Cob Jockey

This blog is about to get a whole lot more interesting than a once a week lesson report!

Thanks to generous offers from both Lisa and my trainer, and a healthy dose of stall cleaning, I can afford to keep
Contender at the barn, and continue to train with my trainer once a week.  On Contender.  It's really hard to keep my excitement level in check enough to continue typing out this post.  I went from thinking that I might keep him at a random (but nice) hole-in-the-wall until the "appointed pony time" (when my car is paid off), to thinking I wasn't going to get him at all, to having him at the barn with my trainer.  I had actually just told Lisa to relist him on her sales page yesterday when my trainer texted me with her offer.  Talk about timing!

Now comes the balancing act of working 8-5, having a pony that's 35 minutes away, being a Crossfitting gym rat, and still letting Nick be top priority in my life.  I am worried about never seeing him with Contender being so far away, so I've been tossing around a 4-day a week schedule at the barn.  Is it ideal?  No.  Will it work?  It has to, in the face of high gas prices and limited free time.

The other problem is that starting in January, I'll only be able to make it to the barn three out of four weeks.  For my job (Systems Administrator in Information Technology), I'll be on-call one week out of four.  During that week, I can't drink any alcohol, and I can't leave my county.  That is extremely unfortunate, but there's no way around that.

That white flaxen mane and tail...it gets me every time.

As far as the actual horse himself goes, I have so many questions that I can't wait to know the answers to.  Will he like jumping?  Will he be good at it?  Does that athleticism I see translate over fences?  Does he have the mental toughness for Dressage work?  He's such a little fighter with a desire to go forward and be going on to the next thing, and it'll be interesting to see if I can translate that impatience into a good Dressage ride.  He's certainly got the movement.

Then there's the question of build.  He's only 5, and in the Cob world, that's not yet a mature horse.  He's probably not going to get any taller (13.3 and 3/4", can you believe that?!  I'd have said at least 14.0-14.1 til we sticked him!) but he will certainly fill out into a more mature-looking Cob frame sometime in the next year.  Unlike Smokey, though, he's not unbalanced under saddle with his immaturity.  This horse has had some fantastic training.

Looks like I'll be taking delivery on November 11th!  Can't wait!