Pony Needs A Two-Pair Of Shoes

Nice when the farrier gets his first look at your horse and immediately compliments the quality of said horse's feet!

Tuck got his new set of sneakers this morning.  We stuck with the plan to keep him shod all around for this season but everything looked good under the pads and those did come off.

Then we headed off down the trails for a two-hour jaunt.  It, uh, did occur to me towards the end that maybe I should have kept his newly exposed front soles on a controlled surface for, oh, at least an hour or two?  But he felt not at all tender, so hopefully all remains well.

I did not get lost!  We did the single-track backwards from the route I was shown -- I found the "out" trail before the "in" and just rolled with it; it doesn't really matter -- but even the less-worn bits were easier to spot than I'd feared, and ditto that for property lines both crossable and not.  We mostly walked and walked and walked, because I wanted to make sure I could find my way and because I'm still feeling cautious about this transition from flatland hacking to the ups and the downs, but trotted some of the smooth wide uphill stretches of unpaved road and aside from a briefly skeptical reaction halfway up the first stretch, Tuck was keen and eager, moving well and well within himself.

(And he was thrilled by the fallen log we hopped over.  I will cop to jumping a few little downed trees while out in company last week, and to the baby ditch a couple of times and walking him off a bank, none of which really counts as jumping except that I threw in a rolltop at the end.  He felt great.  Happy to leap and zoom a little, and very much like his old self.  Hurrah!  Time to start incorporating a little jumping into our schooling rides, and we will be spending lots of quality time with that bank; Tuck is a semi-reformed launcher-off.)

I read Go the Distance on the plane home yesterday and was struck all over again by how much science there seems to be in this sport.  I had always thought that eventers were pretty up on nutrition and conditioning and sports medicine, but we do not hold a candle, I tell you what.

New thing I did not realize I was going to have to rethink: interval training.  What I know about intervals I know from being a middle distance runner and then an event rider, and so they've always been of the-rest-is-the-test variety -- the sort where you don't want a full recovery.  The idea of using looooooong rest periods has kind of blown my mind.

But intervals are a long way off for us if we end up using 'em at all.  Current plan for the foreseeable future is settling into a weekly rotation of dressage/jump schools and trail time, and using the latter to trot increasing stretches of the trail and get more comfortable on terrain.  I have come a long way from my newbie eventer declaration of, "I am from Illinois.  I do not gallop down hills."  I do, it turns out, when on an XC course.  But there is "maker of sensible decisions to minimize pounding" and then there is "total weenie," and left to my own devices when faced with even a gentle downward grade?  Yeah.  Weenie.