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[RC] My recruitment - rides2far@xxxxxxxxI had read about endurance when I was a teen and was dying to do it, even wrote a paper on it in the 11th grade, but Tevis was the only thing I found any info on. Didn't even know there was a ride east of the Mississippi I don't guess. Got married, quit trying to show & such but did more trail riding than ever. When I was 26 (1986) and pregnant a trail riding acquaintance of mine called me and told me she had met some real live endurance riders and they were going to come to her place and go riding Sunday! I drove an hour to get to her house and took my husband to ride his horse with them while I sat at her house, just so he could tell me what it was like. I just looked at them as they saddled & unsaddled...in awe. Then I had my baby and thought I couldn't possibly compete...the closest one was 100 miles away!! (If ONLY they had one in my town!) My friend did one 50 on her mule and started badgering me to get my horse in training. I told her it was impossible, my husband worked 56 hours a week and we were poor with me staying home with an infant. My big 16 hand App was off the track and I'd done barrels with him. He was a real handful and after 10 years of riding him I was ready for something sane now that I was a mama. I put him up for sale but everyone who tried him was scared of him, except one man who kind of wanted him, but I didn't like him so I got on and kinda did the spin him in circles one direction, then the other, then backed him 50' to jazz him up then he bot all tall, bowed up and snorty hopping up and down on his toes and the guy and he left. :-) The friend who'd competed called me to see if I'd had any luck selling him and I said, "Nobody wants him, I guess I'll have to do endurance with him" and she took me SERIOUSLY. She said, OK, here's what you do. This week you'll ride him an hour each day for 5 days, then we'll all do 20 miles Saturday. She sounded so confident I just decided to try it. I got out of bed at 4:45. I went to the farm a mile away where I kept him, saddled him in the dark, rode an hour and climbed back in bed with the baby just as Bill was leaving for work at 7:30. It was great. I used to wake up at 10 AM and feel like I'd dreamed I rode that morning.>g< I overtrained that horse too, but he did get to where he was a very fun, sane ride when you rode the fool out of him (literally). I ended up straining his tendon two weeks before the ride. I was heartbroken, but decided to pull another Appaloosa I'd just bought to resale out of the field and do the 25. When I got to the ride and did the 25 it was over so quick I almost cried. I'd trained so hard and in 2 1/2 hrs. was done (it was cool, he trotted like a freight train and FLEW down hills). After I finished I was walking through camp and saw my friend. She was in tears. She was a big woman and liked to train her horse herself but get a slim friend to ride it on ride day. Her slim friend had whacked her knee on a tree after 25 miles and pulled herself! (if she'd been the person who'd trained so hard to get the horse there I bet she wouldn't have). Anyway, I said, "Let me finish it" and being the stupid beginners we were it sounded sensible to us. She drove me to the away check where the horse was standing eating hay and all the other riders had been gone for some time. I got a leg up on her and took off. I could barely reach the stirrups on their highest notch and tiptoed the whole 25 miles. I actually passed 2 horses and it was the most exciting thing I'd ever done. We were such doofs, we even got the ride manager to tell us that he thought it was OK for us to give the 1st Appaloosa award...which our club sponsored, to this mare...because after all it wasn't an AERC award so who cared if we had switched riders? It's a wonder the lady on the 1st App who completed under AERC rules didn't kick our tails. There was absolutely no doubt I was totally, completely hooked from the first ride. So, my lineage was that I was recruited by my App/mule riding friend, who was recruited by the Arab riding endurance rider who had spotted her reading a horse magazine at their elementary school's car pickup line and recruited her. Those guys had the old Linda & Wentworth Tellington-Jones book that they lived by and loaned it to me along with some early 80's yearbooks. When I started recruiting people I photocopied every article out of 10 years worth of Equus that mentioned endurance & training and we loaned the big brown envelope full of them to every new rider we brought in and we watched Darolyn's Farnum endurance/ct tape. I listened to Matthew Mackay Smith's lecture over and over. The main image I remember is the coathanger. If you bend it over and over in the same place, it eventually breaks. That was what kept happening to me. Too much stress...not enough time to heal. I train so much less now to go so much farther. Angie Angie =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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