Boring is good

Well normally boring isn't good, but in this case boring is good.  In fact, boring might even be great!  Why, you might ask, is boring great??  Boring is great because Reily had his first ride off the track today!  And for a 3 year old horse, straight off the track with two weeks of "let down" time (time off from racing or any other work) at the track and a third week of let down at home that is a phenomenal report to give!  It's phenomenal because a "boring" ride means that nothing happened, no crazy bolting, no rearing, no bucking, nothing.



Little anxious to start

 

OTTB's tend to have this awful reputation for being "crazy" or "wild" or even just plain "out of control".  My response... FALSE.  There are some, yes, there will always be those exceptions, but I think if people really look, they'll find that those hard to handle horses are the exception not the rule.  And Reily proved to be just another example today.  He was a gentleman in every way.  Race horses never have to stand and let people climb on them, trainers give jockeys and exercise riders a "leg up" and essentially help the rider jump on their back while on the move, but he stood still and let me mount on the first try.  Most people assume race horses are either in a stall or running flat out as fast as they can, as if there is no middle ground, but they actually get regular exercise almost every day where, just like riding horses they must warm up.  This warm up consists of traveling at the walk and trot on the far outside headed clockwise around the race track.  Once they are warmed up they will head towards the middle of the track or the rail and canter, gallop, breeze, etc. in a counter clockwise path.  So yes, race horses think fast and forward, but it's not all that they know, and at first Reily was a bit tight in anticipation of me asking for a gallop, but within five minutes he realized all I wanted to do was walk so that's all he did.  We marched around the field with the other horses in it for about 15 minutes and then called it quits.



Maxin' and relaxin' (Boo is the one watching in the
background, Scotty is the one in the middle and
Napoleon the super pony is on the far right)



He did so well for his first ride and I'm super proud of him.  Some people suggest at least 6 weeks of let down time before riding them, but since we'll only be walking I don't think it'll hurt him to start now.  We'll spend at least the first month just walking and power walking around the property.  Gotta build up those butt muscles and coordination on hills.  He'll be a mountain goat in no time!

A pat for a good baby.  I'm so happy that Reily has a good brain in his head.  The exact opposite of Boo who earned his name for being scared of everything including his own shadow when I first got him.  But Boo still takes a lot of "aluminum courage" aka spur persuasion, from time to time.

If only we could all be lightweights

Reily didn't used to be Reily, he used to be "Angel" short for his Jockey Club registered name "Sometimes An Angel".  But now Reily is Reily, or soon to be known as "Slow Your Roll" on the show scene because I just think that's a more badass better show name for a gelding then Angel... maybe he didn't like the track because the other horses made fun of him for being a boy and being called Angel.  That's my theory anyways.  Either way, he is now going to be Reily aka Slow Your Roll the badass three day eventer!

The sexy, sexy rig.

Have you ever made a 10 hour round trip drive in one day.  After you did that, did you really feel like doing it all over again five days later... yeah, neither did I.  And with a truck and trailer no less.  Luckily I had my Dad's heavy duty (but gas guzzling) truck, my absolutely amazing trainer's 2 horse trailer, and the greatest boyfriend in the entire world to sleep in the truck keep me company.  So I got everything ready on Friday night, we left the house at 6am, we stopped for gas about 15,000 times and eventually made it to Laurel Park Racetrack in Maryland just after 11am.  The big surprise was that when we got out of the truck we were greeted by a film crew.  No legitimately.  They were actually filming to make the "advice" book written by Kim Clark, the founder of Thoroughbred Placement and Rescue (TPR, which is the group I got Reily from), into a DVD and since they were at the track that day and we were picking Reily up that day they asked if they could film us.  My answer,  "Anything to help out Thoroughbreds, so sure!".  And so that's Reily and I's film debut, I'll have to remember to buy a copy when it's done!

I told you they were filming! How embarrassing, I started
wrapping backwards! I guess I had stage fright :(

Anyways, we went ahead and bubble wrapped the chestnut monster who had already been given a half dose of Ace (a mild sedative) to help keep him from stressing too much on the 5 hour ride home.  He may be big, but that Ace hit him like a drunken sailor, what a lightweight!  In a cute way though.  So off we strode to load up, after only a mild hesitation he walked right on, we closed up and scooted on down the road, because we had another 5 hours before home and at that point we were racing to beat the daylight.  In the end we didn't succeed (thanks to the slowest KFC EVER, and the insanely frequent gas stops), because it was dusk when we pulled into the farm.

Now if there's anything that I wasn't mentally prepared for when we got him home it would be his balance.  They'd warned me that he wasn't going to be very sure footed coming straight off the track.  You see, race tracks in America are the most perfectly groomed places you'll ever see.  By that I mean that everything, literally, EVERYTHING is grated to be as flat as flat can get.  So OTTB's tend to be clumsy the first time they experience hills or any kind of rolling terrain.  Well I thought I was prepared for clumsy... I was wrong.  By the time we got home the Ace had completely worn off and he was very excited about this new developement.  In his excitement he managed to trip himself, not once, but twice, because at home there's almost nothing but hills.  Before he could fall on his face anymore, we put him in his stall and locked the run-in that surrounded the stall so that when we let my other horses loose they could see but not reach him.  Unfortunately it wasn't the other horses who really wanted to get to him, it was Reily who really wanted to get to the other horses!  His legs are so long it looked like he could almost climb right over the stall door and walk out.  So rather then wait and see if that happened we did something I never would have imagined I would do the first night... we locked my poor Shetland, Napoleon, in the run-in area right outside his stall so that he had company.  Luckily, Napoleon's a trooper and he was happy enough to stay with him all night since he had as much hay and water as he wanted and the other boys couldn't run him off of it.  So that's how they were this morning when I got to the barn to check on them.  Scotty (QH) and Boo (TB) outside the run-in staring in, Napoleon still munching away on hay inside the run-in, and Reily standing with his chest pressed against the stall door desperatly trying to reach Napoleon to convince him they should be best friends.