43 – 2012-2013 Season Gets Underway
With the Counties club in recession we were definitely missing their early season rides in the Waiuku forest. Waikato doesn’t really have any all-weather tracks, Tokoroa forest was always our first ride but even that was too wet for August. Thus our season did not get underway until September at Whakamaru.
Lace had been in work for quite a while… but if you look at the graph where the y-axis is kilometres (training and competition rides combined) and the x-axis is weeks, you will see it took a while to build up with the first two weeks being just getting on her really. Data obsessed remember. You can see the first Whakamaru 80km is the red bar that nearly reaches the 100km per week at about 12 weeks in. The y-axis goes up to 200 as you need that when you do a 160!… and I like to keep the axes the same on all the graphs for comparison purposes… yeah a touch obsessive.
During the initial training I had the chiropractor out as she seemed to be a bit sore in the right shoulder. She wasn’t happy doing her stretches on that leg and would resist when I brought her leg forwards and across. She checked out ok though and so onward to our first 80 of the season.
Kerry was riding Tigger and wanted to get him going a bit faster this season but also wanted to him to settle and not pull like an idiot. So Emma and I dutifully let her go off ahead and had a lovely time riding together. That worked OK for a while, but Lace started getting a bit antsy when the 40km horses came charging past at one point and Tigger was pulling anyway. The Whakamaru course was a bit like that, it was mainly along the road verge, then about 7km into the forest at which point you turned around and went back the same way. So either your horse got used to there being lots of horses going both directions at all times and didn’t care, or they could get a bit wound up about it, first ride of the season I guess it wasn’t surprising that they were a bit excitable. So Kerry said we could go ahead and Lace and I set off after the horse in the lead.
She felt fantastic and was up for it so we cantered for a while and soon caught them up – Lace really is something when she’s in pursuit mode! They tried staying with us for a little bit, but soon we were on our own, first home and really enjoyed ourselves.
Vetted through no problems. Then as we were understaffed in the caravan I got caught up in there pretty much straight away and had to rely on others to look after Lace. Tigger had been second and Kerry was there, so it was OK really.
Later that week I was having lunch with my sister as we do every Wednesday, and was telling her about the ride and ending up in the caravan. “But I love entering data!” So we arranged that I would show her my Excel Spreadsheet for doing race timing and stuff and she would plan to come to the next ride – also at Whakamaru and only two weeks after the first one.
I think that the horses went down in the truck the day before that next ride and that Mary and I drove down super early in the morning, I can’t remember why though. But I clearly remember introducing Mary to Lois, “This is my sister, Mary, she’s good at data and does stuff faster than I do!” That day marked the beginning of the truly wonderful situation of having a totally competent person in the caravan who enjoys it and DOESN’T WANT TO BE ON A HORSE!!!! And is also devoted to ensuring I got to spend time with my pony rather than worrying about the results.
Lace and I won that ride too. Tigger and Kerry 3rd. In both the Whakamaru rides she felt a little scratchy for the first few kilometres but then warmed up and felt absolutely great.
Lace had now done 4975 qualified kilometres! All going well the next ride would bring up the 5000…
