Thursday, September 6, 2007

It's Cooler Now...

Well, it appears that the extreme hot weather has backed off some and it's dropped back down into the mid 80s (thank god!).

With that, I took the opportunity to saddle up and ride Max for a bit last night. Max doesn't appear to have any obvious sores and the area I was concerned about doesn't appears to be allright for the moment. I'm still concerned because there might be bridging going on with the Thoroughgood English saddle that I've been using extensively for the past 5-6 months. Kind of strange- there was definately problems from either the '59 MacClellan and/or the Wintec English saddle in that are- white hairs and all, but it appeared to have have stablized when I got the Thoroughgood.

Anyway, to play safe, I broke out the antique WWII German Army saddle and saddled Mx up with that. It seems that of all my saddles, this one ACTUALLY fits Max the best, although it's a bit hard on me. The horses could definately sense it was cooler and they were all buzzed up, including Max. Fortunately, Max's idea of being buzzed up was to make himself a pain in the rear as I was grooming saddling him. He was acting more like a goofy kid than anything else (a BIG goofy kid that could cause some damage if things aren't handled carefully...).

After saddling up, I decided to do the usual trotting, cantering, transitions, leg yields, and even some side passing. It worked out pretty well and once I got Max fired up, he did very well. It was a bit difficult getting used to the German Army saddle- it's always that way when I put on a saddle I haven't used for awhile.

We worked out for about on hour and I then cooled him down. When I took the saddle off of him, there didn't appear to be any issues with the back and he did not make any response when I worked my fingers along him spine. A good sign...

Hopefully the cooling trend will continue for awhile.

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