At first, I thought that I had tweaked something in my right ankle when I made the switch to wearing winter boots. It happens. Big stomping boots change your gait, and I always buy winter boots slightly too large for my feet, because I always end up layering socks within a week or two of wearing them.

Time marched on, I kept limping, and I learned through trial and error that the problem was not my ankle, it was my heel. Specifically, it was the back of my heel, and it was not getting better.

Whatever: I walked less, and I was riding without stirrups anyway.

You can see where this is going, right? It didn’t get better. It’s still pretty definitively not better. I finally, grumpily, started googling, and pretty quickly made an armchair diagnosis of achilles tendinitis, pretty classically right where the achilles tendon connects to the bone of my heel.

Unsurprisingly, diagnosis did not actually change anything. In fact, things continued to get kind of worse, with the pain sharper when the tendon was expressed and a low-grade burning sometimes even when at rest.

So, for the last 10 days or so I’ve been resting even more (so many extra holiday pounds that are just not getting worked off, ugh) and icing it every night. That has helped a little bit, but do you know what uses your heel? Driving. And putting stirrups back on your saddle to get ready for a lesson.

I have a doctor’s appointment next week. Since I can still flex my ankle just fine – well, it’s painful, but mechanically sound – it’s definitely not ruptured, but there is a nagging sense in the back of my mind that it’s a partial tear. Best case, I’m still looking at quite a while of restricted activity and icing because soft tissue. Damn it.

Sometime last week, while icing my heel and reading, it finally occurred to me.

If this had happened to my horse, I would’ve had the vet out to ultrasound him a month ago. I would be icing every day, monitoring bute, working to get the inflammation down and watching every step he took with an eagle eye.

It’s one thing to vaguely and intellectually know that I treat my horse far better than I treat myself. It’s yet another thing entirely to have it so cut-and-dried in front of me. If my horse had a strain of his digital flexor tendon, I would be FREAKING OUT. My own foot? Meh. I’ll gimp around some more and after 3.5 think about icing it.

Not that I have any intentions of changing this pattern, mind you.

One of the best things about horses, for me, is how they force me to develop certain qualities.

For one thing, horses do not cope well with equivocation. They want clear, firm direction. They want steady commitment. They don’t do that whole “well, I dunno, what do you want to do?” conversation well at all.

I think that’s something that so many people who have those “that one time I rode a horse, he bolted/bit me/flipped out for no reason!” stories just don’t get. Horses are generally very clear in their communication. You just have to pay attention. Learn to read them, and you can see something coming from a mile away. (Which, ok, is not to say that sometimes they don’t flip for no reason – but that is the definite minority of instances.)

So in order to become a person who works well with horses, I have had to develop those qualities: be clear, be decisive, be firm. I’m not great at them yet, but I am lightyears better than I was. I think it’s one of the reasons that horse people are often difficult (from society’s point of view) to get along with. People who are in deep with horses, and who relate really well to horses, are often blunt, straightforward people who don’t always have patience for the you-first-no-wait-what-now dance that society values. Oftentimes, they’re women, for whom being blunt, clear, and not wholly sympathetic is considered a negative.

Here’s another thing: horses teach you to be still and to wait.

I suck at this. I am a person who wants to practice frenetic energy in all that I do. I multitask, cubed. I need a million projects. I need to fidget. I need to constantly poke at things.

But I’m learning. For me, the epitome of this feeling lies in the perfect half-halt: that quiet, still, gathering, that moment when you communicate a complicated idea to a horse that you should hold, wait, be still. I think of a good half-halt as a spot deep in my stomach, in my core, that for one split instant contains everything and makes everything possible as a next step.

The more obvious, outward example of this is the ability to stay the calm center of the storm, to hold your body and your mind still when shit is going down. You can do it from the saddle, riding a buck or a bad moment. You can do it on the ground when you’re dealing with or approaching a horse that’s frightened or cartwheeling around on a longe line. Horses need that. They can read us way better than we can read them. They see our tension, they see our fear, and they feed off of it. But they can do the reverse, too. They can see a person who has let tension drain from their body, who is holding still, who is waiting quietly, and they respond to like with like.

Last week, I took the dog for a short hike down a rail trail near our house.

I love my dog, but she is not always easy. She is fast, strong, and very tricky to keep focused. She is not great on a leash, but she is absolutely forbidden to be off leash except in enclosed areas. She bolts, instantly. Her recall is not good; she simply doesn’t have the self-discipline to have it nailed down yet.

So on this beautiful, sunny day, we went about three miles, and on our return, when we were about half a mile away from the trail head, which was on a very busy road, she took a flying leap off the trail into a muddy ditch. She loves splashing in mud puddles. She was flailing around, sprinting back and forth, and then all of a sudden she was no longer on her leash.

There was no tug, no warning; she wasn’t even at the end of her 30′ lead. One second she was frolicking, the next she was a brindled blur and the next second she had vanished into the trees.

I ran forward down the trail, yelling for her. She reappeared out of the woods about twenty yards down the trail, crossed the trail, and then disappeared into the woods on the other side of the trail.

Between the moment when she first got loose and I panicked and the moment she crossed the trail again, I fell back on those horse instincts. I could feel my body grow still and quiet, and time slowed down. I saw that when she had crossed the road again she was actually angling in my direction. I saw how amped up she was, and knew that she loves being chased.

I jogged a little bit further in an unhurried way, watching the brush where she’d disappeared, making noise so she knew I was there, and then paused, waiting, called her one more time – and she exploded out of the brush right toward me and flung herself down at my feet.

I grabbed her harness instantly with a shaking hand, twisted my hand around a few times so she’d have to pull it off to get away again, and praised her to the skies, fed her half the treats I had with me.

The harness (her ususal Ruffwear) was in perfect shape. The leash was in perfect shape. The hardware wasn’t twisted in any way. There were no tears or loose spots. There was no earthly reason for the leash to have separated from the harness, but it did.

If I had panicked, she would’ve thought it was a game, and kept running. In fact, she did that once before, two years ago, the first time she slipped her leash (and her collar; it’s why she only goes in a harness now). But because Tristan – and the other horses I’ve learned from – has drummed into me that need to be still and wait, I caught her less than two minutes after she bolted.

Hopefully, I’ll keep working on those lessons. They’ve served me well.

Last night, I left work on time solely due to my bargain with the devil of bringing my laptop home and planning on about another few hours of work later that evening.

It was a beautiful day. I didn’t hit any traffic. (Such as it exists in Vermont.) I got to the barn right when I wanted to. Tristan was looking great. I got out my tack, and put together my old figure 8 bridle for an experiment.

I had a good riding plan: I put his old kimberwicke in the figure 8 to see if we could nip the bolting and jackassery in the bud, and settle down to actually schooling outside. If – as past experience indicated – he hit the curb chain once or twice and then settled down, then I had a conditioning ride planned with some long canters. I wanted to get some of the fuss out of him before trying an actual dressage ride in the big outdoor the next day.

I buckled the last strap of the figure 8 and stepped back to take a picture of his new bitting getup, because blogging.

Then I saw that I had missed three calls from my husband. I called him back.

He was stuck in non-moving traffic because of an accident on the main road of the city he worked in. Even if he got on the highway literally that moment, he was still 45 minutes away from home.

I had dropped the dog off at daycare that morning so she could get some exercise and socialization on a beautiful day.

He called at 5:30. Daycare closed at 6:00.

I hung up and stood there for such a long moment, just staring at Tristan’s face, at the bridle I had just finished putting on him. I had to focus on breathing deeply. I could feel tears stinging, but I fought them. It was one of those moments of perfect, exquisite misery, when there is only one thing you can do but every fiber of your being is screaming that you don’t want to.

I took the bridle off. I took the saddle off. I put my tack away. I put Tristan’s sheet back on. I fed him his grain. I closed the barn door. I picked my dog up from daycare, and I went home.

I opened up my laptop, and I worked until 9pm.

I am so tired.

When I started Tristan, in January 2006, basically everything was difficult.

Every day, I would catch him in his paddock, lead him into the indoor, and groom him.

He was so nervous that he would tremble, sweat, or spook away, to the end of the lead line. When he got back to his paddock, he would drink gallons of water; the stress dehydrated him.

Eventually, I could groom him inside. Then I could longe him. Then he wore tack while longeing. Bridling was especially difficult.

I cried a lot. I am not really a person who cries from frustration. Adversity usually makes me grit my teeth, get angry, and push through. I cry at other people’s pain, real or fictional, but not at my own. So when I tell you I cried a lot, that should give you some idea of how miserable I was. For months.

Early on, my trainer gave me one tip that really helped, and I used it for years.

Always keep emergency chocolate in your tack trunk.

I bought peanut butter chocolate bars, much like the one I have pictured above, only not nearly as nice. They were 2/$1.00 at the grocery store, and even that was a stretch, because I was on a really strict budget so I could afford my horse.

But I always found money to keep one in my tack trunk. On really bad days, I would put him back in his paddock, and I would go sit down on my tack trunk. Sometimes I would not even turn the light on in the tack room. And I would eat some chocolate.

Blood sugar is no one’s friend. Stress does crazy things to my blood sugar. Forcing myself to sit down, have a moment of pleasure, get some sugar into my stomach, and breath deeply for a few minutes, was a key part of readjusting and getting myself ready for the long, cold drive home.

I haven’t kept chocolate in my tack trunk in years, because even our very worst days now are lightyears better than even our very best days were that winter.

But it was still one of the best pieces of advice I ever got for training a young, green, volatile horse.

Not the best ride ever last night.

Riding, for me anyway, is all about plateaus and valleys.

Mostly, we sort of cruise along, plodding ahead. Adding fitness, adding a little bit more suppleness, a little bit better transition.

Then we fall off a cliff.

And we hit bottom and I sort of stare around, dazed, wondering what the fuck happened, and Tristan thinks I am a worthless idiot. Then we wallow for a while, and everything is awful, and nothing works, even the stuff that worked flawlessly 48 hours ago.

Then we start slowly, painfully, crawling back up the other side. Eventually, we hit a spot that’s maybe 1″ higher than it was before we fell off a cliff.

So we plod along for a while. Then another cliff. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Sometime late last week, we fell off that cliff.

And right now Tris is wondering what the hell is wrong with me, anyway.

So right now we cannot: bend, go on the bit in the canter, trot forward, change direction on the bit, back up, turn left in the canter, breathe, relax at the base of the neck, use stifles. We can sort of get on the bit in the trot. We can in the walk if we want to crawl along flopping on the forehand. Which, obviously, is not ideal.

We also cannot, absolutely CAN.NOT. behave sanely outside. Un-possible. Out of the question. How dare I even think about it.

To be fair, this is his first year in four years when he’s arrived into spring both a) very sound and b) very fit. Right now, he’s banging out long trot sets and short canter sets and he’s tired but still bright-eyed and willing to go. (On days that are not overly warm, anyway, since he’s still got a lot of winter coat to blow out.)

But yeah.

Every single time in the last two weeks I’ve taken him outside there has been some kind of major shit fit. Last night, I set a goal of walking and trotting sanely in the outdoor. 20 minutes of walking, and he finally let go of the tension in his back and his neck – or enough of it, anyway – and I asked for a trot. Tons of little mincing steps, angry head-flipping, flinging shoulders side to side later, and he started to soften to the bit.

And then we got to the far end of the ring and he went sideways in this great scrambling leap, and UP, and down and then up and down a few more times. Still going sideways. Fast, toward home. I swore a lot and sat deep and yanked his head up and then kicked him on. Then it happened again. Then it happened again. I kept him walking.

Then I looked up to see that the barn manager was leaving, and I had one of those moments of utter defeat. I realized if I kept pushing this, I was going to end up on the ground, and there would be no one else around to catch Tristan. I can roll. Tris would head for the hills.

So we went inside, and we spent another 20 minutes attempting to get some semblance of “better than we started.” Which was for the most part unsuccessful. I tuned up the trot-canter transitions a little bit. I got some changes of bend on a 20m circle. I got a couple of steps of leg yield. That was it. He was blowing hard, because he had spent the entire time fighting me, grinding his teeth, not breathing.

I called it quits. I stripped his tack. I took him back outside to one of the dry lots, and I let him roll, and then I curried him up and down. It was windy, but sunny, so the strong breeze took the hair away as fast as I could get it off him, and he still wasn’t relaxed – he kept pacing, nosing at the hay and not really eating it, but he seemed to hate me a little less by the end of it.

Ugh.

April 11 is a big day in our family, and yesterday was a milestone anniversary for both of the April 11 events.

First, Tristan turned 21 years old!

Realistically, I have no idea when his birthday is. Even his year of birth (1995, coded into his freezebrand) is a bit of a guess, since he was rounded up at age 4. It’s a pretty darn good guess, but it could be wrong one way or the other.

So, when I got him, I decided to pick a day for him. April 11 was my much-beloved grandmother’s birthday. She passed away from a very fast, very aggressive form of lung cancer six months before I got Tristan. (Actually, very close to her own birthday.) So it was a good way for me to think about her on the date. Yesterday would’ve been her 90th birthday, and she’s been gone for 11 years. I miss her a lot.

I went back and forth on whether to feed Tristan a beer. I ended up not doing it. I might on Friday night. We have a strict no weekday drinking rule in our household, and between a) laziness, b) neurotic doubt and c) that rule, I decided no beer last night.

I ended up doing a short, 25 minute dressage school. He gave me some lovely stuff in that short time, including a couple of trot-canter transitions in which he really lifted through the withers, and some gorgeous big expressive stretchy trot at the very end.

I groomed him hard before and after the ride, and got a TON of hair out of him. I offered him a slice of the maple pound cake I’d made and brought to the barn, but he wanted none of it – pretty typical for him. He’s not a baked goods kind of horse, alas.

But! Yesterday was also an anniversary of a slightly less happy kind. Five years ago yesterday, I had colic surgery.

Yes, you read that right. I did. Not Tristan.

See, five years + one day ago, I went to bed not feeling great, but not that awful – just sort of nauseated and unsettled. I woke up at 2am in the worst pain I’d experienced in my life – and I’m really good with pain. I literally crawled to the bathroom and tried to throw up, failed at that, called my mother (she’s a nurse) and decided with her and my husband (boyfriend at the time) that I needed to go to the ER.

Thus began a very long day that ended at 2pm with me being wheeled into surgery, entirely unsure what they would be doing. It presented like appendicitis, but my appendix looked ok (not great, but not ready to burst either) on the CT scan, the pain was not any better (they did not give me drugs until noon, so that they could establish that I was not drug-seeking, which I get, but wow, it sucked), and so I signed a waiver on the understanding that they would be doing exploratory abdominal surgery and would remove some part of my inside – definitely my appendix, because why not, but also possibly an ovary (also looking a little dodgy but not definitively so), spleen, pancreas, who the hell knew?

I woke up a few hours later and heard the verdict. Somehow, an adhesion – which is a piece of internal scar tissue – had displaced and had wrapped around and tied off a loop of my small intestine. The pain I felt was from my entire digestive system slowly shutting down. If it had gone too much longer there was a distinct possibility that the tied off piece of my intestine could have died or become infected. It was basically one of the weirdest possible things it could’ve been based on my symptoms. The surgeon took a photo of my intestines with his phone during surgery and I made grand rounds that week, since it was a teaching hospital.

I ended up in the hospital for two days, and at home flat on my back for another two weeks, and recovering for the rest of the spring. At a post-op appointment the surgeon was carefully explaining to me that they’d chose to go in laparoscopically for the best outcomes, and that was great news, since if I was careful the scars would be minimal and I could wear a bikini again, probably!

I sighed, looked at him, and said very calmly but firmly, “I have never worn a bikini in my life. When can I ride my horse again?”

I swear, the surgeon’s whole face lit up, he looked like he wanted to high five me, and we got on famously. I recovered pretty darn well, and never even filled the prescription he gave me (for 30 days of opiates, ah, those halcyon days before drug addiction was a white people problem and so we didn’t really care about it). It did set me back in riding for that spring since I had no abs and jiggling around was painful, but for a life-threatening issue that could only be solved by surgery, it was pretty darn quick and straightforward!

It took me a while to realize that what had happened to me was exactly what happens to a number of horses who colic and have to have surgery. Since then I’ve had more sympathy for the pain horses are in when they colic!

I’ve always found self-regulating to be a challenge. If I’m doing something, I get lost inside that thing. I want to do that, and nothing else. If I am reading a book, I get lost for hours. If I find myself at work for an extra fifteen minutes, I stay for an extra two hours, and then I bring my computer home, and I’m on the couch working until midnight.

The same is true for my riding: if I have a good ride, if I put together a few days of good work in a row, I want to ride all the time. I read COTH all day. I stare out the window and wish I weren’t at work.

But there’s a flip side. If I fall out of that hyper-focus, it’s like things don’t exist. I haven’t picked up a crochet hook in 9 months, after making a baby blanket a month for almost a year prior to that. Sometimes, I’ll marathon a TV show, get interrupted (by sleep, or by having to go to work or do something else) and then I’ll forget it exists. There are so many that I’ve completely dropped that way.

For whatever reason, my brain is not built to do the steady plugging away thing. It’s gotten better over the years, in the sense that I am more aware of my natural tendencies, but it’s also gotten worse – for whatever reason, as I get older, I get more set in some of my ways. This is one of them.

Sometimes this hyper-focus is a good thing. It’s great for working on the house. It’s great for the intensive work of dressage. When I really dig into a work project, I can absolutely crush it. When I can turn it to my advantage, I lay waste to a to do list.

One of the biggest struggles of my equestrian life is managing those tendencies, especially in relation to a horse who is basically the opposite.

See, Tristan is a horse who is really, really difficult to manage mentally. He fundamentally does not have a work ethic. There are many horses who will work their hearts out for you – who thrive on being ridden every day, or twice a day – who will keep going no matter what. Lots of people seek that out in their horses, and value that about certain breeds of horses.

That’s not Tristan. Work, for Tristan, is a negotiation. He is the equine equivalent of the guy who shows up conscientiously to his job every day, 9-5, plugs away, honest as the day is long but never spectacular, and then spends his weekends on the recliner watching football, beer in hand. Figuring him out physically is a piece of cake compared to keeping his brain on an even keel.

Me? I work 8-7, then go home and paint the kitchen, then re-organize my office, then scheme for new projects. I over-commit and burn out spectacularly and when I force myself to take some rest, within 12 hours I’m itching to re-commit to something new.

So you can see how we might come into conflict.

When I have a good ride, I want to go back and ride every night, all dressage, all the time, for hours. Tristan can’t do that. He just can’t. Ride 1 is great, Ride 2 is decent, and then the wheels come off. So I’m constantly forcing myself to plan in rest days for him, to vary his work in quantity, quality, and type. To juggle it so that each ride I have the happy, refreshed, and cooperative horse instead of the one who lets out a deep sigh at the mounting block as he’s staring into the middle distance.

Here’s the other catch. When I give him a day off, I fall into a rut. It turns into two days off, three days off. I tell myself he’s happier that way – which is actually completely true. So I fling myself into projects around the house, or into reading book after book after book, or staying super late at work every night, and before I know it, he’s had a week off.

I’m not good at the moderating. I’m not good at the plugging away just a little bit every day. I full appreciate that this is a pretty deep character flaw, but I would also point out that learning to work with my natural inclinations has netted me some great results otherwise. The trick is in learning to manage it, to channel it, and to occasionally force myself to put one foot in front of the other, even for things that I love to do, like riding.

No, I’ll never be a world-beating rider. But then, I honestly never wanted to be. I love my horse, I love to ride, and I want us to keep getting better. For me, part of that “better” is finding ways to square what I want to do with both my brain and my horse’s brain. Sometimes that’s challenge enough.

[sorry for the wall o’text – I’ve had this on my mind for a long time. Hat tip to The $900 Facebook Pony’s recent post about momentum that finally spurred me to put this down.]