My first 50s were ridden in the 2012 AERC season on my then 16 year old Arabian mare, GE Blazun Haatdesire. The full write ups are linked below and please do read them if you have the time and inclination!

Cuyama XP: 50s Days 1 & 3—completion

Whiskeytown Chaser 50—the dream ride: completion and unintentional top 10 

Cache Creek Ridge Ride 50—completion

Hat Creek Hustle Day 1 50—completion

Hat Creek Hustle Day 2 50—lameness pull

Trinity River Challenge 50—completion

I had someone ask for a few salient points on riding a competitive/hot horse, so here’s what I learned on Desire, who top 10’d her first 2 50s before I owned her and then had to learn to Slow Down:

1) BE FIT: Bottom line, a hot horse is a lot of work to ride. Whether they just want to go mach 10 speeds or they also throw in fantastical spooks to ride out along the way, you need to be physically able to be WITH IT for 50 miles. Hopefully your horse will settle down in the first 5 or 10 miles, but if he/she doesn’t, are you prepared to ride, really RIDE, for 50 miles?

2) BE REALISTIC: For the sake of you and your horse’s sanity, don’t try to make a Turtle Horse a Top 10 or a Top 10/mid packer a Turtle Horse. Deny the horse’s basic nature at your own peril. No, I was not interested in our average speed being 16 mph as Desire intended, but neither did I expect or try to make her go the 6 mph average my Rushcreek naturally does.

This is our *Day 2* Hat Creek Hustle 50 ride photo, after completing the Day 1 50 in 8 hours. She came up lame/foot sore after this pic at 40 miles on day 2 and was still jigging lame, le sigh. GOGOGO!

3)Choose your Trail buddies Wisely: Even though your best friend lives next door and rides endurance too, her fire breathing dragon may not be the right trail buddy for your feisty partner. Your time spent alone dictating pace is very important in your relationship with your horse, but you can throw all your good work straight out the window if you pair up with a horse of equal or higher drive. Find a horse to ride with that rates well with yours, neither pulling you back nor driving your horse to higher levels of excitement. If you can’t find that partner on a ride, don’t be afraid to pull off, dismount if necessary, and find yourself a quiet niche in the traffic. Your brain might tell you safety in numbers but that often isn’t the case with a hot horse. No really. My mare pulled my arms out of my sockets for 2 50s straight at Cuyama XP 2012 because I was riding with a great friend on an ass kicking stallion. It was a rush but um, not very conducive to horse brain development!

4)The Manners Box: If your horse is forward and competitive and you’re wondering how to deal with it, there’s a good chance that when you hand walk them they try to drag you down the trail often too. Desire sure did. To keep her at, let alone even close to behind-ish my shoulder, I helicoptered my reins in front of her nose for miles and miles, sometimes it took just 5 times and other it felt like 500. Bottom line that’s the type of horse she was and I had to keep my shit together and deal with it, or get really really frustrated. She got better with each 50 ridden, while still having special throwback moments on each occasion. Be sure to practice and maintain the Manners Box all the time, whether coming in the from the pasture, wandering around vet camp, etc. It takes time and miles, and more miles, and more time. And has to be adapted for each horse–for example I also have a gelding that will drag at the end of his reins and that is no more acceptable. I ground drive him to wake him up and for him the Manners Box is actually with me at his shoulder, to keep him moving. That is what works for him. Figure out what works for you and your horse and stick to it!

5)  Never Let your Guard Down: This goes hand in hand with the first point, actually. In Desire’s case, she was not only physically fit and well aware of it, she’s smart as  a whip and will take advantage of any weakness, from sensing my inattention in the reins and taking off/spooking, to using that one time I let her walk a little ahead of me to the vet check against me. Without fail, if I let her out of her Manners Box when hand walking her, she was an impossible shit for a good while after. Maintaining boundaries and attentive authority with Desire was always important, she was simply not a passenger horse.

6) LSD miles: Though Desire top 10’d those 50s  before I owned her, and snapped back into shape quite impressively after foaling, I rode my conditioning miles at a pretty conservative pace. Though she was fit and fast and forward, we didn’t do much zooming around the trails at home. Trotting yes, having fun, yes,  but not a lot of high speed or high mileage-at-a-time stuff.  We ended up with 700 trail miles to our 305 competition miles. She already had it in her tank to go fast and long but what she needed to figure out was quieting down and taking those walks on the trail, being a little more leisurely about things.

No matter how you slice it, a Pull on your AERC record can reflect hours, days, if not weeks and years of torment. From the tiniest bad step walked off the next day to the most tragic of consequences, a Pull means something went wrong with your horse partner, and I can’t speak for everyone but I will say that *that* is my personal worst nightmare as an endurance rider and something that doesn’t leave me.

Of the two pulls, Metabolic or Lameness, Metabolic screams to me as worse. Many many riders have lameness pulls on their records and seem to accept it as an unfortunate side affect–as one ride vet said, “If you haven’t been pulled yet you haven’t been riding long enough.” That’s not to suggest a cavalier attitude about lameness in the least, merely that with that so many miles ridden, horses are at a much higher risk for lameness, period.  We can all dream of perfect ride records and horses lasting thousands of miles virtually unassisted but for our hay delivery/back-sitting-on skills, but it’s not the reality for the vast majority.

Which brings me to the big, ugly ‘M’ on my ride record:

http://aerconline.org/erol/Individual/rhReport.asp?aeMbrID=31609&Rider=Grohman,+Aurora

Yep, not only do I have a Metabolic pull–it was on an L.D.!!  Shocking, right? Embarrassing? Kinda. Ready to dismiss me as a complete idiot? Find the x in the upper right corner if you must.

I can boil down the entire story to 3 simple words: I. Fucked. Up. Here, let me hit you with 7 more: Let That Be a Lesson To You. May someone read this and avoid my mistakes–which is the entire reason this blog exists really.
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So HOW did an otherwise intelligent, informed, well meaning experienced horse owner who had already finished 3 LDs, top 10’ing 2 of them, end up with a Metabolic pull on an LD? Noo really, how! 

*I rode my horse like he was the horse I used to ride*

I hope that resonates as profoundly with you reading it as it does in my brain. Because really, that experience cemented that forever, epically, in my head. I certainly wish I’d just been smart enough to know better, or finished the ride with a happy, if tired, horse. That simply didn’t happen and fortunately Blaze was just fine, so I will hold on to and share this lesson from now til eternity.

My first two horses were forward, feisty mares, well suited for a wild teenager who liked to “condition” by cantering around the woods for hours like a lunatic. I rode long and fast and that’s how I rode and finished the LDs. Fair enough, the mares finished in fine fettle and asked for more; one was Appendix and the other Welsh Pony/QH and they would have both done just fine at 50s. I didn’t get that opportunity to bump up distances with either of them, unfortunately, and some years passed before I got to attend an endurance ride again.

In 2009 I attended the Lake Oroville Vista endurance ride in my new home town, with my new gelding, Blaze. We’d been riding alone in the foothills all summer and I figured he was pretty well physically ready to finish an LD at the pace we’d been riding at home. Yes, as you experienced endurance riders probably caught, the last part of the previous sentence was the fateful one: “physically ready to finish an LD at the pace we’d been riding at home.”   Since this was Blaze’s first LD, he had no plans of riding the controlled pace we’d been riding at home, and also notice how I didn’t specify that he was *mentally* ready. Riding alone at home does not an endurance horse make! There is so much going on from the dynamics of camping in a charged atmosphere, to the vet exams (is your horse comfortable being handled all over by men and women, some more polite than others, really?), to the herd dynamics on the trail where the horse must leave others and be left.

I started the ride as if I were on my fast, fearless mares. They said controlled start and be there on time, so I was. Up front and ready to go. To this day I’ve never seen a ride start so fast, as riders literally cantered and hand galloped out of the start. Oroville has some rocky bits and I was floored at the rate of speed we were riding. Oh yes, we were riding that fast too, because Blaze was in the middle of the hot shoes and losing his mind. He and I fought for anything less than a literal gallop for the first ten miles. Nope, not exaggerating, I know the trails well and have GPS’ed them to death, that charming little 14 hand bugger fought me like a 20 hand monster for 10 solid miles.*

No pro ride photo but Josh waited along the trail and got this of us giving our # …  niiice ugly neck and hollow back Blaze, sigh, haha!

 I was completely and utterly exhausted at mile 11 but we zoomed into the 15 mile vet check and passed with flying colors, getting 2 thumbs up from the vet who was seeing a lot of tired horses already. We headed out of the check on time behind the mare I’d finally managed to tuck behind (after asking if the guy minded) but the last few miles to the finish had us climbing the Oroville dam *again* on the steeper side, and Blaze just ran out of steam. We’d both given it everything we had to stay alive in our respective ways the first 10 miles, and knowing what I know now of managing Blaze through an LD, we didn’t have a prayer of finishing. Eating and drinking weren’t even near on the list in those first 10 miles, when he needed it. Thank goodness he drank and ate at that 25 mile vet check but his pulse hung in the 60s and that was that. I was crushed that I’d overridden my horse and had that torturous trailer ride back to camp when we were only 5 miles from the Finish. We stayed the night and Blaze was just fine so we headed home early in the a.m. and I never, ever, forgot it.

It was absolutely my error in taking a horse that was mentally unprepared, and starting him in the insanity of the front of the pack. I’ve since brought a couple of horses along through the process and am sure to pay attention to where they are mentally as well as physically, and practice group riding and whatever scenarios I can at home–and I always do my best to leave ride camp for the Start dead last. Be sure to fit your riding and training strategies to each individual equine, but “slow” and “cautious” are good general headings to fall under!

*at that point I hadn’t yet ridden my Haat Shaat  mare who would fight me for 50 solid miles! 😉  

 

Hope to see lots of you on the AERC trails in 2014!  Dream big, whether that’s 30 miles or 100,  and be proud of everything you and your equine achieve. After all, only you and your horse truly know how far you have come.

M agreed the FB seemed like a good fit but once again I had matching dry spots behind his withers after the ride. He rode really well in it and Mel said it looked level while I was riding. His back wasn’t sensitive/sore in the least. But..the dry spots.

M was kind enough to “unredneckify me” as Funder would say, on the whole posting diagonals thing. Yeah I *knew* what they were, more or less, and the notion that you should post on both for even muscling and happy sound horsey longevity made sense. Did I ever actually pay attention to what diagonal I was on, ever? Nope. So when it came to trying to figure it out, it helped to have someone to not only explain everything, but demonstrate in front of me as well.

It took me a while to figure out what diagonal I was on. Turns out I favor the right. All the time. And so does Scrappy. Once I figured that out, and did the 2 beat stand to switch diagonals, BOOM, all of a sudden I was posting this crazy Booty Shakin odd gait! The difference between posting the right and left diagonal was HUGE. It was hard to stay posting on that left diagonal at first. Scrappy did all he could to throw me back to the right, and my body wanted me to also.

 hiking back down

Still figuring out the Frank Baines fit or lack thereof. Promising? I LOVE riding in it and Scrappy moves wonderfully in it. Used a different saddle pad and got different sweat marks but it was a way hillier ride..le sigh..am having a certain kindly knowledgeable Boots n Saddles person take a gander at saddle fit tomorrow on a birthday lake ride for her!! Hooray for 2014 (so far)!