Monday, December 8, 2014

Ride 88 - The whole herd was feeling their oats!


OMG!  Chrome was acting so mellow in the pasture I honestly thought this would be a piece of cake, relaxing ride..... yeah right!  He was such a turd.  First of all, here are the ride stats (I LOVE Endomondo!).

Liz do you put yours on running?

The first 1.91 miles was on the road and the rest was in the pasture.  The part on the road took approximately thirty minutes.  Google Earth said we only went 1.54 so it's been off this whole time because it is straight lines where Endomondo tracks all of our weaving and stuff.  The difference is .37 of a mile, so it's not much, but it will be nice to have accurate information for 2015.  We went back to the gravel road hill, intending to go all the way to the end (it's a dead end), but when we got to the top of the hill there was fresh gravel really thick and no ditch to ride in, so we turned around and went back down.  At the bottom of the hill hubby asked what I wanted to do next and I was so frustrated I said I just wanted to go home.


He started out fine, even on the road while the neighbor horses galloped up to us.  Then they started following and then they took off running.  That's when he just about lost it.  He was prancing around, trying to trot, gawking, etc., but amazingly he didn't try to bolt or anything.  It's so hard to get his attention back on me in the halter though.  I did some lateral flexion (one rein stop) until he stopped trying to trot and prance and jig.


Then as soon as we got to the end of their pasture he started balking again, as usual.  I kicked the snot out of him and we continued on our way.  Then we got to the same place where he spooked a long time ago while I was riding bareback and I caught it on video (post here).  He spooked today and almost spun all the way around back toward home.  I straightened him out and booted him along and he spooked again (not as big).  I could hear stuff moving so I think it was deer again.  He was eyeballing it after that... then a school bus was coming up behind us... I got him off in someone's yard and turned him to face the bus.  At this point I wanted to get OFF!  I haven't felt like that in a long time.  However I stayed on and he was totally fine with the bus.  So we continued on the way and he wanted to trot, dodge into the field and act spooky about trash cans...  in other words he was just full of it!!  There was also a LOT of traffic.  Wrong time of day to ride on the road.

We went to the gravel hill and started trotting up, then a car turned on the road of course, so I stopped him and let them pass.  Then I continued up.  Hubby biked almost all the way to the top.  I was amazed!  There is no way I could have done that.  At the top we saw the gravel, went back down and I decided to go back home.  There was a ton of traffic and he was still gawking and being stupid.  Every horse we passed had to neigh at us too.  Not sure what that was about.  He was a turd until we got to within sight of home and then he dropped his head and chilled out.  I was seething.  That's why I decided to work his butt in our arena when I got home.  If he was going to make me work that hard on the road I was going to make him work hard at home.

He was being barn sour in the arena, but a few flexions and the use of a stick as a riding crop got him over the balking and trying to turn around. Then he was totally fine of course, but my stupid jeans were riding up and I couldn't trot more than a few steps before I had to fix them.  I have to remember to wear breeches next time even if I think I'm only going to be walking out on the road.  I did canter him from the driveway to the pasture and again from the back pasture to the gate and he was perfect.  He has such an amazing canter.

The funny thing is while we were working in the arena Zep was feeling his oats and goofing off and being adorable.  I gave up on doing anything productive and started taking pictures of Zep while hubby took video.

 Pawing the ground.

 Laying down.

 Rolling.

 Saying hi to Chrome and squealing at him trying to get him to play.

 He was full of it.

 Big bad Led Zeppelin!
He wasn't even doing that to anyone, just playing all by himself!

 I started herding him.

 Wish this wasn't blurry. Some weird running and kicking move.

 So handsome!

Zep chased the dogs and goats too.  He followed us around. He tried to destroy my arena marker buckets.  He was just full of himself!  Here's the video.  I tried to cut out as much of the boring stuff as possible while leaving Zep's antics in it.  Enjoy!



The good news is Chrome has stopped expecting to be fed as soon as I untack him.  He just stands there asking me to scratch his head and then goes to his hay bale, ignoring his feed bucket.  Score!

So it wasn't a bad ride, just frustrating, but that's life with a green horse.  I'm just not used to all of this energy because I never used to ride in the cold weather.  Oh and he's gotten a THICK winter coat finally.  I don't think I've ever seen his coat that thick.  :)

12 comments:

  1. I was just thinking today about how much I've been looking forward to the cooler temperatures all summer, and now that we have them, the horses are fresh, fresh, fresh. Could be all the stuff the vet made me add into their diets too, but just hand-walking Bombay was a pain. He jigged the whole way. A lot more people are out too. Someone was revving one of the loudest engines I've heard yet -- couldn't possibly be street legal. The coyotes were roaming in packs and as loud as I've ever heard them. Something about cold air brings out a lot of energy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It sure does!! The sad thing is while everyone else is feeling all energetic all I want to do is curl up in my electric blanket and sleep!

      Delete
  2. I use the MapMyRun app, which has riding as an option. It tracks your ride via your phone's gps, and it quite good if you actually ever go for a run too! Glad you made it okay, despite being frustrated. We went for a little trail ride this past sunday, and it was 90% relaxing and enjoyable and 10% turdy behavior, so I hear ya!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. MapMyRun is one I downloaded but I haven't tried it. I'll try it next. 😁 I'm glad the majority of your ride was relaxing! With practice ours will be too. He just has to get over this obsession with other horses!

      Delete
  3. Cold weather = fresh horses, like you I would much rather curl up in the heat than trying to convince a hot distracted horse to do things my way lolz

    ReplyDelete
  4. bummer that the road portion of the ride was so frustrating - but looks like you got some decent work out of him in the arena despite the conditions & jeans issues! plus, even just having to stand quietly while you take pics of Zep is educational for Chrome... and Zep is, as always, much too cute!!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you! Yes Chrome is amazing at standing still. He really is a good boy. He's just obsessed with other horses lol. Also even though I wanted to get off, I didn't so we are still making progress even when he acts like a loon.

      Delete
  5. Cole was full of it, yesterday, too--even though I had ridden him for the 5 consecutive days before. I think there must have been something in the air besides the cold. It sounds like you handled it all very well.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you! There must be! I'm so used to super hot, humid, sluggish horse lol. This whole winter experience with Chrome is new. I don't remember it really affecting my mare I used to have, but she was very well trained so maybe it's green horse combined with winter that is making things so exciting hehe.

      Delete
  6. Cold weather makes everyone so frisky!

    I started out with Endomondo but when the upgrades came out it just stopped working with my older model iPhone. Booo! The cool thing about it is that you can set it for horseback riding! I now use MapMyRun and I really like it: it has a lot of the features I liked from Endomondo including calling out the pace and mileage while you're riding. So I definitely recommend it if you ever have issues with Endomondo. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Whoa it does have a riding option!! I totally missed that the first time because I was looking for the word horse lol!!! Thank you!! I already downloaded MapMyRun so I will definitely keep it in mind if I have problems with Endomondo.

      Delete

I appreciate all comments, advice and questions! Your comments are what makes blogging so worth it. I love to hear from my followers, so thanks for taking the time to share your comments. :)