2021 National Championships at Fort Howes

 It's enough to make a person question their life choices.

After pulling at 20 Mule Team with a stone bruise, and having addressed such with pads, and seeing no further sign of lameness in Demon since, I was fully confident we'd do well at National Championships and bring home a completion. It was not to be.

Two weeks before National Championships, I reshod Demon. The bruise in his hoof looked good, was well keratinized, and he was trotting sound even after a 10 mile ride. He got new shoes and pads before turned back out until we left for Montana.

The whole trip started out rocky. My elderly dog, Mac, suddenly took an extreme turn for the worse and clearly required euthanasia. The vet couldn't get out to perform the job until noon Thursday. I had planned to leave Thursday morning. Well, OK, guess I'm leaving in the afternoon. Shouldn't be a huge problem.

Mac, may he rest in peace

Once the vet left, I got loaded up and we were on the road a little before 2pm. This is when I realized that 6-8 hour delay in departure was a bigger deal than I'd thought. I had it in my head that the drive was 1200 miles. Nope. 1400. This meant my planned stops were right out the window. Add in having left so much later meaning more traffic (and there were some serious accidents on the road, too) and it took 10 hours to make 500 miles. 

Just to make things even more interesting, a little over 200 miles into the trip, another driver honked and waved at me, indicating there was an issue with the trailer. I pulled off and walked around the rig, discovering one of my brand new (less than 1500 miles) trailer tires had separated. Here I'd been thinking Demon was being particularly antsy in the trailer. It wasn't him. It was the tire. 

I'd stopped in a poor place for actually executing a tire change, so I limped us on down the road a couple of miles. I found a spot where, if necessary, I could unload Demon. 

I'm very glad I had stopped with my devil-may-care attitude about having a spare and all the appropriate tools. I had a tire iron, chocks, and the Trailer-Aide device, plus had carefully put the trailer's spare tire in the truck (the spare tire mount in the trailer itself was in a rather unfortunate location and I'd stopped using it long ago). 

Being appropriately armed, I proceeded to changing the tire. The first challenge was the lug nuts. The unfortunate side effect of getting new tires is having these young bucks who do not understand about galling nuts and bolts putting the lug nuts back on after mounting new tires. Some of them put the nuts in the impact driver, then put it on the bolt, significantly increasing the odds of galling. Which thus increases the difficulty of removing said lug nuts without a breaker bar or impact driver. One of my lugs was badly galled, and was not wanting to break. Normally, it's not a big thing other than the sweating and swearing. The problem I was having was that the rim was not resting firmly on the ground, depriving me of anything to brace against. I ended up putting a chock under one side, kicking it under there as hard as I could, and my toe under the other side, doing my best to limit the turn of the hub as I struggled to break the lug free. I did ultimately persevere, but as one person said when I told this story, "safety third!" The next challenge was getting the spare out of the truck, which involved climbing up on top of the hay, pulling it up onto the hay, getting off the truck, and pulling the tire down behind me. It was a ridiculous amount of work and took me a solid hour to accomplish. I will be purchasing a cordless impact wrench in the very near future, just so I don't have to worry about galled or over torqued lug nuts.

Flat ready for removal, at last!

When I did finally find a place to stop for the night, I couldn't take Demon off the trailer for more than a walk. There was no place to park where I could safely tie him to the trailer and not have vehicles come alongside. He's black enough I've had people nearly walk into him in the dark, and I'm not trusting drivers to do any better even with headlights. So after a walk around, he had to spend the night on the trailer. He was not happy about it. I had to keep the pass through door between the LQ and the horse box open so he could see me, and he still fidgeted an awful lot.

This left 900 miles to hammer out on Friday. I wanted all day Saturday for both of us to recover, and having had to spend the night on the trailer it seemed even more important to have that for Demon. Not to mention I didn't sleep especially well with an unhappy horse on the trailer with me. At least I was able to make this push at a faster clip and we arrived in camp about 10pm, and even still had enough light to manage leveling the trailer.

We both slept much better with a quiet and level spot.

Saturday was a quiet day, but I did a lot of walking back and forth. At one point, my left knee, which has been giving me trouble since the left hip was replaced in November, was so painful I almost couldn't walk at all. I managed by putting on a brace for the walking part.

Sunday was an early start. I got up at 3am and chucked a bunch of food and an electrolyte mash in front of Demon before laying down for a little longer. I walked down to check in and leave my wagon in the vet check area to lug my saddle back to the trailer during the vet hold. We had a good start, leaving well after the fastest riders. Demon felt really good. He drank or at least tasted the water at every opportunity. At the 9 mile trot by, he was drinking and eating, and judged sound. I clambered back on with the assistance of the mounting block ride management had brought out, which was a shorter one than I'd usually use, but got the job done.

We continued down the trail and Demon felt strong and good, wanting to chase other horses. I did my best to keep him from getting too obsessed about other horses. He has this thing, he wants to see all the other horses, either passing or being passed by, at least once. He'll slow down if horses he hasn't seen yet are coming up behind, but once they've passed him, he'll pass them and continue without a care in the world for them. It's a tough dynamic to manage at times.

The first loop was relatively flat with minimal (at least to my Southern California, done a lot of Duck rides mind) rock. So I allowed Demon to keep up a good clip, although I was still aiming for a 7.5mph average. We were sitting at 8mph, but it was early in the day so I wasn't concerned about it.

We were trotting along nicely and I noticed my left foot didn't feel quite right. Somehow it was stuffed all the way into the stirrup, well beyond where I'd normally want my foot. It took multiple strides before I was able to recenter it, only to have it push forward again. I was having one heck of a time keeping it back where it belongs. At the canter, I looked down and could see my leg flopping around from the knee down, and I couldn't do a damned thing to stop it. Standing resulted in the entire leg moving forward. 

It wasn't long after I'd realized I really had little control over that left leg that Demon bobbled just a bit. I slowed him to a walk for a bit before he gamely offered the trot again. He seemed sound, but just as at 20MT, something did not seem quite right. We varied walking and trotting back in to camp.

After coming in to the vet check, I pulled the saddle and checked his pulse at the knee. I can't hear well enough to use a stethoscope anymore, so I do it manually, although my fingertips are a little insensate so it's not perfect. All I can tell for sure most of the time is if he seems to be down enough to present to the vet. He was down enough to feel confident I could present him and we went to the vet line.

The vet took his pulse and sent us for our trot out. I spooled out the line to let Demon trot a little ahead so I could watch him. I wasn't sure, but I thought I saw a couple of bad steps. When we got back to the vet, he said nothing and continued the exam. I thought I must have been imagining things, since I've never had a vet not tell me immediately upon return if my horse was off. Once he finished the exam, he told the scribe Demon's CRI (60/68) and informed me is was off. Having now heard Demon's heart rate coming in was 60, I told the vet I was confident our day was done, as Demon has a very rapid recovery and has never come into a vet check with a heart rate over 52 unless something was wrong. The vet held our card and asked me to re-present him toward the end of our hold time.

We went to the trailer, where Demon drank well and then laid down for a nap. He wasn't able to lay out completely because of the hi-tie, so I dragged my chair over and put a leadrope on. We just hung out together while he napped. He rolled onto his side and went right into deep REM sleep for about 5 minutes. He had a good lay down for 15 minutes, then got up and drank some more and started casting about for food. I took him back to the vet, where it was determined he was still off and we were sent to the treatment vet.

Long story short, the treatment vet went over Demon quite carefully. I even removed his shoes, as with pads on it's next to impossible to use hoof testers. The treatment vet thought maybe something had gotten under the pad, a theory which was quickly disproven by the undisturbed presence of the hoof packing I'd used when I shod him. Nothing of note was found. The treatment vet even checked his temperature (100.2, on a really super hot day, too). 

So, after giving ourselves a couple of hours to rest, I decided to pack up and head for home. By the next day, when we got to Scipio, Utah, and I had a nice arena to turn him loose in, he was completely sound. 

There is little more frustrating than an intermittent lameness which resolves so quickly it's impossible to diagnose.

The game plan now is to have the chiropractor out (she's exceptional at detecting small issues in horses, and has helped us get appropriate treatment for multiple horses no vet had yet isolated an issue in). If she doesn't find anything of note, we'll start riding again after a 6 week total lay-up, with the goal of completing an LD before the end of the year. I'll be visiting my doctor to pursue what the heck is going on with my knee (I'm sure it'll need surgery, and I'm bitter about it). Depending on the chiropractor's findings, there's a significant possibility that Demon's lameness is him compensating for stupid things my left leg decides to do. 

Tevis, obviously, is out. One does not bring a horse with 2 consecutive lameness pulls to the starting line of Tevis. But, hope is a good thing. So, Tevis is on the calendar for next year. July 16, 2022.