Healing?

I have never been tougher than those around me. I have never even had a particularly high tolerance for pain. I do have, and I work very hard to maintain, an incredibly powerful immune system. It is rare for me to be laid out with an illness to the degree that I am too sick to feed up and check on the horses for more than half a day. In fact, this only happens a few times in a decade. I do not even get the flu anymore. I used to enjoy my flu. It always gave me the opportunity to take a vacation with out having to go anywhere. I could just lay in bed for a day or two, read and watch the history channel. But it seems that now I have lost my ability to take a trip and never even leave the farm.

But the mind has no immune system. Cuts and scratches never heal. They just fester. They cannot be cured, but they can be treated. The only effective treatment that I have found is to mount up and ride at a comfortable pace, deep into the woods until I am too exhausted to even put my tack up when I get back to the tack shed.

It is time now to try to ride 100 miles in a day again. My previous efforts have been tremendous failures. I have never made it more than 69 miles. Perhaps this holiday weekend will make it possible. It has been a long time since I have accomplished anything that I could look back on with pride and knocking off 100 miles in a day would be a nice feat for someone my age...or any age.

(Here is a nice shot of the Black Drink and his mother Baton Rouge.)