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Let's Talk About Rest

This is NOT an article about WHY or HOW to rest your horse. There is a surprising amount of quality information out there on the internet already. This is about what rest and recovery looked like for me in 2025.


Montana is a place that forces rest and seasonal renewal. August has traditionally been my month of rest mid show season. The standard Montana August includes discouraging temperatures and stifling wildfire smoke all of which are incredibly demotivating and even unsafe. Mercifully, we're having a great year, but it can change with one bolt of lightning from the daily thunderstorms! (knocking aggressively on the nearest wood-ish furniture). I try to maintain a baseline level of fitness with my riding herd throughout the year, but sometimes the snow is too deep and the parking lots are too icy to ride safely. So, recovery is a way of life, but this year has been different.


2025 has been a pause year for many of my equestrian pursuits. I’ve taken a 7 month hiatus from OCEN’s weekly blog writing, and I miss it. I’ve taken a year off from showing competitively, and yes, I miss it. But that’s the point, no? To reenergize and reflect. To heal mentally and physically. To prevent injury and find your passion again. For me, it was about filling training holes and an opportunity to prioritize other things. My pudelpointer and I trained like mad for the NAVHDA Utility test and passed with a qualifying score for next year’s Invitational. I passed the Montana falconry exam and worked on building the housing for a Red Tail Hawk that I’ll trap this fall. I started a new job and have been building new programing for Missoula County. All of these things have brought me more community, more knowledge, and a lot of contentment. I suppose we can call that growth.



I haven’t NOT been riding. On the contrary, I’ve been riding a lot, but with a different focus. I think that the new non-competitive training plan is working, but I need a test. I have decided to sign up for a proper horse show at the end of the year, but I’m just going to use it as a gauge to see where I’m at. What’s improved and what needs more work. Am I nervous?…yea you bet. I took my mare to a dressage show, DID NOT COMPETE, and just riding next to the dressage ring gave us both the flutters. What’s interesting is that I’m not sure that one year is enough time to recover and change our behavior. Maybe my mare needs another year without showing. Maybe we’ll never return to the upper levels of three day eventing. I don’t like typing that, but I’ve accepted that it’s a possibility. 


I'm also going to start writing again. These blog posts have been such a great way for me to continue learning, think deeper, and express all my confusing horse-life emotions. Stay tuned on some exciting new topics.


The equestrian is not known for resting. Quite the contrary, we are known for constant chore lists, long hours, and dramatic burnouts. Perhaps we need to bring this topic forward in our communities internationally and locally like it has in other areas of extreme athletics. We don’t have wearables for horses to track sleep patterns, heart rate variability over every day, nor can we ask them how their muscles feel. All we can do is stay intuitive. Feel and guess and read and guess some more. Not just about our horses, but for ourselves as well. I'm feeling peaceful in my current pursuits. Peaceful bordering on boredom which is a crazy thing to say outloud, but I'm considering small bouts of boredom as a win!



REFERENCES

Federico M. Boffi, A. Lindner, R.A. Lopez, V. Botta, S. Sadaba, M. Muriel. 2011. Effect of Recovery Periods during Conditioning of Horses on Fitness Parameters. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science, Volume 31, Issue 11:661-666. ISSN 0737-0806. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jevs.2011.05.005.




 
 
 
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