Ride Calendars for January and February

A couple of folks have been posting their ride calendars recently.  I've found it really interesting and useful to read those posts, and it occurred to me today that I also keep such a calendar -- started it a few years ago as a way of tracking our prep for the T3D and never got back out of the habit -- and that maybe it'd be interesting and/or useful for somebody out there to see what we get up to on a daily basis.  So here's January and February, with some hopefully obvious caveats:

1) I've done and continue to do what research I can, but I'm still very much making this endurance stuff up as I go along.  I have not much idea how well this schedule will ultimately work for us, let alone for anybody else.

2) This is a New England in winter schedule right now.  One of the reasons I'm posting is that the calendars I've seen are from warmer-state folks, whereas part of what I'm trying to figure out is how to be ready to do miles in the spring despite snow season, followed by ice season, with mud season still to come.

3) Tuck happens to not be a horse who profits from long stretches out of work.  I shoot to work him 4x/week, which seems to be the low end of the sweet spot to keep him happy and feeling good.  This, too, may not be generalizable, and I'm not sure yet how I'm going to manage his schedule when we can get back outside with some consistency and starting doing miles again.

Anyway, January and February, go:

I did a better job than I'd realized of keeping to the 4+/week schedule.  Gold star for me!  I had completely forgotten that we were outside hacking in January; in my head, this ice-cover has existed since forever and I'm oddly encouraged to discover that's not true!  I actually like the January calendar a lot.

I don't love (and didn't love at the time) how I managed him in the week after our 17-mile day early March.  In an ideal world I'd have given him Tuesday off, too, then flatted him Wednesday, jumped a little on Thursday, and onward from there.  Or rather, in an ideal world I would have been jumping more steadily all winter and so wouldn't have felt the need to fit in a last-minute school!  As you may have gathered from this blog, though, there were quite a few weather-related complications in February.  And no, I'm not sure why I saved that image under the filename "march+calendar."

My tentative plan for March is to keep building consistency: get our four weekly rides in, jump a couple of times, and see what we can do to get back outside for some longer hacks even if that means walking the roads.  I feel good about our revised plan for the season; that really has made it much easier for me to just go with the flow.  But I would love to get in a 15-mile day or two in the second half of the month if weather and footing allows.

We do have another jump clinic scheduled for mid-April, so I should probably also mark my calendar to not roach Tuck's mane until after then...