Re: RC: LD and BC (also Oakland comments)

[DESERTRYDR1@aol.com]

As a person who started endurance riding doing LD and with full intentions of 
not ever doing 50's on the horse I'm riding now, I have to comment on this 
subject.  I have 11 LD's under my belt in four seasons, all on the same 
horse.  I didn't have ridecamp until last winter, and the person who got me 
starteddoesn't have a great conditioning program.  I've had to learn most 
everything by myself, and from Ridecamp.  The first three seasons I rode the 
heck out of my mare, got her over conditioned, did rides too fast for her 
mental condition, made lots of mistakes.  But we were never pulled, so I 
thought everything was great.  We got several top tens; after the last one 
she peed brown.  WAKE UP CALL.  I swore I'd never endurance ride her again!  
She just couldn't handle it.  The truth was pointed out to me by people on 
Ridecamp--I overrode my horse for her level of (mental) conditioning.  

So, getting to the point, I agree that LD should not be a race.  Newbies need 
to learn how to take pace their horse and take care of it.  For some of us 
this is a long slow process, due to getting caught up in the race/top ten 
aspect.  On the other hand, I like standing for BC, if only to have a more 
thorough record of our progress.  It's also unlikely that people who do five 
or six hour LD's are going to stress their horses too much, so if every horse 
that finished was included, the late finishers might have an advantage, which 
is not in keeping with the spirit of BC either.  It seems like taking the top 
ten is the best idea.  Best Condition award represents not only how good a 
condition the horse is in at the end, but also how good its condition was 
going in, that being the factor that enabled it to compete at a faster pace 
than other horses in the ride.

As far as Dave and Dancer, my only comment is that I never realized how hard 
I pushed my horse until it was pointed out to me on Ridecamp.  People have 
different training/conditioning methods, and different discipline methods.  
Some horses will take more discipline/punishment than others.  There are 
still a lot of "old cowboy" type horse breakers out there, and they don't 
view what they do as abuse, but a