April 1

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Friday, April 01, 2005

 

Fri afternoon, 5:25

Hateya ran on monday. This is the horse I was so excited about last start. He didn't run too badly, finishing third, beat a muzzle length for second place. Today was his first day back to the racetrack. He was good until I pulled him up:

Bear in mind that I have taken this particular stable not alone, but nonetheless, as a part of my identity, as something that must be cared for with absolute commitment.

I have "watched" this horse everyt time I've been on him. He is one of those horses that you can never let your guard down with. Nontheless he managed to drop me, and the bad part of it is that I was prepared; there simply wasn't anything I could do to keep myself in the saddle, at least not that time. I HOPE not that time. I hope the next time I have a way to foil him, because although I have managed to foil him out of everything else, I don't know if anything new will work for this.

Had I not been so firmly cranked into my irons he would not have flipped me over so cleanly (I remember seeing his head, and then the blue sky.) The fact was he could have planted me, in Christopher Reeve fashion, like a pole into the ground. As it turned out, the dirt mark on the front of my helmet shows what part of me actually hit first; then there was one small patch on my butt. In othere words, he might possibly have broken my neck.

I get up, RUN a quarter of a mile up the track to the horse, tell the Ambulance crew I'm fine, get back on Pal and take him home. If he were mine, I'd have galloped him back down to the 7/8 pole about three times to make sure he pulled up properly but he's not mine and I know Hardhead will be worried about his well- being, even though it doesn't look like he got a scratch. And here's the best part of the whole story:

 Hardhead says.... "That's how he got hurt LAST time!"

 

   not....."are you O.K.?"

 

I love Hardhead but that was a bit hard to take. It's bad enough when a horse 'beats' you and you wish you could take those minutes back and try it over differently, bad enough that you don't understand why the horse treats you so cruelly and remorselessly, that you are not sure how you are going to prevent the same in the future or that you won't get seriously invured trying to.

But that nobody gives a crap is the icing on the cake......