Endurance help and advice needed

[sarah23]

Someone is borrowing my little horse to do an Endurance comp in 2 weeks time a 32k (pony is fairly fit, has been team chasing).

I have offered to crew for the day, but I have never done Endurance before so have no idea what I have to do or exactly what my horse has to do. I know it has to have a vet check and I know the longer ones have a few vet checks, but apart from that I have no idea and no idea what the vet check involves.

Could someone please fill me in to what to expect, is it just the fastest ones round is it like a bogey time ? I have tried looking on the Endurance but i'm nun the wiser. It is for a riding club so is it totally different.

Sorry for all the questions but I can't get hold of the people that's taking my horse until next weekend to ask.

 

[monkeybum13]

First of all it is not the fastest time is the winner. Its based on average speeds and the horses heartbeat.

On a 32k ride there'll only be a vetting at the start and and the end (30 mins before you ride and 30mins after).

For crew you'll meet the rider at specific points and offer water to horse (and rider!) to drink and you might want to take some bottle of water so you can 'splosh' the horse down. Easiest way is to hand the bottles to the rider and they can pour the water down the horse's neck.

If you can get your farrier out a few days before the ride then do. Before the 1st vetting you will have to have your horse checked by the farrier, nothing more frustrating to others than waiting for someone to have a full set of shoes done!

Most important thing is to have fun and enjoy it, endurance people are definitely the most friendly and helpful

 

[spookypony]

If it's for the Riding Clubs competition, then the horse will be competing as a member of a team trying to qualify. Each horse that successfully completes the ride gets a score that will be calculated based on a formula derived from its speed (up to 13 km/h) and final heart-rate. The total score of the team's top 3 horses gets entered into a Riding Clubs league table. Each team can do as many qualifying rides as it likes, with better scores replacing worse in the league table. At the end of the season, the teams with the best scores are selected to compete in the Riding Clubs final at the Red Dragon in Wales.

Your horse's job for the day will be to behave itself at the vettings before and after, and to mostly trot for about 3 hours. To pass, it will have to trot up sound, and to have a heart-rate of 64 bpm or less (though you're aiming at 48 bpm or less).

Your job will be to help the rider cool down the horse afterwards to get the heart-rate down as much as possible, and to wait at agreed-upon crew points en-route with water (or better, sugar-beet water) for the horse, and water for sloshing the horse (lots of people use cut-up fabric softener bottles or milk bottles as a type of ladle for this). There will be a secretary at the ride who can advise you what a good crew point might be. For a 30km ride, many people don't have a crew at all, so one crew point is probably enough!

Have fun! It's addictive!

 

[sarah23]

Yes its for our riding club.

Sorry I still don't get it, so do they need to go fast then (I don't mean canter all the way) if it's based on their speed and how fast do you need to go to go 13km/h and how long after they pass the finish do they do the heart rate check.

 

[LizzieJ]

http://www.rcteamevent.endurancegb.co.uk/html/tips.html

http://www.rcteamevent.endurancegb.co.uk/html/rules.html

 

[spookypony]

You have to present for the final vetting within 30 minutes of your finish time.

The formula used to calculate the score is ((speed - 5) x 100 ) / (pulse - 20), where the number for speed is capped at 13 km/h (this is so that high-level endurance horses, who maybe could eat a 32 km course for breakfast at a speed of 15 km/h, don't have a huge advantage over the horses new to endurance, whom the organisers of this competition are trying to attract). The idea is that if you push for a higher speed, your heart-rate is likely to go up as well, so you're trying to balance between a decent speed and a low heart-rate.

For a first endurance ride, it would be more sensible to aim for a speed around 10-11 km/h. For 32 km, that means taking at least 2 h 55 min to get round (11 km/h), or 3 h 12 mins at 10 km/h. That's a good strong trot most of the way, with any walk periods made up for by canter periods.

It's a good idea to mark up the map with distances, and then have target times for getting to those points. For example, at 10 km/h, you do 5 km every 30 minutes. So if you mark 5 km intervals on your map, you can set a stopwatch and try to reach each interval on the next half hour or a little bit faster.

 

[LizzieJ]

It is probably worth playing with speeds etc when riding because my hunter gets 13 kmh pretty much split 50:50 between walk and trot easily but she has a serious power walk that most horses let alone ponies have to trot to keep up with. I actually did the 30km route they did on the hills locally just at normal hacking speed and would have come in significantly under the allowed time. I'm sure it will be a lot of fun Good luck!

 

[DragonSlayer]

Thanks for this info, I am pondering trying endurance at some point myself, with my Anglo.

 

[EstherYoung]

The others have explained the riding club stuff far better than I could.

As Spooky says, aim for 10-11km for your first one. The way the formula is worked out, an 10kph completion with a low pulse will 'beat' a 13kph completion with a high pulse anyway. Besides, 10kph is really easy to work out - a 30km will take 3 hours.

The amount and type of crewing you'll need to do will depend on the weather, the horse and the terrain. A more heavily built horse will need more crewing in hot weather, and a finer horse will need negligible crewing if the weather is cold. You will need to make sure that the rider has something to drink, as generally they tend to forget to look after themselves.

Enjoy

 

[DragonSlayer]

Can I ask, I would think it's not too bad to do a shorter ride with no crew, but if someone didn't have one, does that make it impossible to do, or do some people crew for more than one horse and rider? I know of course, the health and safety of the horse is detriment, but am generally curious as I'm sure there are competitors who have to enjoy their horses alone.

 

[Bionic Boy]

I can't offer any advise but it will be my first time helping on Saturday so wanted to follow the thread

 

[monkeybum13]

Can I ask, I would think it's not too bad to do a shorter ride with no crew, but if someone didn't have one, does that make it impossible to do, or do some people crew for more than one horse and rider? I know of course, the health and safety of the horse is detriment, but am generally curious as I'm sure there are competitors who have to enjoy their horses alone.

When I did an endurance a few weekends ago my mum and dad crewed for me but also helped a lady doing the 80k ride on her second or third loop which was the same loop as mine. I'm not sure if there are any rules on who can crew for who but my parents ended up crewing for 3 in the end. Me, a friend I buddied up with and the 80k rider

 

[DragonSlayer]

When I did an endurance a few weekends ago my mum and dad crewed for me but also helped a lady doing the 80k ride on her second or third loop which was the same loop as mine. I'm not sure if there are any rules on who can crew for who but my parents ended up crewing for 3 in the end. Me, a friend I buddied up with and the 80k rider

That sounds like a good plan. Maybe I could offer to crew for a few riders through my local group, to get a bit of experience on how it all works....

 

[tiga71]

I only do the shorter ones, most I have done is 34km, but we don't have crews and we manage on our own.

THink once you start doing the longer ones it is good to have a crew.

 

[EstherYoung]

I've done up to 65km with no crew. Everyone is really friendly though, and in the end I found someone who would crew me for longer rides if I crewed her, but we started out without a crew and didn't have any issues. If anything it taught me to be self sufficient and made me a lot easier to crew on those occasions that I did have one.

 

[monkeybum13]

That sounds like a good plan. Maybe I could offer to crew for a few riders through my local group, to get a bit of experience on how it all works....

That's a brilliant idea, wish I had though of that to gain some 'endurance knowledge', what area of the UK are you in?

 

[DragonSlayer]

That's a brilliant idea, wish I had though of that to gain some 'endurance knowledge', what area of the UK are you in?

Sorry, missed this!

I'm in the lincolnshire area. I'd be glad to offer a bit of help in return for the experience I would gain from crewing.

 

[spookypony]

So how did it go?!