Over the last year or so, I’ve found that my sport no longer has a place to be discussed at work. It’s not that I’m not proud, or less involved, or even doing less. My coworkers and management team seem to perceive horses as 1. only for fun, should always come second to work and 2. for the rich.
I have some basic problems with #1, but it’s above my pay grade to solve. I’ve opted for “out of office” on my calendar during my barn hours.
I never get tired of this view.
#2 is definitely not true for many of us. I was earning close to minimum wage for the area when I got Fetti. I just made very different choices than many of my peers. I’m making more now, but still less than most of my colleagues (tech problems when I’m not an engineer). Nonetheless, “horse” still carries an elitist connotation, especially in an area of the state where it’s super uncommon and I am almost certainly the only equestrian they know.
For now, I’ve opted for completely separating my work from the rest of my life. I don’t talk about what I’m doing on the weekends, I don’t tell funny pony stories (oddly enough, a highlight for some customers at my last job!), I removed any pony photos from my internal bio.
How do the rest of you handle pony/work separation? Any recommendations?
I am grateful to still be employed in a company that continues to do well and for whom I can work remotely. But. For varying reasons, I have spent two months working more than I ever did in Before Times, and with work/life balance that is questionable at best, nonexistent at worst. Good weeks, 60 hours. Bad weeks, 100+. That is not a typo.
Unfortunately, I have never kept the horses a secret at work, and I work in an area of the country where no one has horses. I’m at the barn four evenings a week. I don’t take my computer, but will check emails and messages on my phone to respond as needed. As my workload has increased, I’ve ended up pushing back on requests from colleagues, who evidently are frustrated that I have time to go to the barn but not time to handle a non-mission-critical item. Since none of these conversations are going directly to me, I’m at a loss and will be discontinuing any mention of life outside of work except for a few select people. It sucks.
Any goals for Polly this year have been thrown completely out the window. I would like her to continue to be a good equine citizen, and I want to continue to build our relationship. I’m getting on when it feels like the right thing to do. We’re doing some groundwork, we’re doing a lot of small steps occasionally.
Confetti and I headed back into the parks when they opened up. She was awkward on the hills and earned herself hock injections, with Pentosan to come soon. We’ll know in a month or so where that puts us. In hindsight, I should have kept her on the Pentosan and done more work myself to deal with my anxiety around needles. It’s time.
I committed to buying a trailer. It’ll be a few hours north to get it, so that’s on hold, but fingers crossed it works out. Small choices for the future that I want. I am grateful for a socially-distanced sport where the parks are fairly quiet most days.
In my non-pony world, I’m handling covid anxiety by dealing with it in small and manageable chunks. We go out on grocery runs once every week or so, either hitting all the stores some weeks or the bare minimum other weeks. My partner and I are both at companies where “afk for the morning, grocery run” is socially acceptable. Weekday shopping is easiest. Mornings after restock is best. If I were working less I’d be cooking more, but a lot of days we order food instead. I’ve decided that being neurotic about cleaning everything all the time after shopping runs is not working for me, so we do a reasonable pass, leave some things alone, call it good enough. I don’t claim it’s the safest or best option. It’s just where I’ve settled for right now.
I do wear a mask anytime I’m out, though less so at the barn since I’m rarely within ten feet of anyone. Again: I’m not advocating this option nor suggesting it’s a wise move, but I stress it less in wide open spaces than I do at the grocery store.
Our local endurance ride has been cancelled for the year and I’m grateful. It was the right call. I’m not sure if the less-local one will follow suit given a late fall timeline. I’m not sure if I’ll be comfortable volunteering at it. If I’m back at work in the city, probably not. If I’m still remote, maybe.
More updates as work settles down, hopefully. This is a good time to be documenting.
In an effort to keep myself accountable, here we go.
Polly
Ride at least once.
Ground drive at least once.
Practice standing still and chilling at the tie rail.
Stretch goal: hobble training?
Confetti
Ride at least two days of the four I’m at the barn.
Stretch goal: ride in the park.
Have a cat photo. Why not?
Me
Drive truck at least once weekly.
Resolve remaining issues (front license plate?)
Better posture, on and off the horse.
Stretch goal: set up a lesson for sometime this quarter. I am sort of at a loss here in terms of finding trainers that will come out, and may have to wait on lessons until I’m comfortably hauling places.
Spring break 2010: I wanted to ride again. To make this happen, I needed a car. I started browsing around, as one does, running totally blind, and stumbled upon an inexpensive, moderately low-mileage Prius on Ebay. I asked my parents all the right questions: why is it so cheap? What should I be looking for? I bought the car. It doesn’t matter what questions you ask if the people you’re asking are equally clueless. A few thousand in repairs later, it turned out to still be a reasonably good deal. Would probably not purchase car on ebay again.
End of summer 2010: Met Confetti. Fell in love.
Summer 2011: First trail ride. First ponderings of “what do I do with a horse that doesn’t seem to get tired on trail?”
Summer/fall 2012: Officially gifted Confetti. First LD at Quicksilver, where Funder and Dixie very kindly got us through. I don’t know why I can’t find any photos of this, but one is framed and on the wall.
Winter 2012. Yes, two in one year. First beach ride.
We hauled out a lot in 2013, and completed both Fireworks and Quicksilver LDs.
In 2014, we volunteered at a very wet and muddy trail trials event, and I had total confidence in her surefootedness. It paid off. I never want to do it again quite like that – the worst parts aren’t pictured. NATRC ride, Fireworks, and Quicksilver LDs again. I regretted not doing the 50 at Quicksilver. We finished up the year with a beach ride.
2015. NATRC again as a warm-up for the season. Two days of LDs at Wild West, where we met Aurora and Mel and IrishHorse and destroyed a whole bunch of boots. Friend’s young Gypsy started coming along on short rides with us. I begged, borrowed, and negotiated a rideshare up to Cuneo Creek, where we absolutely rocked our first 50 with Cyd and Bugsy. Finished up with a LD at Quicksilver with Olivia and Nilla. Rained aggressively within the week, which took us from a season of Working Hard to a month of Can’t Do Shit, and I did not manage Fetti well through this.
2016. Rode to local gymkhana, got bucked off, minor concussion. Completed the 50 at Quicksilver with Olivia’s husband and Eugene. My gut feeling coming into the finish was that we were done with competition. Then the barn flooded.
2017. I got my Haffies in Endurance article published in the Haflinger magazine, and another in the AERC magazine. Fetti stuck her head through the fence, injured her suspensory(?), and we spent the summer on rehab instead of being trail buddies for my friend’s young horse. We also befriended the orphan deer.
2018. I wasn’t really shopping for another horse, but. We detoured a few hours on the way home from vacation. Friends hauled Polly home for me a couple weeks later.
2019. First rides on Polly. Continuing to ride Fetti around as my reliable pony. And finished up the year by buying a truck.
It truly takes a village. I’m grateful to have found a good one and hope to keep making choices to effectively build the future I want.
We are still under 10 rides in total, mostly in the round pen. Polly turned three this summer, our riding partner is not crossing the river comfortably. It’s not the summer I thought we’d have, but it’ll do.
Polly now has questionable balance, steering, forward, and brakes.
First goal: stay off unless she looks like a horse I want to ride. Some days are full squirrel brain pony distraction. Eventually we’ll need to work through that. For now, those are groundwork days.
Second goal: work on something, then ignore it for a week or five. We had near-zero real forwards earlier this summer.
So when I had an evening where she was unenthusiastic about running, it felt like a good day to get on. Unfortunately, it’s fall. I tacked up. It got dark. I wasn’t entirely sure who else was at the barn.
Did I mention that I’ve only ridden Polly outside the arena once? And never by herself at all? What could possibly go wrong?!
I hopped on anyway. I was already tacked up. It dawned on me that someone was around because their horse was turned out in the arena. And might start running. This might terrify Polly. And I can’t go the long way, because there might be deer. Ok, one tiny lap and we called it good. Horse fine, rider anxious.
She stood for a bit. My riding partner made it out. We should ride! It’s dark! But they’re mellow, barn’s pretty empty, her mare is solid, it’ll be a nice relaxing lap or three around the barn.
She got on. I got back on.
A loose warmblood cantered around the corner.
My friend did an emergency dismount and prompted me to bail. My brain got stuck. What if Polly moves while I’m getting off? Yes, that is sort of the point of the emergency dismount. Both the five year old and three year old stood perfectly still, like they see loose horses bolting around the barn all the time.
I finally connected to my brain and got off the horse.
We hand-walked a lap. The loose horse was retrieved. We got back on and had a nice, civilized walk around the barn.
I have no idea what I did to deserve this horse, but I continue to be really delighted with her brain. Gold stars, pretty pony. Keep it up.
Fetti is doing much better after her hock injections. We’ve ponied into the park several times, both across the river and trailering in. One on occasion we moseyed into the river with a friend on a bit of a whim, bareback and in a nylon halter – thankfully not ponying at that point, as we proceeded to head into the park for the first time that year. Fetti was fantastic. I am very, very lucky.
I took a week earlier this summer to go traveling to Asia. We’d gotten some trail rides in prior, pulled ticks off the horses as per usual – that’s just how it works around here. Midway through the trip I noted a bit of a rash on my chest. I wrote it off to being an obnoxious bug bite. It happens. I react. No big deal.
Since I’ve been back, we’ve been working hard on getting some (very, very tiny) miles on Polly. I have zero horse-starting experience. Thankfully my best riding partner has done this before! Polly’s had a saddle on a number of times, and I lucked out finding a very similar one to what Fetti goes in. Saddle reaction: eh, whatever. Getting on for the first time was fairly anticlimactic. I hung off the fence for a while, overused various muscles in weird ways, and eventually slid on over into the saddle. She thought it was a little weird but generally didn’t care. Yay!
Maybe the ground has cookies.
I was rather unusually sore the following week, and wrote it off to climbing on the fence and dangling my weight onto the pony. Shrug. It was a little weird, though, and somewhere in here I noticed that the rash had grown.. and looked suspiciously problematic. I got it looked at. We ordered some tests.
Polly and I did our first walking steps, our ground crew leading us around. She’s still sorting out the whole “balancing with a human” thing. I haven’t lost the weight I was hoping to, so we’re making do. Slow and steady.
My jaw hurt for about a week. Then my neck. Then my.. foot? OK, I have a baseline level of pain all the time, but this was above and beyond, and in weird places.
Test results came back positive for Lyme. That explained a lot. At least riding doesn’t hurt as long as I skip the stirrups.
I turned out Polly and Birdie, and went to get Fetti. I heard a bit of a scuffle. Everyone was chill when I got in eyesight. My friend pointed out the bleeding cut on Polly’s leg.
Cue three days of watching, cold-hosing, and wrapping. Polly is not a fan of the standing for wraps part, but totally fine with the wraps. Her brain is fantastic, yall, at least when she’s not picking losing fights.
It’s been a long week and I’m hopeful that this week will get better.
Fetti and I are good partners. We understand the other’s crookedness and deal with it fairly well. It’s not something I’m super aware of.
Then I put a beginner on her this weekend. He nearly rolled the saddle sideways. Hmmm. Is this horse or rider error? Does the saddle not fit? Did he tack up wrong?
I got on. Was fine.
I put the beginner on bareback. He slipped sideways. Hmmmmm.
I got on her the next day and pondered. Sat back. Consciously un-engaged core and let Fetti shift me around. Oh. Yep. Suddenly dropping off to one side.
Unclear how much of this is hocks, how much is her (rehabbed) injury, how much is acquired movement patterns. Hocks will get injected this month. Will consider scheduling a massage. Beginner and myself are both set up for lessons to keep working on our parts of the equation.
Polly has not been going along on our park rides. To get there, we’ve had to go down the highway on a narrow shoulder. I am not comfortable walking two horses down that!
But the highway walk is not popular with my riding partner. This weekend, we hauled all three ponies a few minutes down the road into the park.
Polly gets a gold star for loading up with minimal hesitation, despite this being her first trailer ride since we brought her home last July. Well this is weird and some pawing. Acceptable starting point.
And then I got on Fetti, picked up Polly, and proceeded to swear colorfully for most of the ride as both ponies went diving for grass despite all my best efforts.
Is green. Must be edible.
The good: we did manage some 30-second intervals of noses and hooves all going in the correct direction. Also, ponies were polite and generally civilized.
The bad: aforementioned constant diving for grass. Also, I was riding bareback and in slippery leggings. This was not my smartest decision ever.
The good again: ponies all loaded up politely on the way home.
She has arthritis in her hocks and we’re both fairly out of shape, but we continue both our evening moseying around the barn and our weekend redwood rides.
I suspect her brain needs a few “conditioning” rides before Polly comes out with us – but if I don’t manage it, I have confidence she’ll be ok.
I am thankful every day for what this pony has given me, the places I never thought we’d go. May we have many more years of doing whatever she wants.
During the winter, the dam goes up, and the river cannot be safely crossed. Our trail access then involves walking down the shoulder of a rural, one-lane-each-direction highway with traffic zooming by and not always respecting equine space. In previous years we have encountered motorcycle packs, gravel trucks, and in one memorable occasion, a tour bus literally two feet from us. (One horse teleported up the steep hillside; Confetti paused to graze.) Good news: Fetti is actually pretty solid with traffic. I have no issue leading her down the highway even after a year or two off.
Our first ride in the park every winter/spring has historically been a nervewracking event. Brains are lost. Everything is new and shiny. Zooming is desired but can’t be done because footing and fitness.
I guess the perks to semi-retired ponies include keeping their brain instead of trying to go back to work right away?
Fetti was an excellent example for a friend’s pony with zero road experience. Then I hopped on at the park and had Zen Pony right away – and it stuck. Polite, civilized walking on the buckle with occasional diving for grass. Just another day, this is what we do. Deep and slippery mud. Culvert with rushing water. People and questionably behaved dogs.
