Friday Fotos: Racehorse Camp

My barn has summer camp going on every week right now which I've been careful to avoid by going really early in the morning before it starts. Small children that ask a lot questions while roaming the barn are not really my thing. But this week was the intermediate group which consisted of five girls that lesson regularly and actually mostly know their way around a horse.

bm tells the history of her tiny saddle.

This morning I finally decided to take Bobby for a brief w/t/c. I got there well before camp started and BM told me they were doing a racehorse day today. I told her to sign me up, hacked Bobby quickly, and ran home to grab my camera.

the unsuspecting pony

I have a love-hate relationship with racing. For a long time, I thought I was going to work with racehorses forever. Fuck, I even have a pretty worthless associates degree in Thoroughbred Management! I hot walked in high school, did all the things for our college racehorses, and walked, groomed, and galloped at Saratoga also while in college. But after awhile, working with some of the people I did and finally blowing my knee out, I was kind of over it. And the passion for the backside never really came back.

ponying BM to show the camp kids how it's done

That said, I still really love horse racing, and I have all this now-useless knowledge stored in my head just waiting to be shared with preteens that think PONIEZ IN TINY SADDLEZ IZ THE BEST!

i am way too tall for this nonsense.

BM used to train Thoroughbreds (and eventually Standardbreds) so she brought along what she had left of some of her racing tack which included a postage stamp sized saddle she thought was about eighty years old. A friend gave it to her; he'd had it made when he was ten when he was riding on fair tracks. This thing was nowhere near the size of a jockey saddle you'd see today, and not even remotely close to the big fat exercise saddles I'm used to.

silver take his racehorse gear a little too seriously

After ponying all the campers around, I got on Silver--who might have Thoroughbred in there somewhere...really, really far back somewhere. I'm 5'10 and the majority of that is legs so sticking my feet in those fucking stirrups was no easy task.

aw, cute fake racehorse!

Not gonna lie, I mostly just posted which was a feat unto itself. After I'd done all of three laps of canter, I fell to the ground in agony dismounted and went to retrieve Mr Magee. Obviously he was going to get in on this.

look how excited he was!

Being on my own horse who knew exactly how this game was played made my job so much easier.

seriously. how cute is he?

BM took a spin on him when I was done which was cause for much giggling as she tried to convince us she couldn't canter him because her hips would fall off. So she cheated and dropped her stirrups to do it.

I made all the campers win pictures of their rides on Silver, so of course I had to make one for Bobby too since he's never won a race before.

winning!

I feel like I can skip my yoga workout tonight with no guilt. Twenty minutes of glorified stretching ain't got nothing on five minutes of two point with six inch stirrups.