I finally rode my horse.

Perfect fall weather but too much to do and not enough time to do it and the end of daylight savings time has kept me from riding, dark at 5:30 sucks.  That and the fact that I wanted his trail wound to heal up.  He ended up getting swelling and heat in the leg but a couple days of wrapping and antibiotic ointment has it healing up nicely now.  So I would say for the past almost 3 weeks I have only ridden a handful of times.  He was not happy about me showing up with tack and ran around the pasture bucking and acting silly for a few moments.  I did not plan to make it a grueling work out anyways so I don't what he got his panties in a bunch about. 

Goal: pretty much just make sure he remembered how to move off my leg and a walk and a trot.  He was feeling WAY to good to even care to attempt a canter.  He has a lovely canter and I am not worried about him rushing at the canter when he is feeling like that my worry is more about how crazy forward he gets at the trot after a good canter.  I didn't need more forward at the trot.  He broke into a crazy silly run off with his nose in the air half attempting to buck for a moment, goofy guy was feeling good.  I took that as a signal that even though I already felt we were pretty low key we needed to go a step lower.  A tip I picked up from Dorothy Crowell.

I felt it was as successful of a ride as I could asked I'd say 25 minutes total.  He was harder to move off my right leg so our ride ended the moment he moved off it perfectly.  I jumped off at the trot and patted him all over and told him he was a good boy.  A major lesson Steady has taught me over the last year and a half is that 'Rome was not built in a day', nor does any training need to be perfected in a day.  I live for the tiny glimpses of light and make him feel like he just won the Kentucky Derby.  Now tell me do you think he will want to figure out how to repeat those glimpses of light?  And before you know it, those tiny glimpses turn into big break throughs. Also that there are those days that you can't see any light and to never take those days too seriously.  And never make a decision based on any one single bad ride, especially if you are dealing with a TB.  Thanks Steady for being such a great teacher.