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| Love that feeling as you dive into the water complex! |
In a perfect world, I would be prepping for Novice outing number 2:) Alas, real life intrudes, and I'm kind of back to "now what?" I'm mentally preparing for 4 weeks of summer camp (sigh), and planning a little mini vacay in September with friends. June and July are the HARDEST months for me because it is SO hot, the ground is SO hard (in the ring AND in the pasture), and I'm so busy with summer camp. I'm thinking about maybe just light work once or twice a week for the next 2 months. I would love for Poplar Place to be our next outing, but honestly I'm really not that picky. I would like to get out at least once more before the end of November because that's when my USEA membership is up.
What do y'all do? Do you give your horse a few months completely off during the year? I have in the past; not more than 7 weeks total. For some odd reason I'm feeling like I want to keep him in work for now, just lightly, as I said. Gotta get new tires on the trailer, so he won't be going anywhere until then. KY killed them deader than a doornail! Don't really care about getting out for any hunter shows, but if I could find something dressage related, that would probably be a good thing! Got to get that whole warm up thing figured out. We still did well, but for SURE we could have done better had he allowed me to put him on contact at ALL. All of our judge's comments were, "needs to be better in the bridle", "above the bit", "above the contact", "needs to come into the contact better". He can do it, because we've DONE it! Somehow we need to release that crazy tension ... somehow!
Muffin carted around a couple of kidlets in the ring yesterday. It's the first time he's had tack on since last Sunday. He was quite good, quite incorrect and 'chintzy', but perfectly well behaved. One of the kids actually fell off him because he overjumped the xr oxer a little bit, and her leg went flying back and off she went. He tore around the ring at a bit of a gallop straight to the gate. Interesting; I haven't actually FALLEN off him in that way (knock on wood), so wasn't sure how he would react. She was fine of course, and I made her get back on then jump it again from the trot. Love my boy! He's the best :)
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| I STILL remember how stoked I was to FINALLY get over this jump. I was genuinely scared to jump it, and we conquered! |
I've never given a horse long periods of time off unless there's a specific reason (injury, illness, etc). I think they lose a lot of training and they get bored. a week here or there maybe, and I slow it down when the weather is rough, but that's about it. Staying in work when you're making progress seems like the sensible thing to do.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your input. My thoughts are similar; now that we've made good progress and there's still progress to be made, no sense in a total let down.
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