Finding a New Normal

It's been almost two months since the whirlwind of life changes and all has been well so far.

As things have settled down, I've been carving out more time for the barn so Quest and I have been getting in more rides together! We were super lucky with a recent break in the late summer heat and got some gorgeous weather perfect for brisk trail miles with lots of trotting and hill climbs.

Our experiment with regular front shoes is going okay so far and Quest is eating up the gravel roads with gusto. However while mareface is still sound, I can tell and feel that she is a bit tenderfooted after the rockiest rides. Our trails at home aren't easy and while they offer the typical trail scenarios which are great for conditioning for NE-coast endurance, it definitely requires horses be properly outfitted with appropriate footwear for trail riding.

While doing hoofcare, I've noticed Quest's soles have been a bit softer than normal and Farrier D has been noting the same thing. Given the muddy areas in the lower pasture paddock around the hay/feed area, I'm not all that surprised and pretty annoyed that drainage hasn't been improved yet. Ugh.

So the new game plan is to pick up some Durasole the next time I make the long trek to the tack store (the closest one is 40-50 mins away) and we will be switching back to hoof boots so Quest gets some extra protection on the gnarly terrain while we toughen up the front soles. I know that one possibility is to pad the shoes if we really wanted to keep using shoes but that doesn't solve the underlying issue of softer soles. So we're going back to the basics before we complicate things and plus, I don't mind using hoofboots since they actually fit Quest pretty decently.

That aside, mareface is doing excellent and we celebrated our 5th gotcha day earlier last week! I can't believe its already been five years together. Things have panned out much more differently than how I originally had hoped but such is a life that naturally takes interesting turns and twists.

Everything is (hopefully) baby steps in the forward direction though. Right now, I'm slowly gathering supplies for the trailer and making a checklist to prep us for our first haul out to some training trails. I've also picked out some parks that allow horse camping to eventually expose Quest to overnighting in a low stress environment. It might take us 5x as long and we may have to work 20x harder but we'll get on the endurance trails one day. As along as we keep stubborn and stay positive, we will get there.

By the way if folks are curious to what our trails look like, Gonehikin recently did an excellent trail write-up on our neck of the woods. It gives a great overview of the type of terrain that Quest and I get to slog over during our normal trail rides. You might recognize some familiar scenery too!