What Goes Up Must Come Down

Right now, temperatures are up (yay!) but the quality of my rides are way down (boo!)

It's been an unseasonably warm week. Most of the snow has melted and even the mud is drying up now. Today in particular was beautiful. The sun was shining and the wind calmed down. All I could think about was getting out to the barn and riding.

Work is stressful right now. I have a lot of things on my plate and will need to put in a lot of extra hours at the office over the next couple weeks. However, the fields were calling me today so I used up some banked hours and took the afternoon off so I could make use of the daylight and the sunshine.

Unfortunately, when I got to the barn, it was anything other than fun. Kachina was wound up and tense from the start. Her ground work was worse than usual. She cut my hand jerking her foot away repeatedly while I was trying to pick it, and even just leading her to and from the hitching post was a battle. I figured she would be okay once I got on so I threw on my western saddle for an extra bit of security and went to ride outside. Unfortunately, she never settled down. After a couple laps around the property with a lot of necessary circling, I decided that the safer choice was to move inside to the arena rather than venture down the road by myself (the outdoor arena is still too wet to be useable).

Even once we moved inside, things weren't much better. I was able to be a more effective rider, but Kachina was using her old tricks of counterbent giraffe running. I worked Kachina into a lather just trying to get a couple decent circles of trot. She was a completely different horse than she was at my amazing lesson last Sunday.

My sweaty, pawing jerk of a horse

Part of me recognizes that today was only one bad ride and Kachina has been doing really well in general for the last few months. Also, even though it was a bad ride, I had more tools than the last time she was like this and so I was able to keep pushing for what I wanted and got some decent trot in the end.

On the other hand, mentally, I just didn't have the patience for her shenanigans today. All I wanted was a nice toodle in the sun and I was so frustrated with my horse for not letting me have that. While I'm not the most talented rider, I normally find that patience and understanding for the horse come easily to me. Today was the first time in a very long time that I just felt like giving up. I'm hoping this is just a small blip and that we're both back to our better selves tomorrow.

Note: I know this post has a distinct whiny tone to it, sorry about that. I'm not fishing for sympathy or anything, I just feel like for my blog to be honest I need to post about the bad as well as the good.