Diva's Done Sitting Around

Remember Diva?

After the makeover, I started her under saddle, then spent 14 days training with the idea of making her and Sunny into a liberty team, but they don’t really get along and enjoy working together so I switched tracks.

I let her grow, put some more training on her, and shes matured considerably over the last several years.

She started out this year strong, celebrating her 1 year anniversary of being a lesson horse, a job she loved doing. She flourished under the job of carrying a handful of riders that came back week after week and helped to give them a safe ride, while teaching them the value of riding correctly with perseverance, as she didn’t just hand anyone things on a silver platter. Diva makes you prove your worth as a partner, while doing her part to provide a safe and fun ride. She did this well and was much happier as a lesson horse than as a performance horse expected to compete and continually up her game.

Diva trained hard this spring to take her first rider to a horse show, and they did so well together, pulling placings in HUGE classes and winning lots of ribbons. Afterwards we set our sights on the year end High Point award and hoped to achieve that with improved performance and further participation.

Then, a week before the show, at the beginning of August, while participating in a clinic, Diva’s hind end locked up, and when asked to move forward she couldn’t pick up the left lead lope, and completely locked up. A massage therapist, chiropractor, two vets and lots of bills later, ultrasound imagery showed that she had pulled a huge area of muscle where several intertwine on her hindquarters leaving her very sore and very tight. We don’t know if it was the training or a pasture incident (but we can confirm it was not the couch haha, we actually threw that away in 2019!)

We gave her two months off, but that still left her tight and sore. We extended her time off, and I finally brought her back to work around the beginning of January.

I decided to pop on her myself, and I was pleasantly surprised at how responsive and amazing she was for a horse with almost 5 months off, so I decided to use her in my application video for the Retired Racehorse Project! A couple of weeks later and she happy to finally be back to her job as a lesson horse!!