Back to Work

Last week I absolutely failed at blogging, oops. It's just hard to have anything to talk about when your horse isn't in work and when you are having crisis after crisis in your personal life. Fabulous year, 2020 has been. 

But let's focus on TC for this post, because he remains the light of my life even though he had two weeks of just walking to help his lungs out a bit. 

The vet came back out last week to do a recheck of his lungs and they were much improved. No comets on either lung and the one spot in his left lung that had looked a little fuzzy was 95% improved. She okayed us to go back to work slowly, so that's what we've been doing! 

So much walking

So far, we've done four days of mostly walking with four one minute trot sets with three minute breaks in between. It's VERY conservative, but now any time he breathes slightly harder (like, you know, a horse who has been in and out of work since August would), I get a little concerned. So I'm probably taking a way more conservative route than necessary, but it makes me feel better and does no harm to him. 

I've done a lot of rehab schedules for horses (thank you Rico), so it wasn't hard to come up with something that I knew would effectively bring him back into shape without stressing his tendons/joints/etc. But for breathing, it's a little different. I figure that he needs to trot for short periods of time to get his lungs working, then have enough time to recover before we trot again. So while he does need to trot more over the course of the schedule, I need to build not only the total time we are trotting, but the stamina as well. So we need to go from trotting four total minutes to trotting twenty total minutes. But we also need to go from trotting one minute at a time to trotting five minutes at a time. And we also need to go from three minute breaks in between to less than that. It's a lot of math! 

The canter is coming way later, when we are almost all the way in full work for trot. The reason being is that the horse's breaths per minute at the trot are more variable, versus at the canter, horses breathe out in the down beat of the canter and breathe in during the up beat/back swing. To reduce the strain on the lungs, I want to allow him to increase his fitness cardiovascularly at the trot (where he can breathe as fast or slow as he wants to) quite a lot before I force his lungs to breathe at a certain rate at the canter. We'll do the same thing in canter that we do in trot, first increase the total number of minutes of canter work in 30-60 second sets, then slowly combine those to canter for longer periods of time. 

This is so unbelievably overboard. The person at my barn whose horse had *legitimate* respiratory distress (TC was basically fine lol) put her horse back into hard work almost immediately and I guess he's fine. But I just figure there's no harm in being careful. TC is only 9 and I know how much he loves being in work. It's not fair to push him and risk a career-ending or career-limiting problem just to go back to work sooner for what? For no reason, it's winter, we have no plans to move up to Fourth any time soon, he's confirmed at Third. 

He hates it for some reason

The vet didn't think she'd need to come out again unless he started coughing again. So far he hasn't done anything other than blow his nose once during two of the four rides this last week. He honestly feels fine and is probably a little annoyed to have such a stupid schedule to be riding on. He's gotten a bit bad about being blanketed because I think he wants the guys to play with him. I bought him a lickit and he hates it, so sorry buddy, I tried. 

We do a lot of walking around the ranch and playing games with the clicker in his paddock, but this horse thrives on working so I don't blame him for being a little frustrated. 

Today we go to six total minutes of trot. So hopefully that will help him feel a little better! At least it isn't a tendon rehab, please keep this in mind, TC! Keep those tendons healthy and this could be your last stupid rehab-like schedule.