Spring Fever 101

You go to the barn one afternoon and notice your horse is starting to shed. The ground is no longer a sheet of pure ice, but is slowly starting to resemble a mud pit. The barn manager has pulled some of the water heaters out. You start to cautiously pack away your horse’s heavy weight and replace it with his medium or (gasp!) lightweight blanket. Could it be? Is it really that time of year again? Is winter finally winding down? YES! It is almost Spring.

As I write this I am sitting outside in a sundress soaking up the rays. No, Pennsylvania has not been hit by a sudden heat wave. I’m on vacation in sunny Florida for the week, enjoying seven days free of constant phone calls, cleaning stalls, and small scale barn floods. But all this warm weather has gotten me to thinking: what can we do, as horse owners and riders and barn managers, to make the transition from winter to spring a smooth one for both us and our horses?

1) Training & Conditioning. If you’re like me, you tend to slack off in the riding over the winter. It’s cold, the ground is frozen. Barn chores take twice as long to complete and by the time you’ve finished cleaning out one barn and taught four lessons, you don’t want to spend any more time in the freezing weather, even if it means finally having the chance to ride your own horse (plus Darwin is claustrophobic and Poppy covers the length of the indoor is four mammoth canter strides, which makes turning kind of hard). So it shouldn’t really be any big surprise that when the weather finally clears up you are itching to ride, but your horse isn’t because they are either a) so amped up from not being ridden for four months they just want to be FREEEEE or b) so lazy and undermuscled from not being ridden for four months they just want to sleep. Cue the training and conditioning.

Do not step into spring expecting your horse to be at the same fitness level they were in the Fall. When the weather finally clears and the outdoor footing resurfaces, lunging is going to be your best friend. Don’t even think about jumping or any of those fancy high level dressage moves until you have a good four weeks of lounging and long bouts of trotting under your belt. My conditioning program for Darwin this spring is going to look something like this:

Monday – Lounge walk/trot ten minutes each direction
Tuesday – Ride walk/trot for approx. half an hour
Wednesday – Free lounge at the trot for twenty minutes
Thursday – Hill work either in hand, undersaddle, or on the lunge
Friday – Lounge in the chambon
Saturday – Ride walk/trot for half an hour
Sunday – A well deserved day off (for both of us).


Each week the work will get progressively longer, until he can easily chug through an hour of work without breaking a sweat. Then we’ll get to the big stuff, like cantering and collection.

2) Tack Maintenance. Be honest. When was the last time you sat down, took your bridle apart, took your stirrup leathers off, got out the silver polish, and really cleaned your tack? If you’re like me it was, er, quite a while ago. Now is a great time to take the time to thoroughly go over all your tack with a fine toothed comb. Saddle, bridle, stirrup leathers, lunging equipment, martingales, girths, halters – don’t leave anything out. Pop your saddle pads in the washer. Scrub your brushes. Wipe down your tack trunk. Clean your boots. Start Spring off right with sparkling fresh equipment that will be the envy of every other rider in the barn.

3) A day at the spa. For the most part, bathes go by the wayside during the cold winter months and under his blankets and hairy fur, your horse is dirty. When you know you’re going to get a stretch of warm weather, get out the hose, your horse shampoo, and wash that horse. Scrub his mane, his tail, and his legs. When he dries off (or before) trim up that hairy moustache he’s been styling. If you’ve been letting it lax, pull the mane and bang the tail. By the time you’re done you won’t recognize the new, shiny horse that has been disguising himself as a wooly mammoth all winter.

4) A blanket saved is a… Once the spring weather really sets in, you’ll begin the long process of packing away the winter blankets and pulling out the anti-sweat sheets. But wait! Before you pack that dirty, smelly old blanket away in your tack there’s something you need to do first. Send it to a blanket cleaner. If you don’t know of anyone off the top of your head who cleans blankets, call up your local tack store. If they don’t do it themselves, they should know someone who does. You can add years to the life of your blankets by having them washed, rewaterproofed, and repaired every spring before you pack them away for the year and it is only a fraction of the cost of having to buy a new blanket (usually between $15 and $40 per blanket, depending on the weight and the repair). You’ll thank yourself come winter time when all you have to do is unwrap your blanket and put it on your horse, no cleaning or stitching required.

So that’s it! Four tips to springing into Spring. Here’s wishing warm weather on all of you from easy, breezy, beautiful Florida.