Winter endurance training

[emcorrie]

Hi everyone
My mare and I started competing in endurance this year, finishing our first race last month. I don’t know how it works in the UK, but in France (where I live) it’s necessary to start at 20km and qualify for each level up. So next year we’re aiming for 40km in the spring and hopefully 60km later in the season.
anyway I wonder what your training routine is in the winter? Do you keep your horse going at the same rate or do you ease back the training a bit?

 

[Flame_]

I have only ever done up to 40k and my current horse has only done two 32k rides. He gets his shoes off late September until late January every year for his feet and practicality (no arena and work is time consuming in the run up to Christmas). I start walking him out at Christmas and just aspire to get up to whatever we get up to, whenever we're ready. I'm sure someone more focused and successful can provide better advice.

 

[Steerpike]

Here we have to do 3 Novice graded rides between 30km and 50km to get to Open Level when you can compete in a 60k and 80km graded ride to qualify for advanced, once advanced you can then enter Competitve (race) rides.
3 of my horses will be coming back into work next week which is early for them but they have not done much this year so I want to get at least 8 weeks of good walk work into them and it allows for if we have some atrocious weather over winter. I always aim to enter the first rides of the season which tend to be the beginning of March.
In a normal year mine would have a holiday from October time until December then brought back into work with minimum 4 weeks walk depending on how fit they were before their holiday.

 

[sbloom]

Can't help directly but can highly recommend Groen Equestrian (endurance coach), Esther's Dutch but has been in the UK a few years so will even understand the shift from one country's endurance set up to another

 

[Steerpike]

There is also On The Hoof Training by Maggie Pattinson who has many years of experience in endurance here along with being heavily involved with the Mongol derby.
https://www.onthehoofdt.co.uk/