office has three stalls).
3. Sit on the toilet.
4. Hold it in until everyone else was gone.
5. If someone came in while I was mid-business, I'd clench until I was alone again.

Yeah, typing it out makes it seem even more loony. And what's more, this had been going on a long time. Think of all the elementary school stalls, the college dorms, the highway rest-stops. If you add it all up, I've probably devoted entire days to "holding it." 

Days. Of. My. Life.

I don't know where this self-conscious, irrational phobia came from. The idea of making a sound—any sound—in the potty is deeply embarrassing and unpleasant for some people. It forces us to acknowledge that sometimes we aren't meeting the imaginary ladylike ideals. Or maybe it’s just gross. I don’t know for sure.

But I have found the cure in endurance riding.

Since I started doing the distance thing, I have peed next to the trail, only somewhat obscured by sagebrush, as a dozen riders go by. I have peed behind boulders and trees while someone else held my horse and knew exactly what I was doing. I have peed next to my truck and trailer out in the middle of nowhere, and also within sight of farmhouses. I have peed in foul porta-potties, on the shoulders of well-traveled gravel roads, and while holding the reins of one or more bewildered horses.

In the immortal words of Johnny Cash, I've peed everywhere.

For a time, I was on a diet that required me to drink 60 to 100 ounces of water a day in addition to any non-water liquids I was consuming. With my walnut-size bladder, that means sitting at my desk desperately needing a potty break every 10 minutes or so. 

And because of endurance, I could do it. If I can go out in nature where anyone can see me, I can certainly go into a three-stall bathroom and shamelessly use it for the purpose for which it was designed. 

And I don't care who hears me.

Sitting there now, I sometimes just want to exclaim, "Hello, world! Yes, that's me you're hearing! Go with the flow, my sisters!" But then I remember that not everyone is an endurance rider… yet.

How do you break the cycle?

Does anyone have a good routine to break the cycle of emotional escalation between horse and rider?

Scenario (cobbled together from various incidents): On a cool day, you take your horse to an unfamiliar place. He's a little "up" from the cold and a little "up" from being away from his buddies. There's unfamiliar debris next to the road or arena, and your horse seems more worried about than he should be. You mount up and can feel the high-headed tension of the coiled spring beneath you. He walks out short and tight, looking everywhere but forward. You catch yourself subconsciously gripping with knees and taking up the reins. His reaction is to be evasive and above the bit. Even the slightest leg aid gets an exaggerated reaction (i.e., silly sideways scooting that leaves you off-center). By now, your spine is rigid and your posture defensive. So is your horse's.

We've all been there. What is your strategy for dealing with it?

Hey, what's that?

What is that? Do you see it? Look closely.

Did you spot it yet?

Still don't see it?

I'll tell you: That is our mountain loop disappearing for the season.

You know what else it is?

It's a great excuse to get out the blanket. Isn't he cute in his winter coat?

Yep. We live in a beautiful place.

[Note: these photos are about a week old. Today the mountains are even whiter—but you can't tell because we are socked in with the should-be-famous "Walla Walla Stinking Fog." It slides over from the paper mill on the Columbia and settles into every nook and cranny in the valley. If you've never smelled a paper mill, you're lucky.]

Bluster and bobble

Two very good rides this weekend, despite the pre-winter bluster.

It is now well and truly dark at 4:30, which means I had about an hour of daylight in which to ride after work on Friday. When I drove up, Heather was tacking Bunny to do the short road loop. She invited me along, but you know I'm kind of anti-road-loop since our last experience.

I had been wanting to try the arena exercises from Heather's lesson last Sunday. I did my best to listen to the instructions while I was taking pictures, but I have not had a moment to ride in between. This was a week of chaos and overtime on the work front (especially disappointing since Heather's husband just added some stadium lighting to the arena so we could use it at night).

I've been reading one of my TTEAM books again too, and had decided to try some bridleless work with the neck ring if there was time for that. I made time by multitasking—I decided to use the neck ring for warm-up. So we toodled around the arena at a decent walk with me not touching the reins at all. Blue did fine. It wasn't the miracle of human-horse synchronicity that Linda makes it sound like in her book, but it was good to know that I have another exercise in the toolbox.

In the lesson last Sunday, Anna had Heather ride Bunny toward the corners and concentrate on stopping her straight by lifting the reins straight up (rather than pulling). Anna's on a real "independent seat" kick right now, so her focus is very much on helping her students fight the urge to brace against the horse's mouth.

Blue and I have been working transitions the last couple of weeks, and I have found him heavy and awkward on the forehand. He never stops neatly on the first try, and when I release, he practically falls flat on his face. So imagine my surprise when he stopped neat and straight every time I lifted instead of pulling. It is a lesson in humility that he was more than happy to whoa when I stayed out of his mouth. That means I am the problem in this case. Sigh.

This is going to be an extremely hard habit to break. "Pull back for whoa" is pretty much the first thing you learn about riding. They tell you that one at the pony rides at the zoo, for heaven's sake!

This is more a trust issue for me than anything else. The idea that I could safely stop my horse on the trail with just a lift of the reins and no additional contact goes against every self-preservation instinct I have.

For now, I'll keep working it in the arena until it feels natural for both of us.

The second exercise from Heather's lesson was a bit more involved. The idea was to walk the horse straight down the long side of the arena with his nose tipped to the outside. While I have read a lot about using the different parts of the horse independently, I haven't had a ton of luck with it in real life. The idea here, as I understand it, is to begin introducing the idea to the horse in a very logical way. Yes, I can face one way and walk another.

Going clockwise, nose tipped left, he got it pretty quickly. He was soft and not too crooked. He was moving off my leg and seat. I felt optimistic that this was an exercise we could master. And then I turned him around.

Counter-clockwise was a fiasco. "Stiff" doesn't even begin to describe his reaction. I kid you not, he could barely walk. He pulled and fussed, stumbled, swished his tail… and then grudgingly took a couple steps. The only time he really did it well was as Heather and Bunny were coming back up the driveway. Then he bent and looked right at them as I drove him down the arena. Of course, when we got to the other side and he had to face away from them, the whole thing fell apart again.

<Note: Heather told me Bunny was trotting a solid 14mph, and actually passed a slow tractor out on the road. This jives with my internal clock. It seemed like she was back almost before she left. I have a feeling Heather will be a force in LD in the coming year, but I think Blue is going to need another year of nutritional recovery and conditioning before we consider getting competitive, let alone trying for tractor-passing speed.>

Anyway, the fact that Blue was able to do the exercise counter-clockwise when there was something he wanted to see off to the right makes me believe that there is a mental component to the stiffness. I will try a combination of TTEAM and April Battles' methods to release any lingering tension, but then it might just come down to insisting.

We went back around the "good way" to end the training session on a high note.

On Saturday, I woke up late to roaring wind and ominous skies. I discovered that I had slept through the first half of the crucial/stressful college football game (Go Huskers!—eventually!). Laying there on pins and needles at the thought of another embarrassing Big 10 loss, I imagined riding at Madame Dorion—the howling wind sandblasting my eyes while I desperately tried to make myself as visible as possible to the hunters—and I was overwhelmed with laziness. Brian and I spent most of the day sprawled on the couch. He played xbox. I watched.

Brain=jello.

But I regrouped 24 hours later. Heather and I had planned a lake ride for Sunday afternoon and no amount of wind was going to keep me from doing at least a little conditioning. So although it was still very gray and blustery, we decided to brave it. It seemed like a safe assumption that the wind would be less offensive down in the woods near the lake. That was 100% true. It was almost—dare I say—a pleasant day out of the wind. Plus the lake was nearly deserted because of the iffy weather, so we could keep up a good pace without worrying too much about trampling pedestrians.

Blue forged the entire time. And I mean literally every stride was clack, clack, clack, stumble, clack. I shifted my weight. I two-pointed. I dropped the reins so he could find his own equilibrium. Nothing was working. Coming down the switchbacks on the far side of the dam he stumbled so hard that I was sure he was going down and taking me with him. He crumpled forward on the downhill, half righted himself, but tripped again as gravity and momentum threw him forward. I threw him the reins and sat still to give him every chance to recover (and give me every chance to bail if I had to). It took a momentous effort, but he hauled himself back up and continued as if nothing had happened. Disappointingly, our little brush with mortality didn't seem to make him more careful. Clack, clack, clack, stumble, for another 6 miles.

Don't get me wrong. His behavior was sensible and forward overall. He even seemed downright cheerful on the single track through the tall grass (Hello, HOTR!). He didn't do anything ridiculous all day other than being a little "looky" when we went by Dean's horses. But his forging made me cautious when I probably should have been more encouraging. He went roaring down a couple of hills in what would have been an exhilarating trot minus the forging. The speed and rhythm were there. The grace was not. So I was checking him and trying to get him to rock back and use his butt. No dice.

Jeff the farrier is coming tomorrow, but Blue's feet aren't particularly long or too far out of whack to the naked eye. I suppose he could be a little thrushy from the sudden change of weather. Everything else seems normal. Is thrush all it would take to disconnect him so completely from is own hooves?


I guess we'll just have to see what Jeff has to say about it.

PS: If you haven't been following Aarene's Endurance 101 online clinic, go now.