Winter season/my life to come
For those of you that live in colder states, do you ever feel like your life has run out of fulfillment in the fall/winter? Haha, WHY does Michigan's winter season suck worse than other cold weather states?
I ended my season here horribly. Thunder was clobbering barrels and Titan was afraid of the photographer. I left state bawling and saying things about not wanting to run barrels anymore (mostly because of Titan, he was just a JERK the whole weekend). If he would have given me a decent attempt even, I wouldn't have been so hurt, but he was bucking and acting like a jerk in the warm up ring and afraid of the audience and photographer in the arena and he was being more hot headed than usual. Please don't go off into the "maybe its pain" thing because he's been checked several times for reasons for this sort of thing and it always comes to the same conclusion that its his behavior.
So, after feeling battered and broken because of Titan (Thunder didn't really bother me too much, he kicked his run up like 10 notches, we just turned a bit too soon and his shoulder killed the can), I've come up with a game plan. This winter I'm working mainly on his confidence. I'm doing some parelli, I'm moving him up to college with me WITHOUT THUNDER (which sucks because I want Thunder too, but I can't afford moving them both up here), and he's going to a few indoor local speed shows/all around shows. He's also getting put on a calming supplement that won't test and isn't just drugging him with Tryptophan. I've had people tell me they saw a difference in their horse's mental abilities to focus on them in training and the horse seemed a lot less stressed in competition.
The other thing I'm thinking about doing is trailering them to shows separately. It'd save me money if I did a one horse per show kind of thing and since I'm going to start doing local rodeos when I move to AZ I'll only be able to run one horse at most events anyway. But there will still be days I'll want to bring them both, and I'm afraid one will get favored over the other. This is a good plan though because a lot of times Thunder just needs a weekend or two off, so he could get it easily. I don't know, as much as I want to haul down to Indiana this winter, it's probably just better for me to take the next 9 months off of barrel racing so that I can prepare to move to AZ, prepare a wedding (I'm engaged now), apply to grad school, put some good training on Titan that he's lacking, and finish my last year of school. Once I'm in AZ at the end of may I can practice and ride daily and I'm hoping my horses will have a good improvement (although I'm not expecting to take them to any big shows until July at LEAST since they'll have to acclimate to AZ versus Michigan).
Anyway, this has been a long post about my life just now, I guess I sort of just want to talk barrels with someone that knows barrels. I'm sick of my family and friends trying to give me advice when they've never competed.
I ended my season here horribly. Thunder was clobbering barrels and Titan was afraid of the photographer. I left state bawling and saying things about not wanting to run barrels anymore (mostly because of Titan, he was just a JERK the whole weekend). If he would have given me a decent attempt even, I wouldn't have been so hurt, but he was bucking and acting like a jerk in the warm up ring and afraid of the audience and photographer in the arena and he was being more hot headed than usual. Please don't go off into the "maybe its pain" thing because he's been checked several times for reasons for this sort of thing and it always comes to the same conclusion that its his behavior.
So, after feeling battered and broken because of Titan (Thunder didn't really bother me too much, he kicked his run up like 10 notches, we just turned a bit too soon and his shoulder killed the can), I've come up with a game plan. This winter I'm working mainly on his confidence. I'm doing some parelli, I'm moving him up to college with me WITHOUT THUNDER (which sucks because I want Thunder too, but I can't afford moving them both up here), and he's going to a few indoor local speed shows/all around shows. He's also getting put on a calming supplement that won't test and isn't just drugging him with Tryptophan. I've had people tell me they saw a difference in their horse's mental abilities to focus on them in training and the horse seemed a lot less stressed in competition.
The other thing I'm thinking about doing is trailering them to shows separately. It'd save me money if I did a one horse per show kind of thing and since I'm going to start doing local rodeos when I move to AZ I'll only be able to run one horse at most events anyway. But there will still be days I'll want to bring them both, and I'm afraid one will get favored over the other. This is a good plan though because a lot of times Thunder just needs a weekend or two off, so he could get it easily. I don't know, as much as I want to haul down to Indiana this winter, it's probably just better for me to take the next 9 months off of barrel racing so that I can prepare to move to AZ, prepare a wedding (I'm engaged now), apply to grad school, put some good training on Titan that he's lacking, and finish my last year of school. Once I'm in AZ at the end of may I can practice and ride daily and I'm hoping my horses will have a good improvement (although I'm not expecting to take them to any big shows until July at LEAST since they'll have to acclimate to AZ versus Michigan).
Anyway, this has been a long post about my life just now, I guess I sort of just want to talk barrels with someone that knows barrels. I'm sick of my family and friends trying to give me advice when they've never competed.