That's more like it!

I took Dixie out for a really lovely 10 mile ride this afternoon. Here's the Strava:



It doesn't look like the Strava shows up in google reader, so if you're interested, click on over to the actual blog to look at it. I do all my reading, right up until the point where I decide I have a meaningful comment to make, in Reader, so I thought I'd warn you too :)



This is the ride I was planning on doing last Wednesday. There's a one-mile segment that Strava is automatically tracking - the mid part of the hill climb - and it took 17:30 to slog up that damn hill Wednesday, and she flew up it in 11:30 today. That's an astronomical improvement. Still, she was dripping wet by the time we made it to the top - I think I will sponge her chest and belly tomorrow and do a bit more clipping. I'm leaving it quite long - it looks like a 3-month-old clip job - so I think she won't freeze.



At about 4 miles we'd worked our way along the top of the hill and there was a very steep long downhill stretch, so I got off and jogged down. My poor Big Leftie complained about it - I don't think I blogged it but I hit it so hard I thought I broke it earlier this month, and it's still bruised - but it felt nice to "trot" downhill on foot. And my faith was rewarded - I found a perfect tree stump (very rare!) at the bottom of the hill.



I worked mostly on keeping Dixie at a consistent speed, and I also didn't check my speed on the GPS once. My watch band is broken so it lives clipped to my saddle - it's not as easy as lifting my wrist up. I am amazed that we were rolling along at 10 mph - it felt like 7-8. She did a lot of gaiting :)



All the erratic stops were from gawking - it was a lovely weekend day and there were a ton of dirt bikes, off-road trucks, and people out target shooting. We often had to slam on the brakes and stare in utter amazement, exactly like she'd never seen a dirt bike/truck/person before.

Dixie was what my riding buddy back in Memphis would've called "spicy." Totally on, sproingy flashy gaits, gawking at everything, just a blast to ride.

You can see she was still PLENTY sweaty. Sorry for the crappy cam-phone pics; they really don't do well at high altitude.


I trimmed her feet after the ride - they look excellent if I do say so myself. I think I've got most of the false sole out and the bars look good and I've been treating her frog cracks with goo and they're opening up pretty well. And I got new gloves! Highly recommended cheap gloves! But I'll take hoof pics and do a post about them tomorrow. I might even take the REAL CAMERA so you can see her feet in the correct colors. ;)

Well, I still think it *looks* pretty

I got Dixie out for a ride this morning. We did the short 6 mile loop around the sand pit. I wanted to take Cersei and have a fun ride, no deliberate training. Also, I put her back in the snaffle for the first time since, I think, February.

Speaking of bits, I bought my own curb! I'd been using DiJ's Myler curb, and I was very happy with it in general but wanted slightly shorter shanks. I think everybody feels guilty for not being "as good" as other individuals / disciplines, and I'm no exception - I feel guilty (among other reasons) for doing endurance with a bit. The hackamore/halter/bitless people are somewhat smug about how their horses are free to eat and drink on the trail. Oh well, Dixie and I are not the ideal team to go bitless, and she stuffs her face without seeming to care about the bit. Still, I noticed that the shanks whacked into water tanks. Yesterday I bought the same mouthpiece, same shanks, just 2" shorter shanks. I think I'll have about the same control and she'll be able to eat and drink a bit better.

Anyway, I'd rather ride in a snaffle. It was surprisingly cold and windy - the sun was shining and it looked like it was warmer than it was. We briskly headed out and when we hit the magic corner and turned for home I let her loose and we absolutely hauled ass coming home.

Dixie's not a fast horse - or at least I haven't had the nerve to let her go really fast. I need something like the Bonneville Salt Flats, some place perfectly smooth with good footing, cause I just get all wigged out about the tiny margin of error when you're really galloping. None of our trails are really smooth enough for my overactive imagination. Random boulders and ditches and wooped-out areas.

So we weren't going that fast, just 10-12 mph, but she went 10-12 mph for two solid miles and felt awesome doing it. She slowed down where I asked (going down into little gullies, coming up to trail intersections) and stayed balanced and solid the whole time. We passed some scary stuff - a lady getting into her SUV after letting her dog play in the hills, a big yellow road grader thing grading a private road, and lots of dirt bikes.

And because we were going pretty fast and it was pretty windy, her mane kept blowing all over the place and getting tangled in my hands. It's astonishing how distracting that is! I'm still not going to cut it. I guess I need to improve my braiding skills and learn to do a real fast running braid down her neck.

5.9 miles, 52 minutes, 6.7 mph. Next: I want to get her out early next week after work and do some deliberate hill work for an hour or so - maybe Tuesday, definitely Wednesday.

Oooh Garmin, I hate you

Friday I had a lovely ride with ~C and the critters. She came out to my place and picked us up, then we headed about 5 miles up the road into Antelope Valley and parked. We took the horses, of course, and the dogs.

The howling winds gentle breezes were still caressing the land, so I wasn't really sure how Dixie would act. She loaded well and even stood well to get her neck clipped. She started off a little giraffe-headed, but we walked for the first couple of miles and she settled into work very well. Diego was completely horrified about C's windbreaker, which was making some alarming crackling snapping sounds, but he eventually got his game face on too.

It's funny how our horses are so different. Dig is completely sweet, a little squirrely, and needs to be asked to slow down in order to calm down. He responds to the normal advice you get about horses - ask him to slow down, ask him to move his feet, get his brain back. Dixie is independent minded and distrustful, and she needs to go faster in order to slow down. If she spooks or starts off hot, I have to let her go forward. Trot or canter, it doesn't matter - she has to have the freedom to move for a few strides. Then I can ask her to slow down, and she will. If I try to boss her around without letting her have those few strides of freedom, we just get in a huge fight and get angry with each other.

Cersei is an old hat at endurance training. She stayed near us the whole time (and kept Diego on edge.) C's dog Molly is much younger and more excitable, so she covered WAY more miles darting off to chase rabbits (and popped back up to keep Dixie on edge.) I don't know how Molly is feeling, but Cersei has been an exceptionally snoozy dog today!

The area is where Rides of March is held, but we took a new trail. It's not really suitable to run a ride over, but it was super cool to train on. We found trees! They were junipers, so they're more like overgrown shrubs, but they're big enough to feel like you're in a very sparse forest. We followed a cow trail up a hill, then found a dirt bike trail, then eventually popped out on this absolutely lovely ridge. The path down was very narrow and dry, so we walked the horses down the hill again. It was SO pretty.

Friday's ride was pretty much my one-year Garmin anniversary. The stupid Garmin Connect site isn't working correctly for me right now, or I'd show you my pitiful stats. Instead, here's the post from a year ago. We really have come a long way, and I'm so proud of Dixie.

Here's Friday's ride. Almost 14 miles, tooling along at a calm steady pace.

Garmin Connect has "teamed up" with Microsoft to "improve" my "experience" by using Bing maps. I hate Bing maps. I like Google Maps, or even topo maps - the whole thing about Nevada riding is the hills! What good is it if I can't see the hills? And it's not like GC was ever very useful to play with aggregate data. The only interesting thing I can tell you is that in the last 365 days, Dixie and I have done 577.49 miles (with the GPS on.)

So I'm looking for a new GPS analysis program for the Mac. I am trialing rubiTrack, TrailRunner, and Ascent. Does anybody know of any other options? All three that I'm trying out seem to have pros and cons, but they use REAL maps and let you play with the data.

Putting the "slow" in long slow rides

Oh man, today was Scary Day Part 2. We did 2.09 in 50 minutes - lots of stopping!

It's trash day in the neighborhood, so we have to very carefully make our way around those sneaky trash cans sitting at the end of each driveway. I encourage her to investigate them and I praise her mightily when she does! But each new driveway has a new trash can, and horses just don't generalize well. Stop, all bug-eyed, and stare. Approach the monster can in full imitation Arab mode, stepping very lightly with an arched neck. Slooowly stretch that neck out and sniff the monster can. Relax almost completely, because it's obviously not a monster, just a trash can. Move 50 yards to the next monster can.

When we left the road, she changed to looking for monsters in the scrub. Lots of slamming on the brakes and staring around. I eased her through it until she started slamming on the brakes without her head up - that's when she's gone from really afraid to "I wonder if we can just go home now?" Sorry, Dixie, we cannot just go home now.

We'd just worked through all that and started to pick up some real forward movement when ZOMG monsters! Actually, it was the neighbors, on two horses, so she calmed down real quick and let me talk to them for almost 15 minutes. Then they rode off in one direction and we headed off in the other - look, a training opportunity! She got "frozen" and wouldn't move for a while, but she wasn't trying to turn and run, so I'll call it improvement.

Then we racked almost all the way home. She is getting fitter!

I am getting the Garmin figured out. It's not very intuitive. I told it I'm riding a bike, so at least it displays my speed as MPH and doesn't auto-pause when we stop!

Things are clicking into place

I have read a lot about horses in the three years I've owned them - just about everything online, all the horse training books in all the libraries I've lived near, books my friends have mailed me. The thing I never read, that I wish I had read, was some kind of reassurance that eventually things start to click into place. Apparently, they do!

Today Dixie and I did the Mines. The SCARY Mines, down in a canyon where a bear could eat us, going past the mineshafts that clearly have demons lurking in them. She was fantastic! Not perfectly loose and relaxed, but not so antsy she made me nervous and I made her more nervous. I watch her head mainly, and her head was held juuuust below the point where she's really nervous.

Another thing that's paying off - when I think she's nervous, I ask her to stop. When she's nervous, she sometimes even stops on her own. Then we just stand there, facing the scary unknown, until I sigh - and then she will sigh, and her head will drop a bit, and I'll ask her to walk forward, and she will. My horse RULES.

Here's today's results:
Name: Track 006
Date: Nov 13, 2009 3:13 pm
Distance: 4.45 miles
Elapsed Time: 1:17:32
Avg Speed: 3.4 mph
Max Speed: 8.4 mph
Avg Pace: 17' 26" per mile
Min Altitude: 4,766 ft
Max Altitude: 5,377 ft

Notice that this trail is a bit steeper - we went up a bit, then down about 500', then climbed gradually back up to about 5,100'. With the altitude, and the "new scary all alone" factor, I'm pretty happy with 3.4 mph. And this time I am pretty sure 8.4 mph was our true max speed - I managed to grab the phone while she was trotting up a straight jeep trail, and it said 8.4, and it felt about that fast. Again, she surprised me with her walk, hitting 5 mph a couple of times.

The most horrible thing we encountered was a flock of Terror Birds when we were almost home. We were rockin' on up the last straight jeep trail at a very nice forward trot when the Terror Birds (probably some kind of jays) started plotting her dismemberment (squawking at each other) and circling around to hamstring her (flying out of the junipers away from us). She almost lost her cool, but I got her to stop and stare til the birds finished squawking and moving away from us.

Here's our map. Hope y'all had lovely days with your horses too!