I was standing on a pasture of ice with a woman who had just brought out 11 horses for turn-out after having walked the same area and decided it was safe for the horses. I’d seen her walking the area without the horses before turn-out, though she didn’t know that.
“It’s too icy here to bring them back in at the end of turn-out, John! And it’s bad over in that chute and the ones in the other pastures. Can you salt and get them ready in two hours?” she asked.
I knew that I could, but as I stood shakily on the ice and knowing that horses, with steel on the bottom of their hooves, must have had difficulty coming out, asked the obvious.
“Why did you bring 11 of them out in the first place?”
“We didn’t know it was this slippery!”
Okay…lie instead of taking responsibility. I suppose that is one way, but it’s not the right way. I didn’t call her on the lie, but she had to know I was a little smarter than that even if I didn’t lead horses. I pointed out that a side gate to the pasture, which opened up onto grass that led back to the stalls, could be used safely and without the salt.
“Geez…we’ve never done that before. I don’t know…”
Just because it made sense, would prevent the possibility of a horse breaking a leg or injuring a handler was not reason enough to do it. I could see where it was going and laid down 500 pounds of salt over the next half hour and ran the tractor with the reveal, an attachment with steel teeth that would dig into and break up the ice, over the fields. Take responsibility when you screw up, but more importantly, think of solutions and listen to suggestions of people who might just have something to offer even if it is outside the box, to fix it. Oh well…
My sore hamstring muscle had been bothering me throughout the day. Not too severely, but enough to tell me ‘no running or riding’. I came home to an empty house as Holly had Dakota for the evening, so I elected to walk on the towpath into Peninsula. It was a sloppy trail. The ice and snow pack had melted leaving a soft, slippery coating of unstable crushed limestone as the top layer. I put on boots figuring the 4.5 mile walk would be a decent workout because of the conditions. I also figured Miggie would suggest meeting me in town on her way home from work and that would become my return trip. When she called as she was leaving work, I discovered otherwise.
“You’re walking into Peninsula? When do you think you’ll be home?” she asked.
“Well…another hour and a half if I walk back…in the rain,” I said.
“Okay then. I guess I’ll see you at home,” she said and hung up.
I arrived in the tiny hamlet and sat on a bench outside of my favorite restaurant, Fisher’s, for ten minutes enjoying the 60-degree temperature in the middle of January. Dark was setting in and the drizzle was intensifying, so I got to my feet and began the journey back in boots that were anything but waterproof.
The 9-mile hike was the longest since my last trip to the Adirondacks. It was easy except for the blister forming on the ball of my right foot and the dull ache in the buttocks/hamstring muscle I’d been feeling for two days. It was a poor choice for someone mending from a slight muscle pull, but I’d never let those kind of sensible details deter me in the past, so why start now? In reality, I should pay more attention to by body signals as I train for long distance backpacking because the aging process does nothing to reduce the chance of injury nor speed recovery. Can one get smarter as he gets older? Unlikely…
Hike: Two hours and 30 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 90 bpm.
Calories burned: 1150.
Bonus: 31,000 steps.
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