The other posters didn’t answer your question about
riding a LD on your 4 year old. While much has been published on ridecamp
about not starting a horse too young I see no problem with riding a slow LD on
a 4 year old. I don’t remember if you stated what breed your horse
was, but I have ridden just about all of my horses in at least 1 LD as 4 year
olds. My Arabian gelding is 15 this year, has over 4500 miles of
endurance and did 1 LD 25 mile ride as a 4 year old and is still going down the
endurance trail. My new horse did a 35 mile ride a month before she
turned 5 this year and I’m sure she will have many years of endurance
riding ahead of her. In both cases we started after the pack and rode a
slow paced ride, which IMO is the key to starting any age horse in endurance.
You certainly don’t need any special equipment to ride
endurance. I started with a lightweight western saddle and wore some old
nylon English riding breeches since I had heard that jeans would rub your legs
raw. I tied my horse to my 2 horse trailer and slept in the back of my
pickup. As other posters have written, all the pretty biothane tack and
hi tech saddles are the bells and whistles that you don’t need to start
endurance or CTR. I tell people who ask me about endurance riding to ride
what they have, using existing tack and clothing. My first endurance
horse went from the hunter circuit to the endurance trail when I got tired of
showing. He was fine for 200+ miles of endurance but wasn’t built
for the terrain of California
rides so I got a half Arabian and rode her for 5 years, retiring her at 17
after 2,000 miles. She is still in my pasture 15 years later. It is
probably good that endurance.net wasn’t around in the early 1980’s
because after reading many of the posts I would have been scared to go to my
first ride, just like you are. Instead I went to a ride and soaked up as
much as I could in 6 hours of time allotted for the 25 mile ride and never
looked back. Sure I have made lots of mistakes but I would have missed
the opportunities to learn from my mistakes if I hadn’t bitten the bullet
and gone to my first ride. Remember the Nike slogan of “Just do it”?
Just be sure to have fun. I try to go to 1 endurance ride per month from
January to October and some of those may be multi day rides of 2 to 5 days.
