Blog article - endurance career longevity

Wow, wonderful article, very interesting.

As Endurance GB riders tend to be keen I was surprised at the short career length of the horses. I would be interested to know how many riders continued riding endurance with another horse, and how many gave it up and did something else with their horse.

It was also very revealing how the career length was longer if the horses were not pushed early in their career.
 
I should stress too that it is only in the last couple of years that pleasure ride results have been added to the database. So the data in my analysis will only be for horses that were fully paid up and registered with EGB and who were actually competing.

There are of course a lot of human reasons why people give up competing (finances, lack of transport, their own physical issues)
 
I know nothing about endurance but was surprised to see how short the career span of a horse could be. Really interesting and really well written.
 
Thanks. As I say, there are a lot of human factors involved in stopping competing and a lot of the horses will just go off and do something else, and as pointed out in the article, most were sound at their last ride so in all likelihood did just that. They didn't completely retire, just retired from competitive endurance.

In my opinion it would be interesting to compare the average length of competitive career and average length of membership to other disciplines.
 
I would say that most factors are human factors. It takes a lot of determination to keep going at the longer distances, the training, the time, the finances, the sheer physical slog for the human!
 
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