Seasonal Affective Disorder=SAD its winter!

The first Sunday of November marks the time/ riding change where I find my self banished to the indoor redneck engineered tractor shed until March.

the 50X120' winter prison

While I am lucky to have an "indoor" of sorts the sheer effort and time required each evening (watering, raking,etc) to prepare for my ride makes it easy to sit on the couch with my hound and a book. It takes every ounce of motivation to grab the hose and rake, scrape the mud of the Moose and go for ride. It is especially a let down after such a wonderful year. But I guess that is /must be my motivator! To 1. not lose ground on what we have accomplished and 2. try to improve a little while confined to 50X120'

Riding in such a small space is not conducive to free-styling exploits (where Moose and I excel!). Our winter grind routine so far is this:

• Walk 10 minutes
• Leg yield head to wall & tail to wall each way
• Tracking left haunches-in and shoulder-in at walk
• Tracking right more head to the wall leg yielding (no haunches in this direction yet) and shoulder-in at walk
• Trot a few loops then circles at each end
• Leg yield quarterline to wall as well as head to wall & tail to wall at trot
• Trot tracking left is ridden 90% of the time with a counter bend
• Trot work tracking right is always ridden shoulder-fore (Moose's weak side)
• A few canter circles -Moose finds this difficult in such a small space...but it is better than last year where any attempt to canter in the indoor resembled toads wild ride amiss a dessert sand storm!
• Interspersed are plenty of walk breaks
• We end with a few trot-canter and walk-canter transitions

Goals for the winter

1. To not be so fat. I need to stay get in shape. Blah.
2. Develop haunches in at walk tracking left
3. Improve canter
4. And finally -I hope -the big goal- is to be balanced enough to counter-canter inside!

As I write this I am looking at this:

Mommy peeese stay inside

But riding beckons. And I have a date with the exercise bike. I hate winter.