Before the gallop

Gallop morning!  It was a beautiful morning, and time to gallop, so I popped Eddie on the trailer and drove a mile and a half to the Heart of Iowa Trail.  This is a shared-use trail that I usually ride to, but it has been so dry here lately that even the shoulder of the gravel road is too hard to trot to the trail to warm up for gallop.  Last week I had a near miss when I felt him take a bad step on the gravel.  He was subtly lame after that, so I packed his hoof with poultice and used a hoof wrap and gave him the next day off and he was terrifically sound after the day off.  That was too close for me, so I drove him to the trail today.  I offloaded him and walked down the trail to warm up.

We ended up going 5 miles total, with plenty of work in gallop and some work in transitions within the gallop as is needed on course.  He did remarkably well.  He feels great!

Then I ran the new saddle pads to the embroiderer to have some new logos put on.  Yes, I could have done that sooner, like 2 weeks ago!  Hey, I had galloping to do.

After the gallop

This evening, Dr. Jim McNutt came out and did Eddie’s Health Certificate and verification of not having vesicular stomatitis, certification of which is required for the Adult Team Championships and AECs.  Apparently this disease is fairly common in the south.

Then in the late evening I had another lesson with Trudy Tatum.  I usually wouldn’t ride him again on the same day I had a gallop, but in this lesson we were working on trot-halt-backup and trot medium walk to free walk; mostly technique stuff for me to work on, not terribly difficult for Eddie.  He was a little tight at first, not surprisingly, but he got better and better.  He gets tomorrow off.