A few steps backward in March and then a few steps forward and then as so often happens, we went backward again and now in June, this is a photo of Nitro and Sandman out on the trail, taken a few days ago. It does not seem significant on the face of it, but it’s a BIG step forward in 90 days, given where we were, I would not have imagined in March that we’d be where we are with Nitro today in June.
Long story short, in March, I “came off” Nitro and hit the ground hard, separated some ribs and then later had a bad case of Vertigo for a few weeks, recovered from all that and then like a good endurance rider, got right back in the saddle and in April, as luck would have it, came off again 
, (yeah, jeez Louise, seriously need to reconsider my life choices) and ended up in the emergency room once again, but this time with a torn up elbow that required gluing my arm back together, but soon therafter, got back on Nitro and then began alternating my riding with Jessica Nordqvist, a great trainer, who graciously agreed to ride Nitro while I ride Sandman.
Ya know, if you hit a wall or in my case, the ground, a few times, like I did and your a little older (and you should know better) and “you want things to change, maybe you gotta change something” and since what I was doing wasn’t working, I thought I’d change it up, so while I was recovering from the first “come off” I was leafing back thru my notes from my riding in 1989, and noted that my friend Bazy said once, and I wrote it down, for our training log, “if you want a bomb proof horse, you gotta ride em every day, nothing better for a horses mind, than wet saddle pads every day”.
With this bit of advice in mind, I began riding in May every day, both horses, Sandman and Nitro, and over these last six weeks, we only took a few days off and on those days, I did groundwork and they got some exercise in the walker as well.
During this time, we were alternating horses and working on trailer loading and bicycle desensitization drills and when we did the bike work, Jessica would ride or walk the horse and I’d zoom around on the bike and then we also practiced trailer loading both horses and a few weeks ago, we moved on to riding both horses together initially in the arena.
After Nitro learned to follow and lead in the arena (big thanks to Jessica) and was better at self regulating his anxiety and need for speed, we moved out onto the trails and just walked everywhere, switching leads and trotting now and then and now we are planning to go out into the park, but first things first, waiting on a new saddle and saddle pack for Nitro and his own SPOT unit, almost there.
Sometimes, you gotta take a big step back or in my case a few steps back before we can move forward, and this along with some trips to the ER, and some helpful constructive insight and outside perspective from others, we are making progress again, it’s all about the journey, enjoy the ride! This’ll be a good one