Feed and training needed for endurance riding

Nonyabusiness

Nonyabusiness

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Hi
In march im going to be par taking in my first endurance ride. My Horse is fit and healthy and has been doing light to medium work, is currently fed on hifi and pasture mix with a few carrots. Im thinking i may need to change this to something thats going to give her more energy but slow release without making her fizzy... (chestnut mare!) Advice on feed please.

Also what sort of extra exercise would you advise. Ive been hacking out and doing some light schooling and jumping twice a week or so.

Its a novice ride i believe it to be 27 miles. Id like to go up the levels eventually but really looking at doing it for fun.:)
 
Firstly, don't panic!

Really a novice ride isn't much different to hacking fitness, so if you can get your mare fit enough to do a couple of hours of fairly active hacking, then she should be easily fit enough to do a steady novice ride.

Is it 27 miles or 27km? If it's 27 miles then maybe look at getting her fit enough to do a three hour hack. Whichever distance it is, you shouldn't need to change your feeding or anything. A high fibre diet with your mix of choice would be fine.

I always look to get them out four days a week if I can - two long slow days and two short fast days. What constitutes a long slow day or a short fast day depends on the horse and what distance I'm doing. For pleasure/novice rides, my long slow days will be a couple of hours walky trotty hack, and my short 'fast' days will be some cantering in the field across the road or some schooling or lunging.

Which one are you doing?
 
Yes which one are you doing? I am doing a 17km then 24km working up to 33km but we regularly do 7-10 miles on our 'normal' hacks....must learn to work in 1 or other format. Good luck, u have plenty of time.
 
Been doing some light school, involving walk trot canter and transition work. Done a small amount of lunging but i do prefer to ride. when hacking out its mainly been walk trot due to water logged fields (peat land). I have done some days out to somerford park in cheshire which is a great hack with x corss country jumps around the track (for those who may not know) Planning on a few more trips there, and around. can be fast paced hack. But its not somewhere i can get to on a weekly basis due to travel.

we worked it out to be around 27 miles from the km distance given. (cant work in km)
 
About 45km then?

Not impossible (in the states everyone starts at 25 miles) and if your pone has been fit before they will find it easier, but if there is a pleasure ride option I think I would do that as your first one just so you get the hand of finding your way, pacing yourself, etc if you've never done anything like it before. Definitely try and ride 4 times a week between now and then and build up the trotting/cantering you do.

I find kms easier now. At novice level if you aim for 10kph it's a doddle to work out and will give you leeway if you get lost anywhere. Your 45km ride would then take you 4 and a half hours. Speed kills, not distance, so just take it steady.
 
Bear in mind that endurance rides (even pleasures) do have an optimum time (to get your rosette you have to be within min and max times).

This means from what Ive found that to be in the middle of the min/max you need to sort of be averaging a trot all the way through, with any walk periods being balanced by similar periods of really spanking trot or canter.

4 and a half hours of that takes quite a high level of fitness. Even the pleasure ride distances all at an average of trot needs the horse to be fit enough, and really horse needs to be working up to doing 2-3 hour hacks several times a week at at least that pace the whole way (and over varied terrain, if the endurance ride will be). Most hacks simply arent that intense if they are analysed.

Once the horse is endurance fit, less work is needed to keep it fit, but getting it fit is the hard work.
 
45km is a fairly unusual distance as a novice class so I’ve put 2 and 2 together and figured out you’re doing Cannock. If you are, it’s a lovely ride and you’ll enjoy it. There is also a 32km novice ride and a 16km and a 32km pleasure ride.

Personally for a first one I’d go for the 16km or the 32km pleasure ride just to get your head round how your horse is going to react, how they recover, how you need to manage them to get their pulse down, etc etc etc, without it actually ‘counting’ as one of your novice rides.

The other thing you’ve got to remember is that at the early season rides the weather is likely to be VERY changeable.

It depends on what your aims are I guess. Are you trophy hunting or are you aiming to put down the building blocks of a potentially very long career? If it’s the latter, then remember the old fashioned wisdom that it takes 4 years to ‘make’ an endurance horse. Pick your rides carefully and aim to teach the horse something new with each one. You don’t have to get 10 novice rides in for your first season – 5 carefully chosen rides of steadily increasing difficulty will teach you more.
 
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