Re: Pony Power, Little Big Horses? -- SAY WHAT?

["Marci Cunningham" <mcunningham@calcot.com>]

Sue, I think you are to commended for your approach to training for your
first endurance ride.  However, my suggestion to all LD riders out there is
that they drop the reference to "Top 10" in writing about their LD
experience.  A more meaningful comment would be to state the time it took to
ride the course ie 3 hours for a 25 or 4 hours for a 30 with a brief comment
on the type of terrain such as hilly or flat.  "Top 10" has speed
connotations associated with it and we all know that racing in LD is not the
way to bring along your endurance prospect.

Without a time reference or number of starting riders, stating that you top
tenned a LD ride doesn't mean much.  I've actually topped tenned a few
endurance rides but they all started less that 20 riders and my pace didn't
change from my normal middle of the pack speed.  So adding "top ten" to my
credentials is rather meaningless for anyone but me and frankly I wasn't
impressed with my performance on those few top ten experiences.

Let all have fun out there and bring our endurance prospects slowly and
safely.  Don't forget that 'to finish is to win'.  I don't think AERC's
motto includes anything about 'top tenning'.

Happy Trails,
Marci Cunningham
Bakersfield CA


-----Original Message-----
From: Sue Brown <sbrown@wamedes.com>
To: ridecamp@endurance.net <ridecamp@endurance.net>
Date: Thursday, May 27, 1999 1:10 PM
Subject: RC: Pony Power, Little Big Horses? -- SAY WHAT?



>What it says to me is -- when I enter my horses in their first LD race, and
>should I, or any of those with me, Top Ten, we would be guilty of plain and
>simple abuse of our horses.  HOGWASH!!
>
>Here's my situation:
>
>I started getting interested in endurance (along with some friends and
>students from my barn) about a year and a half ago.  We started a long,
>slow process of conditioning the horses under a strict program that I set
>up (thru a bajillion hours of reading and studying...and with a lot of
>tremendous help from ridecamp. ;-))  Some of the horses that we have been
>working with are my schooling horses (worth a lot to me since they provide
>for a goodly portion of my income.)  They started training for the
>schooling horse positions (by me) at about the same time we started getting
>interested in endurance competitions.
>



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