Swimming the Winter Away

It has certainly been awhile. I was a little surprised last week when I got my sitemeter results and found that despite the fact no new material has been posted here in over 2 months, 20 people still found their way to the blog home of In Over My Head. When I saw that, I thought it was time for a new update. It isn’t great (or even good), but it is what it is.

- Last post I referenced a possible flare up of his suspensory injury. Unfortunately, that did materialize and we had to pull him from the Florida training facility and send him back to Illinois for more treatment.

- The new treatment went well from what we were told and after some additional stall rest, he was been moved to a new facility for the next phase in his recovery.

- That phase is…swimming! Yes, Mo is taking a more buoyant approach to training and has been swimming in a special pool (for horses) at the Leonards farm in Illinois (near Butenschoen’s).

- Once the weather stabilizes and the track at Butenschoen’s gets over the winter thaw, he’ll go back to jogging and training down.

- If he makes it thought that phase, we’ll figure out what is next. Based on the setbacks he has faced, we aren’t thinking that far down the road yet. Just taking it one step at a time.

At this point, we have really come to accept Mo’s fate. He hasn’t raced in over a year. He’s still months away and to be brutally honest, there is a very real possibility he will never race again. All we can be is hopeful. We never envisioned this bad of an injury would befall him in the first place. Right now, it is hard to envision a successful return to the track, but you never know. For now, he’ll just keep swimming. There are certainly worse ways to spend the winter.

Speaking of injury setbacks, Showtime Shark (aka Seeknee) is still nursing his broken coffin bone. We got a report a couple weeks ago that the healing is going well and there should not be any long term negative effects form the injury. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the soonest he could be back to the track is looking like September. Patience is a virtue.

So for now, we can focus on Laura and my wedding on May 7th in Key West, FL. We are getting married on Derby Day (kind of by accident). We may not be lucky with horses at the moment, but we are certainly lucky to have each other…and maybe someday we can once again be lucky with both!