Back in action

As expected, April has started off at a glacial pace. In good news though, this was the least eventful recovery he's ever had after his hock injections -- a week after he got them done, he was fully sound and back to being ridden. I still took it easy on him to ease him back into it, especially since before the injections he was barely doing anything thanks to his back soreness.

fortunately he's got a body worker with all the toys

I've done three rides on him since then, one of which lasted all of seven minutes to assess soundness. 

The second was thirty minutes with ninety percent of the work focused on getting him travelling straight. 

He's the most crooked horse on the planet on a good day, and he reverts to full gumby, drunk sailor when he's been off the Straight or Else regime. You know the metaphor where you stick your finger in a hole in the dam to plug a leak and another leak immediately shoots out, forever and ever? That's Opie's body. You corral one wayward section and a different one slips out of your grasp, forever and ever. If this horse has taught me nothing else, it's how important being straight is. 

pivo and i continue to fight every time i use it. one day i will
figure its bitch ass out.

like, why can it be normal on this side of the ring but not on the
other side (the pic above this) when it's parked directly at X?

On Friday we did ride number three, this time in the double. The poor double last got used for the two seconds I pulled it out to take Opie's year end pics, and it was covered in dust and feeling very neglected. It proved its worth for the ride though, as allll the straightness issues I dealt with in the previous ride, especially in the right lead canter, immediately went away. I'm sure some of that is that this horse is very well schooled at this point in his life so things come back quicker, but ugh. The double. It is a good friend of Opie's. It's rarely the right choice for him at shows, I've discovered, as he gets so tense in the ring one ounce of pressure on the curb is his excuse to blow up, but it is SUCH a good schooling tool for us. 

We worked on our SI and HI, trying to remember all the points of contact from our last lesson with LB. His bounce per ounce is back with his go go juice on board, and the trot was especially lovely. 

We also worked hard on the walk-canter transitions, trying to get the feeling of the pi/pa without actually doing the pi/pa (obvi not really throwing down pi/pa here folks, it's the feeling of super collected sitting and bouncing to load the hind end and launch into the canter. Such an amazing tool we picked up for him over the winter.). This is hard for Opie because getting him lit while keeping the lid on is a fine line. I tried to redirect and do some turns on the haunches when he got too up and down anticipating, because the outside leg going on asks for the canter, but also asks him to turn so him having to take a second to see which I was asking for was a good distraction to bring him back to planet earth. 

And then the death plague hit our house and Hubby and I spent all weekend comatose on the couch in between hacking our lungs up. Hopefully this week gets us back into a more normal schedule. Our lesson is this Thursday so maybe I'll attempt to fight with the stupid pivo again to get some footage for a blog post. 

Or it might be the day I finally mow the stupid thing down in rage. Stay tuned!