January is Awesome in Georgia

 My Beauty Queen ready for some dressage.

I know I mentioned it a couple posts ago but, seriously, January is awesome in Georgia.  The weather has been pretty perfect for riding.  60-70 is great!  I'm still a little cold but once I am riding I'm too warm in even a hoodie.  Of course the ponies love it.  Take a close look at Klein in the above picture.  Her winter coat is next to non-existent.  You can BARELY see the line of her clip because there's just not that much to clip.

Yesterday I took Klein out for a hack and then we did some dressage work.  Klein was a little distracted early in our ride but then when we started some dressage work I was able to get her to focus and she did really well.  We just worked on simple things like 20m circles, halts, straightness down the center line and across the diagonal.  The thing I wanted to work most on was the quality of her trot and the cadence of it.  I was happy with her effort.  Her head was in the game yesterday.

Since I felt her distraction on our hack yesterday I knew she wanted to get out and GO.  Wish granted.  Today we went to the orchard and did some trot sets and walked around for a while then we did a few gallop sets around the orchard.  

  

Ready to gallop.

Klein was such a BEAST.  A gallop was exactly what she wanted, she could barely contain herself.  At first I was trying to keep her moderately fast but she kept resisting and wanting to go all out.  I planned to do a few gallops and I didn't want her to get tired because we haven't been focusing on conditioning lately.  I thought she'd be tired after the second gallop.  Nope.  She was full of it the ENTIRE time.  I kind of let her win the game today.  We galloped big squares and I let her pick her pace on two sides then had her gallop all out on two sides.  By the end of our ride she could have repeated the entire thing over again at the same pace.  We were out for two hours today.

It's days like today when I realize I've created a MONSTER over the years.  Earlier today I said she's pretty much the equine version of a CrossFit athlete.  She can't get enough, she's up for anything that involves WORK, and she'll never quit.  That's my girl!  Mares rock. 

 Admiring the fact that we also still have green grass here in January.  I was sweating riding around in a hoodie today.

 Can't even wait for me to get to her head to give her a granola bar after our ride.

Moch had a gooey eye this weekend.  I think it's probably a clogged tear duct or maybe she rubbed her face on a tree to get an itch.  It was just barely swollen so I cleaned it up and put some opthamalic medicine in there.  Today it looked better with nothing coming out of it, but still just a tiny bit irritated so I put more medicine in it.  I'm sure it will be good to go by tomorrow.  I have a little experiment for Moch next weekend...

My little Moch!  Such a sweet little horse!