This hasn’t been a problem in Vermont yet, where half the barn is still blanketed overnight and it’s been raining fit to build an ark, but I did enjoy this SmartPak article: Cooling Out a Hot Horse.

At my first barn, when I was eight years old or so, we cooled out after lessons by walking down a fenceline, around the pole at the end, and back up the fenceline, a total trip of about 50 yards or so. At the starting point was a huge tub of water. We were to offer the horses water each time we reached the tub, and to keep walking until the horses spurned the water.

It’s a simple if not ideal system. The horses were almost never worked hard enough to be breathing heavily, and they were all fit lesson horses anyway. I can’t remember ever sponging or hosing off a sweaty horse.

Now I’m lucky to own a horse that isn’t much of a sweater and cools down fairly easily. We always end our rides by walking for at least 10 minutes anyway, more for the muscle recovery than for actual cooling down strategies, though on rare occasions I’ve walked him longer than that when I feel he’s warmer than normal.

He actually usually sweats and dehydrates more because of mental factors than physical ones – when I first started working with him, we’d spend 10 minutes in the indoor at a time, and all I would do would be to groom him slowly and gently, pick up a foot and put it down, and talk to him. He’d go back to his paddock after those sessions and drink and drink and drink. Like a nervous public speaker in front of a crowd of thousands – he’d get an equine form of cottonmouth.

Lately, I’ve been paying more attention to strength than to heat/dehydration. It’s tough to find a flat surface to walk on so we’ve been doing more hill work than I had hoped for, and at the end of our trots (still 5 minutes) I am feeling just a teensy bit of wobbliness. I’m compensating by taking our overall progression more slowly and by making sure he has recovery time – he’s getting tonight off, for instance. There’s already a marked improvement in how eager he is to move out at the beginning of our rides each night.

Last night was Tristan’s fifth ride since August. We’re still walking only, but in those five rides – one a day except Tuesday, which I took off to give him some recovery time – we’ve walked inside and outside, uphill and down, in the ring and out of the ring, with other horses and alone, within and beyond sight of the barn, and last night’s ride was bareback.

He’s been an absolute rock star. I’ve always known he has one of the best brains in the world, but on his first ride the barn cat leapt down from the arena wall directly behind him – and he barely flinched. Last night, when I was bareback, he kept focused when the tractor started up directly next to him, just outside the indoor. He also let me vault onto his back from the ground, with much flailing and some kneeing in the ribs.

The vet was there to see the pregnant mare (baby in July!!!) and I took him out to show off his awesome-looking foot, and she had me jog him out at the trot for a few strides and gosh, he looked good. Springy and floaty.

He was short in the hind end for the first few rides, but I’ve asked him in each ride to loosen a bit more, take a few steps under himself, sideways, into the bend – not much, just a teensy bit, and a few steps at a time, and he’s unlocking there, stepping through bigger and more evenly.

I’m still pondering what our step up will be. I think on Saturday morning, before I head in to work, we’ll move up to 30 minutes of walking, and do a bit more hill work (considering we are doing, at most, one hill per ride right now, so a minute or maybe two, we may do 5 minutes). I may add trot the week after that, and then increase our walking time the week after that, then add in more trot. There’s no reason to rush; I’d like to get out fox hunting at some point this summer, but the season doesn’t properly start until the fall, so it would just be hauling him over to the kennels to acclimate him and to hack out with my friends.

Best. Pony. Ever.