Dipping my toe in the big pond.

You know the old saying - big frog in a little pond or a little frog in a big pond - well I have never been one to be OK with staying in the little pond. I may be crazy, or stupid, or a gluten for punishment (or a little bit of all three) but every time I reach a threshold I want to push beyond it rather than staying happy and comfortable with where I am.

Well a few weeks ago, my new horse Uiver and I dipped our toe in the big pond and I would like to say we were little frogs, but when you compete Dressage in Southern California -(land of the former Olympian/world class rider) - I would say that we were more like guppies in the ocean. But non the less we survived our first competition at the first rung of FEI - Prix St. George. For those not familiar with the levels of dressage, Prix St. George is the first of 3 levels in FEI (Federation Equestrian Internationale). Although I don't have any delusions about going to the Olympics or world cup, I have dreamed about making it to FEI for many years now.

This is where I go back to not being satisfied, or smart enough, to stay in the little pond. As some of you might remember, I just bought Uiver this past June and, especially in Dressage, it usually takes a while (generally 6 months to a year) to "click" and form a solid partnership with a new horse. I bought Uiver through a very well respected trainer in San Diego named David Blake. I have known David for several years and was very happy when I saw that he was brokering the horse because I knew that he was honest and ethical which we all know is somewhat rare in the horse world. After buying Uiver I decided to train with David for several reasons. I knew that I would need help getting to know this extremely talented horse as well as further both of ours education and since David had already been training Uiver for the preceding 8 months, and Uiver clearly liked David, it was a logical choice. In addition, the other pluses were that David trains out of a gorgeous facility, Arroyo Del Mar, with great footing, which is also the home of Stephen Peters with whom David trains. I cannot afford to ride with Stephen and am certainly not at a level (yet) that would merit his high level of input, but it is nice to know that although David is very accomplished in his own right, there is also some influence from Stephen (who is indisputably the top U.S. dressage rider) as well.

The other unexpected positive has been that everyone at Arroyo, has been gracious, kind and supportive and make me feel welcome every time I am there for a lesson. There is such a happy, positive vibe to the place it is no wonder that all of the horses seem so happy to work and that the trainers are so successful.

After buying Uiver I started a routine of hauling to David once a week for lessons. Uiver and I clicked and bonded quicker than my wildest dreams and in August David suggested that we go to our first show and try our hand at 3rd and 4th level. Part of me thought David was a little crazy but the other part trusted him and felt confident in Uiver so to the show we went. Well I could not have dreamed a better result and would not even put it in a book because no one would think it plausible. Uiver and I rode 3 classes over 2 days, Third Level Test 3 and Fourth Level Test 1 on 2 different days. We won all 3 classes with scores of 70% at 3rd and a 66 and a 68% at 4th. What all these numbers really mean is that I was walking around the show in shock pinching myself to know that this really was my horse.

Uiver was amazing. As you all know, you never fully know a horse when you buy them and never really know how they will handle the stress of competition until you go. Uiver was a gentlemen in the often hectic warm-up and the minute he realized we were heading to the ring for our test, he puffed himself up even taller, pricked his ears and put on a show. The moment we started down the center line it was as if he said, watch me and my new Mom. The test was not without a few mistakes, they rarely are, but it was one of the best of my career especially considering we had only been a pair for about 2 months.

So, instead of staying comfortably at 4th level for a little while, David thought we should try our hand at Prix St. George just 3 months later. How did we do, you say? Well, it was not perfect by any stretch but we did not make fools out of ourselves either. All in all it was a respectable start but it would have been even better if I could count right. The dreaded "Tempi" change (a series of flying changes on a designated stride count) was my nemesis and as a result we only got a 58% one day but improved to a 64% the second which earned a 5th place in the class. Not horrible but we definitely have room for improvement.

Am I crazy? Should we have stayed comfortable at 4th for a while? Uiver does not seem to care one way or the other. He is happy to work as long as he knows there will be grass pasture time or a chance to play with his pony afterward. Uiver has become very attached to Michele's daughter's pony Monty and they either play or take naps together when they are not being worked or turned out. They are a bit of an odd couple since Uiver is 16.3 hands and Monty is 14.1 but they are happy and that is all that matters.

I do plan to stay at Prix St. George for most of 2012 and our winter training will focus on getting the count right on Tempi changes and refining everything else. With a little luck I hope to be a little less of a guppie in the ocean and maybe even make it to little frog status. No matter whether the sharks get us or not, I am just happy to be living the dream.

On the First Day of Christmas . . .

. . . my true love gave to me, an Alison Hart book that was free.

How is this possible, you ask? It's the Great Holiday Book Giveaway! Books are the best gifts for any reason, but they're especially wonderful under the tree or in a stocking.

Many of you mentioned that money is tight this season. So with a quick comment about which of my books looks just right as the perfect gift, you are entered to win something free. No standing in lines or shopping with crowds. Simply click on my website www.alisonhartbooks.com and choose which book you would like for someone you love (ah hem, that can include yourself). I have historical fiction such as Emma's River, choose your own endings such as Dive Right In! or page-turning mysteries such as Return of the Gypsy Witch.

Your choice, no postage needed, and I will be happy to personalize the book.
One of the wonderful things about this blog and its members is that the love of animals and BOOKS shines through in every post and comment. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you are wishing for this holiday season. For me, it's a day of peace and relaxation with a good book to read!

Enjoy the Great Holiday Book Giveaway! and Happy December to all!

THE GIRL WHO REMEMBERED HORSES Winners!

Thanks to everyone who entered the contest to win an ebook of my brand new novel THE GIRL WHO REMEMBERED HORSES.

As announced, there are two winners - and they are:

Once Upon an Equine and Coral Russell.


Please contact me linda (at) lindabenson (dot) net with your email address, so I can get the book to you.



And if you're not a winner, THE GIRL WHO REMEMBERED HORSES is available on Amazon.com, where it's consistently been in the Top 100 New Releases for Children's Horse books, as well as the Top 10 Hot New Releases for the same. And it's perfect for horse lovers of all ages, not just kids! It's also available at Musa Publishing, Smashwords, Omnilit, Bookstrand, and Barnes & Noble.

Thanks again to all who entered, and may your holiday reading bring you joy!

Gunner Comes Home

by Laura Crum

The photo above shows my 31 year old horse, Gunner, (and me) fourteen years ago. Gunner was 17 and had been retired from competition for a few years at the time the photo was taken, but I still used him for light riding. As you can see, he was happy to pick up the lope in my riding ring, for the local newspaper’s photographer. I’ve used this as the author photo on a couple of my books, and yes, before anybody else says it, I looked a lot better 14 years ago, pre-baby and minus twenty pounds.

Gunner and I have had a very long partnership. I bought him as a three-year old- with ninety days of riding, and did the rest of his training myself. We competed at the Snaffle Bit Futurity and placed in the ladies division and the non-pro, and then I went on to show Gunner as a cutting horse until he was eight, winning a few buckles and year end awards. When Gunner was nine I taught him to be a team roping head horse and competed on him at team roping until he was fourteen, when I retired him from competition due to various arthritic complaints. I used him for light riding until he was about twenty, when I turned him out to pasture. He’s stayed comfortably sound for eleven good years in the pasture, and I was happy to see him running around on the green grass with his equine buddies. In the last few years he lived in a separate field, next to another old horse, so that both of them could be fed a supplemental ration of equine senior feed that worked for each individual.

I brought Gunner home from the pasture on Thanksgiving Day. We had euthanised his longtime companion, ET, previously (see my earlier post “Sad”), and I didn’t want Gunner standing alone in the winter storms, even with his blanket on. Besides, I missed him. I kept him turned out in this pasture five miles from my place for all these many years because I thought it was best for him. In the last few years, either Wally or I drove out there every day to supplement Gunner and ET with the equine senior feed they needed to thrive. Eventually ET was not thriving, even on free choice equine senior and lush pasture, so we made the choice to euthanise him. And this made me come to the decision that it was time to bring Gunner home.

There were a lot of factors involved here. For one thing there is no shelter, other than trees, in the pasture where we’ve been keeping these horses. In our climate this works fine for healthy horses in good flesh, and the two horses we still have turned out there (Danny and Gray Dog), who are in their teens, look just fine. But horses in their twenties and thirties usually need a little more help, and last winter I was out there all the time blanketing Gunner and ET for winter storms and taking their blankets off when it was sunny. It will be a lot easier for me to take good care of Gunner here where he has a shed to stand in when it rains, and I can monitor his condition closely and feed him exactly what he needs.

Another factor is company. I had to keep Gunner and ET in separate small fields in order that each got enough equine senior feed to thrive, but they were right alongside each other and could see each other at all times. The other horses, in the bigger pasture, are frequently out of sight of the small fields. I felt that my poor old horse would feel lonely and left behind by the herd if I kept him alone like that. Here at home he has horses all around him, his corral is big enough to run around (and he does) and I have already noticed that his demeanor seems happier.

And then, I missed having him with me. Letting ET and Rebby go was hard, and really woke me up and brought home to me that if I wanted to spend time with my special old friend, I needed to do it now. And I honestly think that Gunner has already shown that he appreciates the attention and interaction with his human friends, as well as his equine friends. He seems very engaged and interested in everything going on around him, and there is plenty to keep him interested.

Besides the fact that I feed three times a day, we are often down in the barnyard just to hang out with the horses, even if we aren’t catching the riding horses to do something with them. And I often turn the horses out to graze on my property. And, to be honest, my son and I spend time just rubbing on the horses and feeding them cookies. I know, I know, I never used to feed treats as a practice, and I still don’t believe in this as a training aid, nor would I do this with young horses who need to learn what right behavior is, but my kid so wanted to give his loved horses cookies that I caved. (My karma ran over my dogma, you could say.) I simply taught the (all older, well-broke) horses to take the treats politely and now we have a little cookie feeding routine. Gunner loves it.

I don’t have a current photo of Gunner in the computer (as a matter of fact I haven’t been able to download or upload—I never know which it is—any recent photos because my computer is so spazzy I’m afraid that something as traumatic as photos might give it a knock-out punch, so the most recent photos that I can post are from this summer), and it is impossible to get a very flattering shot any more. Gunner is sway backed and peaked rumped, and his face looks old. But there are no ribs or hipbones to be seen or felt, and he has a decent amount of fat on the crest of his neck and over his whole body. He’s in pretty good flesh and his always very fuzzy winter coat is thick and shiny. He’s sound and his appetite is good. I’ve been happy to see that he moves around very freely in his big corral and throws in a buck when he feels like it. Gunner is doing OK. And he’s getting lots of love around here.

Below you see my son snuggling with Sunny in our barnyard—and Gunner is getting his fair share of such attention, too. I think he’s happy that he’s home.

If any of you have some tips or advice about how you keep your very senior equine citizens happy, healthy and engaged with life, I would love to hear them.

It's a Maybe: The Retired Racehorse Book

Sometimes I think that my greatest talent is coming up with awesome ideas and then sticking them on the back-burner until I have "time." (As if "time" were something I was ever going to possess, to clench in my fist, to cackle a villainous laugh over. I've got you at last, Time! Probably not.)

Stuck on my backburner I have various art projects (what to do with that charming little Sam Savitt paperback before it decays entirely? Something amazing. I'll look it up later), an entire manuscript imaginatively named The Eventing Novel (I'll completely rewrite that eventually), and, most annoyingly of all, the Retired Racehorse book.

I've been planning the Retired Racehorse book since the day I started Retired Racehorse Blog. You might know it, a little WordPress project that made me moderately Internet Famous amongst a small proportion of Thoroughbred enthusiasts and got me a lot of Facebook friends. (Hi Facebook friends! xo) I meant to just keep training Off-Track Thoroughbreds and blog about their training as I went, and eventually put it all into a lovely retraining manual, since it can be difficult to consult a blog before you go out to ride.

YOU PROMISED ME A BOOK

But it spun all out of proportion and somehow I ended up a writer in New York City. I attribute this development directly to Retired Racehorse Blog, and I still want to write the book, out of appreciation, at the very least! The blog deserves its book!

The problem, of course, is that I'm not training horses anymore, and I can't just make up fixes for problems. I don't have a set curriculum for a horse. I'm not Natalie Keller Reinert Horsemanship MasterClass, Inc. My blog posts were mentally composed as I was riding, thinking through the problems that the horse was presenting me as I tried to trace them to their roots in his early training as a racehorse.

And then yesterday I was in the basement of the Strand Bookstore, which is one of my favorite places to be (certainly it's my favorite basement) and I found a gorgeous little vintage hardcover of Ahlerich: The Making of a Dressage World Champion, by Reiner Klimke. It's basically a detailed—incredibly detailed—training diary of one of the most wonderful dressage teams we've ever seen. Just wonderful.

I didn't buy it, because it was $40 and my price limit for books is closer to $1.

But it did remind me that I had a perfectly good diary of training a retired racehorse from racetrack to amateur eventer in five months, and I really ought to pull the Retired Racehorse Book off that back-burner.

Except I still really don't have time.

And then today I saw a WordPress plug-in called Anthologize, which is supposed to make your blog into a book automagically, and I thought, this is the sign! I'll do it today! 

But then I read the instructions, and it doesn't work on WordPress.com hosted blogs. (i.e. dot wordpress dot com blogs, aka free blogs.)

So I pulled out my hair for a few minutes (it's really long and I can spare a few strands) and then took a deep breath. I'll still do the Retired Racehorse Book. Just not at this exact moment. When I have time.

The Trials of Horsekeeping at Home--Stall-Cleaning

I've had Gailey at home since September. I've kept her at home before, but it's been years. So far it's not been much of an inconvenience. Of course, my husband and me can't take off for weekend trips at the drop of a hat like we once did. Still, I'm fine with that. Think of the money we save.

When Gailey lived at home previously, she was the tidiest horse a person could ask for. She never made a mess in her stall unless it was raining hard enough to launch an ark. If nature came calling while she was eating hay in her stall, her head would shoot up and she'd be out the door, heading for the same corner of the paddock each time to her personal outhouse.

After years of being boarded in a stall with no attached paddock, she's picked up some annoying habits. The most annoying one of all is that she's turned into a pig. I mean a full-blown P I G. I'll spare you the gory details. She leaves messes all over her stall, including on top of her fresh hay and in her water bucket, even in her feed bucket.

In the past, if I stripped the stall of shavings down to the rubber mats, she'd stop making a mess because she didn't like laying down in it. Not so this time, she didn't seem to care. She'd turned into an equine pig pen.

I was at my wit's end and resigned to my fate which included cleaning her stall two to three times a day. On Thanksgiving I threw a bale of shavings in the stall, figuring that she'd completely soil it within hours.

Well, go figure, it's now three days later, and her stall is pristine. She's using the outside facilities, rather than the stall. I haven't had to clean it three times a day or even once a day. I'm not sure my reprieve will last, but I'm enjoying it while I can, however long that might be.

In the meantime, I'm off to the feed store for more shavings.

I'm a Collector

So, I know I haven't been here for awhile as things in my world have been a bit topsy turvy. I am grateful that I have the support of this group and that they have been so patient with me. I will be back from now on every other Friday.

Now on to my world of horses. There are 9 of them. Yes--9. I can only refer to myself as The Collector. Not sure what that says about me, but am pretty sure it does say something. At least they aren't stud colts (one is but he will be gelded). I don't know if any of you have watched Buck (the movie), if you haven't you should. We watched it last night while in the after math of turkey dinner in a comatose sort of state. I loved it but there was this woman who owned 18 stud colts! I'm like, who the hell does that? Buck asked the same thing. I won't spoil the movie for you, but if you watch this I am sure you will find yourself angry with the stud colt collector. She definitely got a reaction from my family.

My collection consists of 3 almost 3 year old fillies--Mia, Bronte, and Kaia, 1 sweet middle aged mare who sadly is a Wobbler (she happily resides at Terrie's with her many boyfriends, 2 old quarter horses Hobbit and Mouse (who I have renamed Pig due to the fact that he is consistently covered in mud and can not seem to keep himself or a blanket clean). Hobbit and Mouse are like the odd couple. Hobbit has a corner in his corral that is his bathroom. He does not go anywhere else but in that corner. Not Mouse (I mean Pig). I now have Will who is the horse that I am riding these days. Will has some anxiety issues and seems to think he owns all of the fillies, however, Hobbit strongly disagrees with Will. Hobbit claims he is King of the Barn. I tend to agree with him. Any horse who is as neat and clean as he is gets the King vote from me.

Finally there is Little Cruise. His registered name is High Octane Formula (Terrie named him). He is an Appendix colt that my cousin has at her place and that yes I agreed to take him because he is soooo pretty and well behaved and most likely my next riding horse--and oh yes, also because I am crazy.

Then last but not least we have the super pony Mr. Monty. Monty is my daughter's pony and he is the most fabulous pony in the world. This pony and the kid are quite a pair! He fuels her Olympic dreams and teaches her a great deal along with Aunt Terrie.

My mother and my husband keep asking me which ones I plan to sell. Ummm...... Sell a horse? I just sort of smile and say, "I don't know. Maybe the grey one or possibly the bay one." They both shake their heads and probably realize that I am not selling anyone!

Am I crazy? Probably, but they make me happy and all I can say that throughout all of the crazy that truly exists in my world it's those silly 9 horses that keep me grounded.

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Good to be back.

Cheers,
Michele

Cruise

The Girls and me

Hobbit