Back on the Trails

It has been quite some time since I took TC out on the trails at our local trail facility. Honestly I can't remember the last time I took him off the property for a trail ride. 

Happy ears!

I'm super lucky that we have a very convenient hillside to ride on at the ranch. I can do one loop in 25 minutes and two loops in 45 minutes and it's quite a bit of climbing. Because of that, I stopped needing to haul him out weekly for hill work to keep his stifle functional, but I still would take him out for longer rides and for fun. 

That is, until we went through everything we went through. I've tried to bring him back a few times, but the one facility that is my default trail facility has a lot of hills, and I've not been able to get him fit enough to feel like I can take him there and do the full loop that we do. Honestly, I've also not wanted to take the time to do it either, I really lost a lot of motivation to do much riding with all the issues we were having.

So much fun

On Sunday though, I decided it was time to start getting him used to hauling out and trail riding again. And it was so much fun! 

We got to the facility and there was some kind of fancy photoshoot happening with a girl in a beautiful dress and a friesian all dressed up with matching ribbons in his mane. TC unloaded and was surprisingly quiet, I thought he might think that we were there for a photoshoot with the way he was watching them. 

The mustard is kind of crazy

The bay area really can be beautiful

A little boy came over and seemed very interesting in petting TC. His grandmother asked if they could and I said yes, TC loves kids. And then the closer the kid was brought to TC, the more TC eyed him and the more the boy cried. Poor TC, denied a photoshoot and friendship. 

I tacked him up and hopped on and he was so so good immediately. Again, this is our normal trail facility and he's been ridden there since he was a baby. But it was a bit cold and windy and outside of the fancy friesian, we were the only horse there. We marched out to the gate on a loose rein and I very stupidly put on my instagram how chill he was. 

Love these trails

Because after that he started screaming and showing me all the stuff that was different since he'd gone there two years ago. Like yeah, they added a sign there, I'm sorry, I should have let them know not to change the place at ALL in the years since you have been here. 

But it was still a super pleasant ride, just like when he was a baby, if he was getting a bit unruly (and these days that's just whinnying and like, walking with a lot of huffiness), he gets pointed up a hill. 

I thought this was so funny

Happy boy (mostly)

I wasn't sure how much of the trail I actually wanted to do, I figured I'd see how he felt. He was going to have Monday off regardless and he's been doing both loops at home, plus some extra work on the tracks, adding up to about 75 minutes of light to moderate hill work. This was about 30 minutes more than that and a bit more climbing. 

He got a little over halfway still with enough lung capacity to scream and stare aggressively through the mustard at people, so I decided to do the whole loop. 

It's so gorgeous there

 

We got to the end of the ride with him feeling a bit tired, but still not so tired he didn't try to take me on a second loop. He got to meet two women who wanted to pet him and so I said yes and he got some attention. And he only had one minor spook at the end when two cyclists came bombing down the hill behind him and slammed on their brakes, skidding directly behind TC. 

He zipped forward about two strides before I turned around. The cyclists took that to mean they should race by us and he handled that just fine, but I called after them that like hey, you should probably ask the rider before doing that. Luckily he is the best boy and even without seeing a bike for actual years, he didn't care. 

Unsure of going back home

Tired boy after a trail ride

Finally I got him back to the trailer with a lot of protesting from him, he really didn't want to leave. When he got home, Rico was very happy to see him, and TC rolled, grazed a bit, and took a nap standing in his porch next to Rico. 

I was super pleased with the whole ordeal! He was stellar and best of all, we made it all the way around for the first time in YEARS. I'm so grateful to have this horse back. 

Relearning

After years and years of not really being able to ride my horse, I can suddenly ride my horse, and it's kind of a problem!

Not only am I unbelievably out of shape, I low key haven't really ridden seriously in years at this point. So much of my riding in the past few years has been focused on really basic things - can I get the horse to go forward, can I get the horse to go in what appears to be a straight line, and can I get the horse anywhere close to being on the bit. 

He just felt so complicated to ride, so a lot of our rides were breaking things down, keeping things simple, working on exercises that were like... transitions, figure-8s, serpentines. 

Loving my tracks!

Suddenly, with the saddle, everything became SO easy. He just went to the contact, he just went in a straight line, he just went in general (forward). Everything we'd been slowly working on for years became easy. And now I have no idea what to even do with him! 

Luckily the first day we tried the saddle, Kate had come out to teach me on him and also gave her student a bit of an intro lesson on him. Then I had her student take a lesson with Kate before we left for Ireland so that she could feel confident riding him while we were gone. And then I took a lesson with Kate last weekend. Kate to the rescue. 

Road walking is always fun

I'll probably go into more detail in another post about the specific exercises since we're still working on them, but she said a few things about TC that I wanted to talk more about since it's really more relevant than the actual exercises. 

Now that everything is so easy, what do we work on? Well, one of the first things that came up in both lessons is that TC is a very *flexible* horse without being a very *maneuverable* horse. Her student's horse is somewhat the opposite, and I've had a lot of those - a horse who you can put almost anywhere, but who struggles a bit with the suppleness. One of my old client's horses comes to mind, where he was kind of a ball of tension sometimes, I could put him into any movement I wanted, but he struggled to relax his back a bit. 

TC is a bit of a gloopy mess of a horse, but then you go to put your leg on to move him around and he's like oh... no thanks. And it's like, bro, you will contort your body to fling your shoulder right and your haunches left all day long... until I ask you to bring your haunches to the left, and then that's difficult? 

So we talked a lot about, how do we use lateral work to increase spinal stability rather than to destabilize him. It makes sense, he's already a little unstable, then I push him MORE unstable and he says look, let's not make things WORSE. 

My arena doesn't feel as small when
I can actually steer the horse

The other thing she said to her student about him that made me laugh was that TC likes to be right, but he hates to have to solve a problem. So his way of doing things is to just throw everything at you that he thinks you might want in rapid succession. Her student rode all sorts of weird stuff on him, including a lot of canter transitions (including counter canter from walk, so talented) before he finally was wrong enough to listen to her. 

I have a habit, especially these days, of accepting almost anything as long as it isn't balking or running sideways. So he's used to being right and not having to solve many problems right now. 

The big takeaway I snagged was that I need to balance this a little better and let him problem solve at his own pace, which is usually slower than I want. I think hustling him through things has made him skip the problem solving step and just guess. So I get to work on my impatience with him. 

I dunno if I've posted this weird bridle
yet but we got this too

It's been really great to have things to actually work on. I find myself more excited to ride now than I have in years. And it's fun to finally start seeing him put muscle on. Slowly but surely I am getting my horse back. We still have so far to go! And we are definitely in the time of year where things do start going better for us. I still think that we won't truly know until the end of summer how things are actually going for us. But things are going better right now than they have in years even during this time of year, and we've had some hot days. 

We have a fair amount in our arsenal left that we can do. We can inject his neck, his stifles, his SI. I can have Kate's student ride him more (to take me out of the equation since I'm more emotional about it all). I can give him more alfalfa or grain. We could switch barns. Lots of options! 

But I'm feeling really good about things. I don't need him to come back to Third level. I just want to work on things again, take lessons, go on trail rides, have fun again. And so far it seems like we're on the right track for doing that!

Thirty, Flirty, and Thriving

Rico is doing so well this spring. Every year I have him is a gift, and I felt especially nostalgic on his 30th birthday this year. 

<3

Still the best of friends!

I got him when he was just barely turning 9 years old and I was 18 years old. Now he is 30 years old and this year I turn 40, my gosh where does the time actually go. I love so much that we have gotten to spend the past 21 years together.  I'm so grateful to be able to give him this amazing retirement after all he's given me. 

The big 3-0!

Pasture delivery

He was stoked

Look at that nose!

Closing in on the Answer - The Saddle

Alright, I kind of went over briefly how much better TC is doing but I wanted to dedicate an entire post to it. 

Tracks are a little overgrown but still
remain my favorite thing I've done at
the ranch in a while

Essentially, things somewhat took a turn for the worse in March just because of the winter and my travel schedule. That's totally fine, I wasn't too bummed about it, but it made me realize that I need to give TC more consistency when I am out of town, so I decided to try to find someone to ride TC during those times. 

Basically what happened was that he came out a bit lame one day on his left hind, which is normal when he has been out of work, and especially if it has been raining and he's been locked on his paddock (which is 50' long, it's not a small paddock, but he's used to moving around a lot in his pasture). Normally, I give him a couple days off with some bute on board, then I kinda just push him through it and add hill work. Typically he's better within the week. But this time, pushing him through it resulted in him feeling WORSE later on in rides vs better. So rather than just taking a little longer to warm up, he was getting progressively more uneven throughout the ride. 

So that warranted starting our rehab over a bit and dropping from 15-20 minutes of trot back to 30 second trot sets adding up to like 5 minutes of trot. 

Hill work: required

Meanwhile, Kate and I were talking saddles. She learned SO much at her Stubben training and I was in Uruguay in the back of a van being schlepped across the country when she downloaded most of it to me. It blew my mind, specifically the following with regards to TC:

- The shorter tree points of my previous saddle (not the old Custom, but the non-Custom custom one I'd ordered a few years ago) definitely were what destroyed his shoulder. He was going well in fall 2021 and then that saddle came through and cut into his shoulder blade. Poor boy. That made the balking much worse. 

- My current saddle, the Pegasus, is fine, but it is still probably a bit too much pressure around the withers, TC has humongous withers (not super tall but just a lot of surface area) and most saddles sit way too close to his spine/withers. When there is pressure on the sides of the wither, there is a bundle of nerves that gets crushed and this causes horses to want to stop. It's the same bundle of nerves that stallions bite when they breed mares. 

- There is a bundle of nerves probably right under where my girth lands on his side, which can also be irritating to him. He's always been funny about girths, he wants his girth quite tight, and I wonder if this is why.

- TC is actually quite narrow, I feel like he's been in trees that were too wide for him a lot of his life. This can also put pressure on the wither area, which again causes horses to want to stop. 

He loves an audience

A few weeks ago, Kate was in town and I wanted to kill two birds with one stone, so she brought a client's saddle out AND one of her advanced riders. We put the saddle on TC and I took the first half of the lesson, then her rider got on and we did a quick evaluative ride so that when I was in Ireland, she could ride TC for me so that he didn't get a week off. 

I got on TC in the saddle and immediately felt a huge difference in the contact, TC was RIGHT there, which was a really good sign. He's never just... in the contact. He's been a really complicated horse in the contact for a long time, he struggles to reach evenly to both reins, he likes to retract the neck, and he drops through the base of his neck quite a bit. Except not anymore, because apparently ALL of that was caused by saddle fit. And it's not like he hasn't been in well fitted saddles (at least, fit professionally) for most of his life. 

We picked up trot and he was quite happy to do so without contorting his body. Just a week before, I was lamenting to Kate that he was getting stuck in a new corner, balking a bit, but in the new saddle, he was happy to step right through the corner.

It's just EASY what the hell

We put her rider on and he was... so unbelievably smug. First of all, he loves an audience, and second, he loves a kid. She's an adult, but a young adult, and I could tell from his facial expression that he thought his dreams were coming true, that she was going to be his new kid (young adult). His ears were pressed very far forward as they do when he is excited, so far forward that they were almost facing each other. 

And Kate had her ask him for some more advanced movements than I had in a while - shoulder-in, half pass, haunches-in - and TC was definitely having fun taking her through the movements. It was almost like he was trying to be super duper professional with her, like if I asked for half pass, he'd have been like, seriously? we haven't done that in ages, jeez. But when she asked, he was like oh yes, half pass, I am very trained and you are just a small child (young adult) and I will show you how. She is riding at the PSG level by the way, he's such a mansplainer. 

When we got done, I led him back to the barn, but instead, he stuck really close to her, as if to say "okay cool, when is the vet check? can you take me home today or do I have to wait?" ready to totally abandon me. Bro, I raised you!

Look how happy he is

I was really excited about the saddle, but obviously it's owned by a client of Kate's, so it left with the new love of TC's life (her student and just generally an audience) and I immediately messaged the local Stubben rep, who happened to be in town the next day!!

She came out and I got to try a few of the saddles. Again, TC went SO well in them, but I was really having trouble deciding between them. I told her that I was a little nervous to commit right away for a couple of reasons. 

1. TC is hopefully (and can confirm this is true 2.5 weeks later) going to positively explode with muscle now that he can move properly, so ordering a saddle when he's at his most undermuscled feels like a recipe for having to bring the fitter out a ton and maybe him outgrowing a tree.

2. I'm not sure what will happen with his gaits and how much support I'm going to need from the saddle if he is going to get his big gaits back. His trot and canter have definitely gotten smaller over the years just because he can't support the bigger gaits. I was worried about ordering a saddle with a smaller block and then a few months later being like... cool I can't sit these gaits anymore.

Luckily, Stubben really does seem to want to do what is best for horse and rider, so I was left with a demo saddle for as long as it takes me to figure out the answers to those questions. My goal is to get him back to full work and start to sit his trot. That will allow me to buy a saddle for a fit, somewhat well muscled horse (or at least we'll know what direction we're going in) AND to make sure that I give myself the support I need to handle his hopefully enormous gaits. 

Look how good he looks!

I think I've done a good job not letting myself go down the "if only I had..." rabbit hole. Maybe it'll come later. But I did the best that I could with the information I had at the time. 

I've spent a lot of time thinking about how much you can just trust a saddle fitter (or any equine professional, or professional in general), like they can be a good saddle fitter, and STILL the saddle might not *actually* work BEST for the horse. And it's hardest when the horse is going pretty well in the saddle - the concept of like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

But at the same time, there's that other saying where like, good is the enemy of great. I think both of these little sayings get to me at work - I really do like my job, it gives me a lot of freedom (unlimited vacation, which I've been taking advantage of this year, I think I'm at 5 weeks of vacation so far and it's only April lol) and I enjoy what I do and the people I do it with, but I also know that if I really push myself, I could improve my salary quite a bit if I moved companies. Luckily they sensed me getting squirmy so they promoted me so I don't have to revisit this for a while. So I get to think about it with TC instead!

Basically since the saddle situation was mostly pretty good over the years, I didn't really put a huge amount of weight into it as the primary driving force behind his balking. But it turns out, it might be most of the answer. Only time will tell!

Progress!

WOW I am very behind on this blog. 

Essentially, in January, I spent three weeks in Uruguay, then got home and was extremely distracted by processing all my photos, working on the journal I kept while there, doing my real life job, working with TC, and I signed up for a Spanish class because being down there for so long and not speaking the language annoyed me. 

It was also rainy, I went on three more trips - in February I went to Michigan to visit Kate, in March I went to Channel Islands National Park, and I just got back from Ireland. I've been so busy and so happy, but the blog took a back seat. 

Cute boy

However, a lot has happened that I want to share! So I will set up some posts to catch things up and hopefully I'll stay in town for long enough to continue writing on this blog. 

Last we left off, Sundance wasn't doing so well. I'm super happy to report that Sundance's treatment went super well! He gained the weight back and looks better than ever now. He is off the steroids and maintaining his weight, and he's now slowly transitioning back to hay after an all-pellet diet for the past 3+ months. We plan to start riding him when he's fully back on hay and doing well, there's no rush to put him back to work. 

Celebrated TC's fifteenth birthday!

TC is doing fabulous. We had a bit of a tricky winter - with all the traveling, an offsite for work, and the rain, he ended up having a flare up of his stifle issue. It was an especially weird one, where he actually got worse with work. Normally a trail ride or two and kinda pushing him through his work with a lot of walk breaks makes him better in a week. This time he had to have a bit of time off and a lot of walking. He recovered though, but it set us back in terms of his fitness. 

Because of that, I decided to see whether one of Kate's students could ride him for me while I'm gone. She's a fabulous rider, riding her own horse at the Prix St George level, and is riding horses for a few people in the area. 

Coincidentally, the week before we left for Ireland, Kate was in town, so I had Kate come out to teach me and bring her student so that we could give her a bit of a boost in riding him.

Ireland was AMAZING, more on that later

In ADDITION, when I was in Michigan, Kate had me ride Flounder (missed him!! even though he bullied me a lot when I rode him) in her collection of Stubben saddles since she is now a rep. I really loved them, and so she ended up bringing one of her students' Stubbens out for TC on the day we had the lesson.

I was FLOORED. I felt like I had my horse back, not even the one I was riding in 2020, but the horse I bought. Then seeing her student ride him and seeing him curious about his work and happily doing things he hadn't in years (like they worked on half pass lol), I was super sold. I texted the local rep and arranged for her to come out the next day.

She came out and again I was just floored by how good TC felt in the saddles. He just felt trained, and so it became really obvious that at least some of this is a saddle issue. 

Trust me when I say he has put on a TON of muscle
in like... two weeks, what the hell?

Luckily, she was able to leave a saddle with me that fits him pretty well so that I could try it for some time. I am also getting another one to try. The plan is for me to get him fit in one of those saddles, then I can order one. I loved how much they seemed to be willing to let me ease into the idea of ordering him yet another custom saddle. But I'm truly blown away the more I ride in it so I'm mostly just waiting for him to pack on muscle since we may end up being able to get a slightly wider tree for him. 

I think this is the first time I've really thought I might get my horse back. We still have the summer to get through, this is the time of year where he feels the best. But he's never felt THIS good at this time of year. Anyway, I'm hopeful!

Always happy on the trails

I think I'll set up a couple more posts, I have more info on TC (we had a lesson!) and then more on the horse aspect of going to Ireland because it was SO interesting!

What is Wrong with Sundance?

Sundance has been not feeling good for a couple of months now, so on Tuesday I hauled him down to the vet for my mom. 

I rode him all summer long, since he was the only one I had to ride with TC doing mostly ground work at the time. Mostly I rode him on the tracks and on the trails, I even took him out to HBR, the local trail facility, to walk on the flat road there.

But then this fall we noticed that he was losing weight and topline. I was surprised because he really was in more work than normal (which has been no work for a few years since my mom stopped riding). I stopped riding him in early November and we fed him more and more. Soon he was eating more than TC!

Poor naked pony

We had the vet out in early December for blood work and it wasn't great. He was anemic, showed low protein, and had a few other values that were pretty off. We redid his diet, adding a bunch of alfalfa for the protein. And he continued losing weight, so we did another round of bloodwork that didn't show much improvement. He had also started laying down more often, like many more times per day than usual and at odd times for him. So on Tuesday we took him down to the internal medicine specialist. 

She warned us at the start of the appointment that we were unlikely to leave with real answers. Her theory, which was the same as our local vet's theory, was that he had protein-losing enteropathy, essentially that his gut was leaking protein and that's what was causing the topline loss and the loss of weight. It can be caused by a myriad of things, including inflammation due to chronic NSAID use (nope), infection, lymphatic issues, and even cancer (lymphoma). 

He was truly horrified to have cold
alcohol dumped over his shaved bits

She ultrasounded his gut on both sides, looking for thickening of the walls of his intestines. His small intestine was very active and was dropped, meaning she saw a lot more of it than she expected. That's a sign of colic/intestinal pain. But the actual walls seemed fine. She went back into the large intestine and that's where she found some thickening in the wall of the cecum. It wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, she normally sees them like 3-4x thicker than normal and his was only slightly thicker. So she was comfortable saying that lymphoma was unlikely at that point. PHEW because cancer has taken enough people/animals from me this year. 

We also did abdominal x-rays to look for sand and/or stones, just since he was there at the clinic and it was convenient. Nothing showed up, so that was good to rule out. 

He's been such a good kid's pony 
this year (hopefully not just because
he has been feeling bad)

Like she warned, it was kind of inconclusive. There's no clear reason why what is going on is happening and unfortunately because the only abnormalities are in the cecum, the only way to really biopsy that area is to send him to colic surgery, which would be ridiculous. 

The plan then is to just start treatment. He is going on an all pellet diet so that the cecum doesn't have to work as hard. He's also going to get a tapering dose of steroids for a month. And he is going to be started on an antihistamine since he does have some allergy issues that she thinks could have triggered the inflammation. 

Then we wait. He gets bloodwork done in two weeks to see whether anything has improved, and he gets a recheck on his ultrasound in about a month. 

The younger kiddo is going to be so much bolder
and scrappier a rider than the older one, trying to
convince her to hold on was a no go

We're hoping that just one round of steroids and taking the pressure off of his cecum will be enough to kind of reset his gut. Although some horses need to be on low dose steroids for the rest of their lives, and figuring out the dose is really tricky because if you dip too low, you kind of have to start over because the symptoms start back up again. 

I really feel terrible for the little guy. He's only 20 years old, and for a Morgan that's basically only middle aged. It's been really sad to watch him lose weight and topline this year. He was always a round little guy, we called him an air fern! 

Fingers crossed this all works out and he feels MUCH better soon!

Goals for 2026

Happy New Year! I used to do these goals posts, the most memorable (for me) being my 2014 goals where my stretch goal was to show Rico at Intermediare II and I ended up getting my Gold Medal on him that year. 

There have been other years where my goals haven't worked out, which is fine too, sometimes life is just like that. So I figured I'd put some goals out into the universe this year and see what happens. I'm ready for a repeat of 2014 in terms of successful goal achievement!!

We'll start out really easy though:

- TC comes back into full work - walk, trot, canter, working on Training and First level concepts

- TC enjoys his work again, even through the summer months when his balking typically is at its worst

- TC visibly puts on muscle and improves his weird hind leg mechanic

- We figure out a solid maintenance schedule (injections, nutrition, etc) that keeps him happy year round

- Haul out to trail ride a few times this year

From Sunday, I'm pretty happy with this shape
and how much he's reaching for the contact

These are more of my stretch goals with TC

- Go to a clinic with a new trainer I've heard really great things about 

- Find a facility to haul out to for next winter to keep him in work, whether that's the neighbor facility that he was freaked out by this year or another one

- Do some non-trail outings, such as obstacle clinics/shows, 

- Start jumping small fences again for fun (if he wants to)

And the biggest stretch goal

- Take TC to a dressage show! Just a schooling show at Training level or something like that

The right was much tougher that day

And then I have property goals I want to make progress on (likely won't do all of this in a year)

- Add mirrors to my arena, or at least get a plan in place to do so

- Redo the footing in my arena, even just scraping the old sand and adding new sand

- Add sand to my tracks to improve the footing, maybe buy a water trailer for the ATV so that I can water and drag it in the summer

- Add sand to TC and Rico's paddocks to give them a soft place to lay down 

- Move my arena fence to make it more rectangular, and when doing this, redo the fencing in the arena so that it doesn't look so janky and add short court letters. Come up with a better way to store jumps/poles/etc outside of the arena on the spot that I'm cutting off. 

- Redo the sprinkler system for the arena, dropping the pipes below ground so they don't grow moss inside when it warms up, and making sure the coverage is accurate for the entire arena. Maybe also replace the control system so that I can access it via the internet and then I can write a program for it where it won't water if it's going to rain lol

- Scope out expanding the arena length-wise, figure out what that will cost and decide whether I want to do it or not. I'm leaning away from it now but if it's inexpensive, I may as well add a few meters to it. 

I'm so happy with his progress this winter!

And finally, my favorite goal of the year

- Get my amateur status!!

Hopefully this year goes really well for us! I think trotting down (or even better, bolting down) centerline at Training level in the amateur division would make both of us REALLY happy. But mostly I just want him to feel happy and content in work all year long!