November By The Numbers

One of the girls at the barn told me about the Ride To Win app and since it is free I decided to give it a try.  I am super lazy and haven't played around with most of the features, so I really don't have much to say about the app itself.  I know you can store records and have it remind you when horses need shots and farrier and all of that good stuff, but I have only been using it to time my rides and store little notes about how the ride went.

Bareback and a halter

My "month" started on the 5th, so I am missing a few days, but I thought it would be fun anyway.  As full disclosure, I only did no stirrups at the walk (ok there was some jigging on a few days but the intent was there).  And I do need to buy new stirrup leathers because of the no stirrups November.

Number of rides:  21
Number of hours ridden:  18.75

Number of good rides:  11
Number of rides that made me want to cry:  0

Number of rides without stirrups:  11 (the other rides I warmed up without stirrups)
Number of hours ridden without stirrups:  13.5

I am actually pretty impressed when I look back at the whole month.  This time last year the majority of rides made me want to cry.  He wouldn't walk and our trot was an inverted giraffe with lots of front end action.  I only had one ride that would fall in the bad category this month.  My notes read, "Overall was wound up and annoying."  In general most of my rides had ok, good, very good, with "excellent" thrown in there a couple times.

I am pretty proud of the amount of time I rode without stirrups, even though it was only at the walk.  The down side is I do need to buy new stirrup leathers (and no I didn't buy any when I was buying everything else in sight...because logic).  I think I am going to try to keep warming up without stirrups in December and rumor has it that two point is going to be the December contest so I will be doing some of that again.

I've wanted this shirt for so long now

I did almost fall off a couple times due to the lack of stirrups.  Once the electric fence popped and he decided to teleport sideways.  I was far enough off the side that I was really wishing for stirrups.  Thankfully, he didn't do anything beyond the initial jump so I wiggled back to the middle.