Fun rides and Fitness

Suec04

Suec04

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I'm thinking of entering some fun rides this year but how fit does my mare need to be to do them?

currently we can only ride at the weekends due to no school and dark nights, for 1- 1&1/2 hrs twice a week, mostly walk and trot with 2/3 short canters. we haven't yet progressed to jumping but I will be working on that this year. so can someone please give me an idea of what I should be aiming for before entering for fun rides. eg. how long should our rides be, how much trotting/canter work do we need to reach before going along to one, how often should we be riding? etc

many thanks and obviously I am working on my own fitness too, losing some excess weight and exercising at home :)
 
Most fun rides I have been to you go around at your own pace so you don't need a huge amount of fitness. I would try tracking your current rides to see how far you go as amount of time can be deceptive. I would want to be comfortable doing 3/4 of the distance on a normal ride.
 
Often you can choose from 3 distances and the lower one is 5 or 8 miles which your horse should be capable of easily. Its not like hunting where the pace is dictated by the field, you can go at your own pace. Would definitely recommend! :),
 
You go at your own pace. I've done many over the years and my 22 year old has completed four this year, and he's unfit. The first two were very steady, I think we only had one canter on each and that was slow (we have been escorting green horses), the third we had a blast! The fourth was in November, he was unclipped and we had two short canters and it was only five miles but he came back soaked from head to toe and lost a lot of condition, more due to excitement than physical exercise.

Bear in mind that although you may only want to walk and trot your horse may have other ideas, and they tend to keep blasting on even if they aren't fit which isn't always ideal...
 
As others have mentioned often have choice of length so start at shortest length & see how you go. Somehow always seems to take us longer than we imagine to get round despite trots & canters! Nearly missed the ice cream can last time out at canter for a cure :) they are a lot of fun & all the ones I've been on everyone is friendly & considerate. What part of the country are you in?
 
Go on one, they're great! You go out with your hacking buddy only, there's no great herd of horses all going out together. I've not yet come across anybody discourteous when they want to pass, they call out asking if it's OK. I've had others join us for a while then we either go on ahead or drop back. Canters are usually fairly short, the side of a field or two. If there are jumps they're little and not compulsory. The only one I've had fitness issues with was the 20 mile Newmarket ride, but that was MY fitness. Horse came back bouncing like Tigger. I never thought I'd say there were to many gallops but I slid off at the end.
 
I've just entered my boy and I into the RAF Halton fun ride, which is 7 miles with 50 jumps around the course.

At the minute, he's doing 2 days of work a week, which aren't massively intense as we're just getting back into the swing of things after coming up with a plan to resolve our wonkiness issues.

I'm upping the intensity of his work steadily as well as increasing the amount of days he is worked and by the start of March I expect us to be hacking 7 + miles once a week, no jumping involved. But jump schooling once a week also, as well as 2/3 other schooling/hacking sessions a week.
 
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