Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

k s swigart wrote:
> I must confess to being thoroughly disappointed (actually disgusted is probably a better word) by the apparent attitude expressed here by endurance riders that failure to complete because the horse was pulled for being unfit to continue is not the responsibility of any of the decisions of the rider, but can be put entirely down to bad luck or being  told to go on because the chef d'equipe said so, or because to keep going are too intense, or because the rider and/or the horse have no experience with the conditions of the course.
>
> However, I give up.  Y'all are right. Nobody's endurance failures are a result of poor decisions or poor horsemanship and have nothing to do with anything the rider did.
>
> Of course, that means that nobody's successes are either.  Success is nothing but good luck.
...
> kat
> Orange County, Calif.

C'mon, now, Kat, you're just getting defensive, and a bit silly.  No one 
has said that all pulls are just due to bad luck.  Some of us have 
pointed out that SOME pulls are just due to bad luck, and not 
preventable by the rider other than by not riding endurance.

Believe me, I've had both kinds of pulls in my career.  Some were 100% 
my fault (my last 100, Ft. Howes, being an example of that), some were 
unpreventable mishaps (that Old Dominion I wrote about), and some were a 
combination of the two.

Do you know how the only visible scar that Kahlil suffered from an 
injury under saddle occurred?  I was riding in a search and rescue 
practice, at an easy trot down a gravel road, when Kahlil stumbled and 
fell to his knees.  He cut his knees, causing scars that he carried the 
rest of his life.  Was that a result of bad horsemanship?  We traveled 
many miles at greater speeds on such roads during endurance rides with 
never an injury.

As Truman pointed out in his response, the rider is always responsible 
for his horse.  That does not mean that a rider can protect his horse 
100% from the hazards of the trail, no matter how smart and carefully he 
rides.  All distance rides involve some level of risk just to ride them 
at all, including LD rides.  Some involve more than others.  IMO an 
automatic penalty (beyond not finishing) for a horse being not able to 
complete a ride would be arbitrary, capricious and counterproductive.

--
Joe Long
jlong@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


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