Winter Update

So its been way to long since I posted anything on my blog. This is due to a few reasons including this polar vortex thing and how busy my life seems all of a sudden. I swear, a few years ago I never would have believed that I would have a busy social life but suddenly that is exactly the way it seems to be. I am figuring out how to balance it all and starting to demand more horse time rather than just dealing with being busy and putting Katai last all of the time but it is a work in progress since I've never had to do anything like this before.

I have been working with her fairly consistently its just not as often as I would like, hasn't been as productive as I would like and I've had no time to blog on what has been happening. However, I decided that it is time to stop making excuses. I've had this thing that I've called a "100 Day Challenge" where basically I wrote out 100 days of things that I wanted to do I wanted to accomplish such as cantering Katai for the first time, eating healthier and making more time for myself. I've been doing fairly well meeting the challenges every day with the exception of missing a few riding days due to weather. One of the challenges is starting to blog more consistently again so that is what I'm working on now.

Today I was out at the barn for awhile despite the cold and rode not only Katai but another large draft cross named Durango. It is wonderful to ride a horse that has more experience and to have the chance to work on myself. His owner has asked me to ride once in awhile to do some dressage work and give her some tips. Today we worked on turns on the haunches to start to try to lighten his front end a bit.

Durango with his owner riding 

 



The real star of the show was Katai though. She is slowly getting better and better and our biggest hindrance right now is her lack of strength. Just like any young horse she is weak especially going to one side and that makes the work hard and her frustrated. It really doesn't help that with this extremely cold winter all of the horses are just standing around in the pen. Today she was clearly sore from our last workout a couple of days ago when we did a lot of trotting. While I don't like seeing her sore she did get more comfortable as she warmed up and got working again and I am glad that she is building muscle. I gave her easy work today and we did a lot of walking with just a small amount of trotting. Tomorrow she will get just a grooming and some grain. I may try to liniment her but honestly with how long her coat is right now I think it may be a lost cause. I will do some carrot stretches with her though and some walking to just help her stretch out.

Eating grain foods in a stall.