Wintertime blues.

What an unusually difficult winter we've had here in North Carolina this year. With the "Polar Vortex" plunging our normally mild mid-January weather into the mere single digits, our training regimen has greatly suffered. Roanie has had several days off each week for the past few weeks. It's been exceptionally challenging to keep her conditioned enough to make any sort of progress with her flat work (hence the lack of blog entries lately.)

We started the month with a lovely vet visit... Roanie was getting extremely grouchy when it came time to saddle her up. She has always been one to throw her head and pin her ears when it came time to swing the girth under and fasten it to both sides. We attributed that to having a western saddle thrown on and tightened immediately, but here lately, it had gotten much worse and she was acting sore and I wanted to see if our vet could determine the origin of the soreness. Well, it turns out that Roanie's topline has changed and raised up enough that the saddle wasn't sitting properly on her back anymore and it was pinching one little spot on her withers. Ultimately it's a curse and a blessing. On the plus side, I know for sure that all the hard work Roanie and I have been doing has been paying off. On the down side, my favorite dressage saddle no longer fits. Dangit.

After we figured out the dressage saddle was causing discomfort we took her off work for a few days, which was well timed, because it was unbelievably cold and I had no hard feelings about having one less horse to ride in that weather. We brought her back into work slowly with lots of lunge work and we added back in the hill work in the field. Every ride now begins with a ten to twenty minute hack in the field consisting of walking and trotting. This greatly loosens her hind end up and allows her to bring her hocks up underneath herself. When we decided to temporarily quit jumping her we also took all field work out of the equation as well because she would get too hot after trot sets to do anything productive with for a few days. We sacrificed her fitness for a few days of mental stability. Being able to add in trot sets before ring work without her going bananas has been truly exciting and shows me that we are well on our way to having a mentally balanced event horse. Hooray!