This isn’t about the horses, its about me. It suddenly dawned on me today that when lifting the mower pole to hitch to the neck yokes, there would be much less weight if the mower lift pawl was not holding the inner shoe in the “up” position. I leave the shoe “up” with a board under the tongue to raise it (the tongue) when I park so that the inner shoe is not siting on the ground. If you leave it like that when you are hitching the pole is a lot heavier than if you drop the shoe onto the ground first.
This is pretty basic but it had escaped me until just now. Alternatively you could, as Donn has pointed out, use a tongue truck.
Mark