Finally, a day off of work! I actually really love it that I don't have to work Sunday's much. Gives me a day during the weekend to spend with the hubby. And seeing as I haven't been out to the barn lately, I decided to go see my boys and ride.
Left the house around 11:30 and quickly got out to my parents place. Didn't see anyone around, so I went to the back to grab Dollar from the holding pen. And man, was he MUDDY!!!!! I almost thought I had a black horse instead of a chestnut. Sheesh Dollar. Just because there is mud around, doesn't mean that you have to roll in it ALL THE TIME!! So I got him out, tied him up to the fence and got to scrubbing all that mud off. Luckily, it wasn't caked on too bad. Once he was all cleaned up, I threw my English saddle on him, got him out of the arena and off we went!
Decided for today that we were going to do a 4-mile hack with basically just walking and trotting to build him back up and build up his feet. So out on the road we went. Started out casually at a walk and then progressed to a trot to let him stretch out. He seemed to be moving out OK and had energy, even though he's FAT! Oh Dollar. Actually it doens't bug me that much because he'll be staying outside during winter (and it gets frigid up here in Winterpeg, Manisnowba), but on the other hand, it doesn't help his heaves. What to do, what to do. I guess we'll stick with doing hacks right now, just to keep him moving until spring comes and then we can get to working really good. I don't have an indoor arena, so that means we'll be doing a lot of work in the snow. See what happens.
Anyways...back to the hack. Once he got trotting, Dollar had figured out that we were going in the direction of another place that's just down the road from us and used to go there all the time when he was younger. Well, we weren't going there today. He was moving pretty fast and tried to get me to go there, but once we past the driveway, he knew that we weren't going, although he was still trying. Once we got past there, he slowed down and was a bit hard to get back into the trot again. Old Man, why do you have to do this to me??
We continued alternating between walking and trotting for the next mile and half. And we did get some walk work on pavement done! There's a stretch of paved road about 1 mile from my parents place, so when we got to said stretch, I let him walk it (which was about 1/2 mile), turned the corner and back into a trot.
Now, about this 3rd mile. He actually did really good. He managed to stay trotting almost all of the first half and then when we got to the 2nd half, I decided to ask him for a canter. This part of the 3rd mile is really packed down and hardly any cars go on it at all. It's actually situated between 2 fields of cows, so it's basically a farm road that's really packed. So Dollar picked up his canter right away and then decided that he wanted to stretch his legs. And of course, I agreed. He started gathering speed faster and faster until I realized that he was doing a medium-fast gallop. And he did that for almost the entire half mile! Once we started getting closer to the intersection, I just lightly pulled and asked him to slow down. Which he obliged like the gentleman that he is. He was huffing and puffing and wheezing a bit, but he felt so good!!
We walked/trotted the next mile home (he knows that he's not allowed to run home at all) and once we got home, I untacked him, checked him over and put him back into the holding pen. Lovely ride!!
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