Our road to 50 mile endurance rides

The road to a 50-mile completion was a long one, that is for sure! I had not ridden horses in over 15 years when I got Marco, and the first year was all about us learning from each other and fixing some issues.  Once we did that, it was time to start having fun out on the trail and getting some miles in for a spell. I decided I wanted to get into endurance, as that was what I had started getting into back in the other life when I was still riding. It seemed like it would be fun, and what I wanted was lots of time in the saddle and an excuse to ride out on the trails. I have never been one for the show ring, too rigid and just not fun. I thought I would start the slower route and do a few Competitive Trail rides first, and we did so successfully. The rules outside of the trail were a bit too rigorous for my taste though (do we see a theme here?), I was really not fond of people judging my campsite, so we packed up next time and went to an LD ride with friends and hoped for the best. An LD ride is Limited Distance, it is kind of an introduction to endurance without killing you or your pony. It gives you a taste of endurance without the commitment ;). Most healthy horses can do an LD ride as long as you don’t go too fast, and you have six hours to do 25 miles, or 7 hours and 15 minutes to complete a 30 mile LD ride. Well, the first ride was a bit of a disaster. There were monsoonal rains, muddy climbs and ascents that at one point required Marco to hunker down and slide downhill for about 100 yards, and broken tack was had by all! This was the Race the Trace 30 mile ride in 2009, and we were incredibly proud to finish, much less in 11^th place! We were hooked, although that seems silly that we had an incredibly rough time and loved it. We did four more LD rides that year, getting lost in half of them, and completed all but one. Longstreet’s Charge eluded me twice before I decide to just volunteer at that ride every year instead of riding it ;). I was still trying to get some weight on Marco so that winter I put everything I could think of into his belly to gain weight… and not one ounce did he gain.  

In 2010, we decided to stay in the LD rides as I was not comfortable going up to 50’s without getting some more pounds on him, and some more training! We came out of a couple of rides with blisters on my hands and both of us a bit miffed, but did get a 3^rd place at the 30 mile Arabian Horse Association Championship at Big South Fork (which had to be a bit rude since Marco is a Paso Fino). The top ten was in no way my idea by the way, but I just had to stop holding him back as I was having visions of skin grafts in my future. I figured either he would get some self-preservation, or we would keep it up until he was fit enough to be a butthead for 50 miles. He decided on option #2. 

I finally decided to try him in a 50 in 2011, but between finishing graduate school and other obligations, I really had not been able to ride much since December. The March Red Barn Run was a disaster! Not riding Marco very much is like not giving a border collie a job… or any exercise. He fought me, I fought back, he wanted to rear, buck, and bolt, and I wanted him to calm down.  Neither of us got our way and he was pulled. The sport of endurance is very much focused on the health and welfare of the horse (and NOT the rider). You have vet checks throughout the ride to be sure the horse is “fit to continue”… The rider can drop dead on the spot, they would just move you out of the way. By the end of many rides someone besides the rider has to trot the horse out for the vet as the rider cannot walk, much less jog. When you are pulled, like we were in this ride, your horse is considered not fit to continue… and neither of us were fit to go on. I looked much like a zombie with hunks of missing skin, twigs in my hair, ripped riding pants, a hole in my shirt, and blisters on my feet. Marco was exhausted from trying to beat every horse in the race, as he did not realize it was 50 rather than 25/30 miles. I tried to explain this to him on that last lap of 14 miles. He was so exhausted that I had gotten off and walked with him the entire 14 miles, so we had a very long heart to heart discussion about the fact that I have the big brain and know what we are in for, and he has the smaller brain that does not know how far we are going. This discussion lasted the several hours it took for us to walk back to camp. 

After this failure, I became paranoid that there was something horribly wrong with him; he was always sweating like crazy, would not put that last bit of weight on, and he constantly panted with only the slightest bit of exercise. I bugged the vets at rides to look at him over and over again, had blood work done on several occasions when he was worked heavily on training rides, and even had UT take a look at everything; No ulcers, no calcium imbalance, no nothing. Turns out, he is simply a heavy sweater, and he pants. All his blood work came out completely normal and the vets said he seemed fine to them, thin yes, but perfectly fine. So I eventually stopped being paranoid, finished the season with some more LD rides (getting lost in half of them) with the idea that I was just going to get him really well conditioned, get the weight on him, and would try a 50 next season.

We had an incredibly mild winter here in N. Georgia in 2011/12, mixed with my good fortune of getting a great job that gave me plenty of ride time. We went all over the place and Marco got into his best condition yet. He did put on 50lbs, although he actually looked thinner than ever to me. Turns out the more I ride him, the more we travel, the more he eats and puts on weight! Seemed counterintuitive, but hey, who am I to argue? So I decided he was actually fit enough to be a butthead for 50 miles and put him in the Red Barn Run 50 this year for his first ride of the season. It was AWESOME! We went faster than I would have liked, but I decided not to fight him and just let him go, this was after all, what the winter conditioning and training was all about! After about 15 miles or so at a pretty fast pace, I got a nice mannerly horse on a loose reign for the rest of the ride. He changed gaits between medium largo to a canter and he would switch his leads out all on his own. He would even slow down to a little corto when he got a little winded or tired. He was like a perfect pod pony (reference to outdated horror movie).I Couldn’t get a flat walk out of him until mile 47, but he was still chomping at the bit and ready to go when we finished middle of the pack! His heart rate was below the requirement of 64 (51 after the last loop) by the time I took the saddle off at all three vet checks and the finish.  I was so proud of him, he was happy, healthy (albeit still thin), and ready to book it another 50 miles. Most horses lose between 20 and 50lbs during a 50 mile endurance race, but according to the scales he actually gained 15lbs at the ride. My special pony just does not like to follow the rules! The weather was beautiful, the trails were so well marked even we could not go wrong, and the ride staff was incredible! We plan on doing as many 50 mile rides as we can for this season and next season, maybe after that… a 100 mile ride?