First 50/ Angie

[guest@endurance.net]

Angie McGhee Rides2far@juno.com
Your question was how long off between rides?  When I do a 50, I always
give the horse a week completely off afterwards.

In the past I used to go to about one ride per month and that worked well.
Then, in the last few years we started going to a ride about every two
weeks.  It made a difference, by the third ride a little lameness would
start cropping up.  The faster you go the more time I recommend in between
competitions.  Now I'm back to trying to space the competitions a little
farther apart.  If I want to do one every two weeks, I slow down.  It's
been my experience that you're a lot more likely to lame a horse with
rides (both training and conditioning) that pile up on each other without
time to rebuild in between than people are who pull a horse out of the
field, do a ride, then turn it back out.  Not fair, but seems to be the
way it goes.

By the way, when I'm starting a new 50 mile horse I try to ride every
other day.  A couple of shorter rides during the week and a long one on
Saturday.  Almost never ride 2 days straight.

Angie