After the Manzanita Endurance Ride, my trainer, Beth Smith, and I had a conversation about conditioning strategy. I'm still unhappy with Hoss's recoveries. Even allowing for the weather at Manzanita, by this point he should be recovering better. His recoveries should be improving with each ride. That's not happening. So Beth and I discussed what to change.
Hoss is my second endurance horse. However, Phoenix, my first, was largely conditioned by Beth. During the early years of his training with Beth, I was flogging along getting myself going as a farrier. Also, for about a year, I didn't ride at all due to a medical condition that caused pain while riding. During this time, I pretty much left it up to Beth to train and condition Phoenix. She knew my plans, so she developed a strategy for getting Phoenix ready.
Beth had a couple of obstacles to overcome. Phoenix is a rather poorly conformed, thin and small horse, and I'm a large, heavy woman. We are not a good match. Still, this was the horse I had, so Beth worked with it. Beth is one of those trainers who can find a way around virtually any physical limitation. Using her strategy, she was able to get Phoenix into phenomenal shape. To this day, at 13, Phoenix could be taken out of the pasture and do 25 miles without looking like he did anything. He hasn't done a ride in nine months. The most he gets ridden is a little around home, and the gymkhana last month.
During the time Beth did all of this, I was not exactly taking time to come out and watch. I trusted her to do what needed to be done, and left her to it. The result of this is that I had a very fuzzy notion of what she'd done. I knew she had done "interval" training, during which she would do a walk/trot day, then a trot/canter day, then a canter/gallop day. Still, this doesn't really explain and define what she did. It wasn't until this recent conversation that I realized what a poor understanding I had of what it was she had done.
The big, glaring difference: Time spent walking! Long, fifteen to twenty mile walking rides. Now, when I first started taking over riding Phoenix myself, I had him at a place where I often rode with another lady who had the philosophy of walking everywhere. To me, the idea that you condition a horse for a twenty-five mile ride by walking everywhere seemed sort of like a person training for a marathon by walking! Didn't really make much sense. It doesn't make sense to do exclusively, to be sure, but those long walking miles are important. At the time, my thought process was that Phoenix was already pretty fit, so riding around at a walk wasn't going to hurt him. Turns out that was what was helping him.
So, I am reworking the strategy. We will spend more miles walking, especially on hills, and those rides will be long miles. To be sure, we'll be doing the faster stuff too. Those rides will largely be shorter and on less challenging terrain. As Hoss builds his endurance, and improves his recoveries, we will start working on being able to trot over more challenging terrain.
Our next scheduled ride is on November 6, the Wind Wolves Endurance Ride in San Luis Obispo. Not a lot of time, and I haven't ridden Hoss since Manzanita. Of course, if he can't do fifty miles right now, I won't change that in the next few weeks, so it doesn't really matter. With any luck, we'll get a few trail rides in before this next ride. Mostly that will be to keep him in line and his mind fresh.
After Wind Wolves, I am planning to take Hoss to the Death Valley Encounter multi-day ride. We will be doing the limited distance rides, totaling 110 miles over four days. The approach to a multi-day is a little different than to single-day rides. While many single-day rides are run more like races, multi-days tend to have a more relaxed atmosphere. Also, since you really are planning to get on the pony again the next day, you have to ride more conservatively. So, I will be incorporating walking into more than half of our trail miles!
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