Hopefully Back On Track

 It has been such a long time since I posted anything here! There has been a lot going on with Killian over the past several months and I've been struggling with how to update everything concisely on Instagram so I finally decided to post here.

Some of this won't be new if you're following me on Instagram but some of it will be as it's just tough to post full updates there. Hopefully I can still keep this fairly short and concise though.

Here we go! 

This spring we did two dressage shows. Leading up to those shows I was really struggling with Killian's fitness. I was working way too hard to get her moving and keep her forward. It was particularly a struggle at the canter and was very demoralizing after how hard we'd worked over the winter. I continued to chip away and was training most of the 1st level stuff but without nearly the forward we needed. With that being said we were running through 1st level test one pretty successfully but man was it taking a lot from me just to get us through the test. 

Ultimately I decided at the time to go ahead and enter 1st level test one at our first show of the year. In retrospect we just weren't ready but at the time it felt like the right decision. Killian ultimately took charge of the decision at the show as she was uncharacteristically spooky and unwound. I'd ridden her off property several times at that point and at 5 different facilities and each time she'd been basically the same horse that she is at home but at this show she was not.

Because I'm all about this being fun and building good experiences for both of us I ended up scratching my test each day but did get some good schooling in. Around that time I was at my wits end about what to do about her fitness. Because the indoor at my barn is so small and I'd struggled to get her to canter consistently under saddle in the indoor over the winter, despite my best efforts, I decided to consider an opening at a barn that I'd looked at years ago. They had a bigger indoor, heated barn and wash stall, and lots of good outdoor riding spaces including trails. On paper it looked perfect and after talking with that owner again and discussing with my current barn owner I decided to go for it.

Picture from the barn just before we left

I had so many mixed feelings and had some concerns about Killian living outside in a paddock 24/7 and getting fed with a feed bag, as well as concerns about losing my amazing barn family and support system, but the good things seemed to outweigh the bad and ultimately I wasn't sure I could build the strength I needed to with Killian without a larger indoor.

Doesn't portray how tough this was

I gave my notice in May but went to one more show with my barn in June and then moved the weekend after that show. For the second show I took us back a few steps and did Intro B the first day and Training 1 the second. She was good as gold for both tests but still so behind my leg that I had to carry her through both tests. 

The ribbons also don't accurately portray
how tough riding her was at this show

The move went well and she went into quarantine. Because of a few factors including how wet it was this spring that quarantine ended up being extended and then extended again after the first introduction didn't go well. A second introduction into a different pen also didn't go well but after some great flexibility with that barn owner we found a turnout situation that worked for Killian and their horses.

Quarantine in full bug armor

Her and her bestie Remi with Zoe photobombing

I started taking lessons with the barn's eventing instructor and made a bunch of progress in learning to ride a horse that is naturally more woah than go. She was great and I was having a great time but Killian continued to feel like she was losing rather than gaining condition. We took things back a bit and focused on getting her in front of my leg at the walk and trot but on the lunge her canter seemed to get worse rather than better. 

She also off and on struggled with eating her grain and supplements and I wasn't always hearing about it in a super timely manner which made it tricky to address. At that time I wasn't overly concerned if she missed a day or two of supplements since she wasn't on meds or anything super critical so I continued to do what I could to work through it with the feeding crew.

At the end of September I went to lunge her and she looked very slightly off behind, my guess was left leg up high. I gave her a few days off to see if some rest would resolve it but it didn't seem to improve enough so I had my trainer look at it. She agreed with me that she was off and we decided it was a good reason to have the vet look at her. Even though it was very slight my gut had been that she was not 100% for a little while, we just didn't have anything to point to other than that she was tough to condition.

The day after I spotted the unevenness behind

I made the appointment and for a few different reasons it ended up being almost a month later. I gave her a week off, expecting that after a week I'd at least start tack walking or trail riding but after that week off she looked worse. I gave her more time off and then had a vacation and was out of town for 5 days. When I returned she looked worse still (slightly not a lot but definitely moving in the wrong direction). She wasn't looking more lame, if anything the lameness was mostly resolved but her whole body looked sore. It was midway through the following week that I started to wonder about EPM. When the vet came out a few days later she agreed that EPM was a likely cause with how weak and was and how she responded to the neuro tests so we tested for EPM, Lyme, and put her on a high dose vitamin E and some banamine while we waited for the tests to come back.

It took 5 days and during that time I was super freaked out. I was so lucky with Katai who basically was never unsound in the 9 years I owned her and now I'd dealt with a major injury with Niall and now potentially EPM with Killian. Luckily we got back results for EPM that were fully negative, not just a low titer, and the Lyme came back negative as well. We decided low vitamin E was potentially the cause since she was doing way better at that time on just the vitamin e. I stopped the banamine and continued the vitamin E.

It was lovely to get to use my tack locker again!

In retrospect I think she's been struggling with this for awhile. Up until this spring she'd been on a vitamin e supplement at 2000IU and my guess is that it was at least maintaining her levels. In the spring though I'd changed her to a complete grain with 2000IU on the bag based on her serving. I've learned though over the past few weeks that vitamin E is destroyed in a complete pellet like that so since I changed to that grain she hasn't been getting really any vitamin e supplemented. 

That brings me back to the issues with her eating the grain though. For two full weeks I went out every day and gave her the high dose, water soluble, vitamin E with an oral syringe to make sure she was getting it. I learned that she hadn't been letting the feeding crew put her feed bag on consistently during that time and that sometimes (not sure how often) she would walk away when they put her feed in a feed pan and another horse would eat it. I tried problem solving for a bit but I'm in full seasonal depression mode and everything else going on in the world is stressful enough without worrying about whether she'd eat her vitamin e each day.

Not looking too shabby after a couple of weeks of high dose vitamin e

I'd also been missing my prior barn and barn family since I'd left. With the vitamin E diagnosis I also had hope that the bigger arena maybe wasn't the only solution and that with adequate levels of vitamin E I'd actually be able to make progress with her strength. I reached out to my amazing prior barn owner who took me right back. I'm so incredibly thankful for this amazing group of people and so happy and relieved to be home. I also got to trailer her back myself in my new trailer which was a life changing experience.

We learned alot while we were there though including me getting brave enough to
do our first few solo trail rides

Splash party before heading on another solo trail ride

We've been back now for almost a week and she is continuing to look so much better. She's got her vitamin e split into two feedings now which I think is helping her levels stay more even and the last time I tried trotting and cantering her briefly on the lunge to check soundness she looked better than she has in a long time. We had the vet out for fall vaccines this week and are testing her vitamin e and selenium levels so I'll be curious to see what those come back like.

We still have a long road, she still looks pretty weak and I don't want to risk an injury so I've got a rehab plan that we're working through to slowly get her strength back up while we address the vitamin e levels. I can't wait to have my horse back and get to start riding again but I'm also just so thankful to have her feeling better and get to see her goofy personality returning. Having my people around us while we go through this is also such an amazing thing so I know the time will fly by.

Getting Killian Part II

 I left this on a bit of a cliff hanger but of course if you follow my Instagram you know that I got Killian. It was an adventure to get her though with a lot of firsts for me so it’s still a good story.

As soon as I was reminded that Killian was an option I booked a flight since I had the benefit of following her on Instagram for over a year I didn’t need to wait on any additional videos or photos. Because the trip was eating into my already very limited budget I flew into Orlando in the morning, drove a rental car to Ocala area for a mid-day test ride, drove back to Orlando, and flew back that same evening. It was a whirlwind trip with a very early morning and a very late night but I made it. I ended up being a little late to the test ride because of a GPS error but other than that plans went smoothly.

 

I had been telling myself that Elisa Wallace certainly wouldn’t be there to show this mustang to a lowly adult amateur so when I parked, looked over and she was standing there with Meg I just about passed out. I was probably embarrassingly fangirly but Elisa is just super nice and down to earth. I walked into the barn and Killian was standing in the crossties and I think it was love at first (in person) sight. I just had this really strong “this is right” feeling in my gut the second I saw her. She was unsurprisingly a little bit standoffish (other than wanting to smile) but warmed up quickly and both Meg and Elisa mentioned that she seemed to like me which apparently hadn’t been the case with some other’s who looked at her.
 
We walked her over to the paddock that they were warming her up in and Meg hopped up and walk/trot/cantered in each direction and then I mounted up. Elisa Wallace held my sunglasses while I rode so they’re never getting washed lol. It’s always tough to get a feel of a new horse especially one that’s green and been focused on a different discipline. I was also in a full on jumping saddle and Killian is very narrow sided so I felt like my legs were swinging really badly. Even with that though we got some really nice trot in both directions and an easy canter right with a little tougher canter to the left. That checked everything off my list and then, even better, Meg opened up the gate and I rode out into their open field where they have jumps set up. 

It already seems kind of like old news but as happy as I was that we had nice w/t/c on each rein on a completely new, still green horse I was almost in tears at how steady she was when we left the paddock and went out on our little trail ride. She had a couple of good looks at things so I got to see her reaction to that sort of stuff and got to play with getting her to approach things a little. I seriously had the best time and hated to leave her but had told myself to at least sleep on it. I asked Meg if I could have until the next day and she said of course and I got back in my car to drive back to the Orlando airport.
 
That next morning I talked with a couple of friends and my wife. I asked them to challenge me and ask hard questions about whether this was the right thing and the questions weren’t that hard to answer so everyone supported moving forward. I reached out to Meg to proceed and then everything went quickly. We got a sales contract done, and moved forward with finding a trailer ride. Luckily it was spring and our local community has plenty of people that spend winters in Florida so we pretty quickly found someone who was trailering up this way, actually going further north to the border of North Dakota. We found a boarding barn parking lot where we could swap Killian into a fellow boarder’s trailer and got it all finalized.
 

The day she left I was on pins and needles. While I was glad they were making an overnight stop I was also anxious about how she would handle getting off the trailer, get handled, let herself get caught, and load back up. Now that I know her more I know how unfounded those concerns were but Mustangs can, for sure, have some tricky little quirks which I’d experienced with Niall so it was easy for me to stew a little. I got an update that she took a little bit to load that first morning but trailered well, drank and ate and unloaded without incident. It was a chilly night so they blanketed her which she also handled well. The next morning I was again super anxious made worse by the fact that I didn’t hear from them until the afternoon. They shared that she’d been pretty reluctant to load that morning, who could blame her after a full day of traveling the day before, but they were on the way and everything else was going smoothly.
 
We figured pick up would happen late in the evening and, of course, it started to rain. Killian was riding in the middle so they needed to unload a horse to get her off and, again of course, she didn’t want to get on our trailer in the dark and rain after another full day of traveling. With a little encouragement from the boarding barn owner and myself we got her loaded up though and headed home with an ETA of right around midnight. My amazing barn owner had some apt beverages for us when we got there 😊
 

She again unloaded perfectly and walked into the barn like she owned the place. Because it was still early spring for the Midwest I put her in a blanket that night and after keeping an eye on her for awhile to make sure she was eating and drinking I headed home for some well earned sleep. The next few days were eventful and included a well time saddle fitting and lot’s of getting to know her. I had a lesson at the end of that week and a show to prep for just over a month after I got her so we really packed in the eventful time for that first couple of months. I knew it was a lot early on but after so long without being able to do those things I just really needed to prove to myself that I finally could. I’m glad I did it and really exited to continue to share our journey.

Getting Killian Part I

I’ve been wanting to share Killian on here ever since I got her but man has this summer ever been full on. I’m still pretty confident that I’m not going to get back to blogging on a more consistent basis but it is nicer to have the longer format to introduce Killian and close out 2023.

To start Killian’s story we need to go back a ways. All the way back, in fact, to when I had completed all of Niall’s paperwork and was waiting for her to get a trailer ride to my barn. During that time I was following a bunch of mustang accounts and found Killian (Allure at the time) through Elisa Wallace’s account. I had been following Elisa Wallace ever since I found the video of her first mustang competition years ago. It was the video with Fledge and that was where I really decided that getting a mustang was something I was interested in.

 

Elisa’s working student, Meg, was Killian’s trainer so I started following her account (mcmeventing) on Instagram. As soon as I saw Killian I fell in love. She was very much my type, chestnut, mare, leggy, the right height, had good movement, etc. I very much had the thought that if I didn’t have my own amazing mustang arriving and if she had been available I would have been very interested in her.

 

Fast forward a bit and Niall got home to me, was perfect, and I very quickly fell in love. Then she got injured and I fully committed to her rehab and I couldn’t be prouder of myself. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t have faith that we’d pull through even though I had moments of doubt. Over the next 1+ year I got Niall through months of stall rest with daily hand walking, her CT appointment during an ice storm, hours of long lining, and then starting her under saddle. During that time I continued to follow Killian and Elisa’s other mustangs as inspiration and to live vicariously through them. When we added trotting under saddle as part of Niall’s rehab it was an extra bright spot of hope and I was feeling extra confident that we’d get through this together. 

 

During that winter (2022/2023) I slowly, slowly added more and more work under saddle at the walk and trot and as we moved into 2023 I started to do some canter with her on the lunge line. That was the toughest point because that made her explosive in a way that the other work hadn’t. At this point she was still on restricted turnout when she wasn’t in her stall so getting to “run” was extra exciting. Day by day I tried to walk the line between pushing her enough but not too much and man was it ever stressful. As we continued into the year there were more and more ups and downs. Despite going slowly and carefully, on weeks where we did some work at the canter she would go down hill a bit and seem ouchy. I’d give her a chance to rest and recover with some easier work like handwalking or even just a little trotting and she’d seem better but then as we worked up to canter again she’d go back off.

 

It was very minor and based on a couple of vet visits around the time the thought was that with the extent of the injury on that joint it was sort of a miracle that she’d pulled through that well and that this was probably just how she would be. I struggled so much with this mentally over this time. I’m fully of the opinion that every horse has their stuff. I know my right knee is messed up and it makes my gait weird when I run but it continues to be super functional for me and I’m not in pain. I also know when it starts to hurt again and can get more testing and treatment for it immediately and horses can’t necessarily communicate that as quickly to us. The problem is that after all of that slow rehab with her and with wanting a horse that could move, at least modestly, up the levels I was just feeling like I’d hit another brick wall in that goal.

 

After finally deciding to rehome Katai since she couldn’t trailer and show off property successfully after 9 years of working on it, having a horse that was unlikely to be consistently sound enough to work up the levels and show was super super difficult to face. On top of that, I wasn’t sure if it was in her best interest to try. With Niall I wanted so badly to give it more time and I continued to work with her and try things including giving her just some steady time off. When that didn’t make a big difference I had several really difficult conversations with the people in my life. They were all supportive of me continuing to try and at the same time agreed with me that it seemed unlikely that Niall and I would be able to successfully and comfortably meet my goals together.

 

Thankfully there was a back up plan for her. This exact scenario is such a nightmare for someone that boards and can only, really, afford to board one horse. At this point the option was potentially on the table to get a second but it just felt like I might be slightly overextended and I didn’t want to risk putting any horse in that situation. Instead we ended up going with the back up plan for her which was to be absorbed into the lesson program at my barn. It was truly the best case scenario for her since she loves kids. The work is easier, the riders are mostly much lighter and she loves kids. I’m so so glad to report that this has continued to work out super well for Niall and while there have certainly been some green moments she honestly seems so happy to be working with kids.

 

But now, back to Killian. I had made the final decision in late March of this year I took some time to process and then expected to be horseless for the majority of the summer so that I could save up for my next horse. My goal was to get to the start of a 5 figure budget since that’s just what horses cost these days. I was hoping to get another mustang but was super flexible on any pony. I definitely knew I wanted something that was started under saddle but green was ok and I was absolutely set on finding something that had been off property a few times and handled it well. I figured I wouldn’t need a 5 figure budget but wanted to have some flexibility if exactly the right horse came along. I also was looking for something that was at least 14 hands. Katai was 13.1 and ¾ and Niall was 13.3 but that extra inch was really ideal as an adult with a pony.

 

One of my friends encouraged me to just post an ISO for my current budget and what I was looking for to see what was out there. I got lots of responses but many were just not what I was looking for either height wise, age wise, or training wise. I did have a handful that I was interested in but of course one was on the East coast, one was on the West coast, and one was south so not exactly easy to combine into a trip. I was weighing my options for going to see one or two of them when Meg commented on my Facebook post with Killian. Immediately when I saw her post I wondered why I hadn’t thought of her. I instantly responded to Meg and after asking a couple of questions I booked a flight to Florida to go see her.

to be continued...