Re: [RC] Kids, ponies and distance riding - Karla Watson
Well you have a kid that could handle the 50s the
first time out. Thats very cool and quite amazing. Many kids I know around camp
start out with the 25s. They don't get as tired and are more willing to come
back and do it again.
Subject: Re: [RC] Kids, ponies and
distance riding
>>>>LDs are partly invented to give kids a
chance to do a ride without making them go thru a 50 miler the first time.
I don't know if that's so or not, but I will say that both times that
my daughter had problems it was at the beginning of the ride. The second half
of the fifty went smoothly both times. If she'd only done an LD she might have
assumed the next twenty five miles would have been worse which wasn't
necessarilly the case. I gave her the option of an LD but she flatly refused.
She'd been going to endurance rides since she was 18 months old. Crewing as
soon as she could hold a sponge or walk a horse. She'd done plenty of 25 mile
training rides and had been dying to do a 50 for as long as she could
remember. She saw no reason to do a 25 when her horse was an experienced
50-mile horse. Had she done her first ride on her Welsh Pony (which we never
did get trustworthy enought to compete) she would have done LD and been happy
to do it.
Fifty was hard. It took a few rides for us to find that she
had hydration problems which we had to deal with. It finally took me having
the same problem at a ride to understand what she was going through...try
doing endurance when you feel like you *really* need to go to the bathroom but
can't! The cure wasn't age, it was cranberry juice. :-)
