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Sep. 25th, 2011 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickHow to win at the competitive ride.
Okay, "Ride an Arab" is not really the way to win, but it helps. It helps a lot. They're thin-muscled and shed heat beautifully. They handle distance mileage and sustained trotting very well. They recover from exertion rapidly. Competitive trail and endurance is what Arabs are made for. It is their sport. You can do dressage on something other than a warmblood with its big, warmblood movement... but the top riders ride warmbloods. You can play around at cutting cows on something that's not a Quarter Horse... but the people who win ride Quarter Horses. And you can do competitive trail and endurance on a non-Arabian...
That said, you have the horse you have and there are a lot of things that you can do to maximize the performance of your horse at competitive trail. Here are some (nearly-free) ways to level up your game.
1. Pacing. Improve your pacing at the ride itself. The 4-H competitive ride that we attend has a window of time for completion of the trail. It'll be like 4hr, 28min to 5hr, 3min. If you finish at 4:30 or if you finish at 5:00, you score the same. You lose points for going faster than 4:28 and also for going slower than 5:03. The point you should be homing in on is that there is no advantage to going faster. Actually, since you are being judged on stuff like mechanical fatigue and metabolic fatigue and pulse and respiration, there is a significant advantage to going slower. I try to use every minute of time that I am given (without going over). Finishing earlier in the window gains me nothing and robs my horse of valuable walk time. If you choose this route, be sure to keep careful track of time -- going OUTSIDE the window costs you a point-per-minute. Since the winning scores are in the high nineties, being careless about time means you go away empty-handed from the awards ceremony. Wear a watch, keep track of time, and pace yourself.
2. Conditioning. Condition your horse. Basically, this means trotting. Also be sure to condition over the type of landscape that the ride consists of. For the ride we attend, that means blue gravel state forest roads up and down central Pennsylvania mountains. To be ride ready, your horse should be comfortable trotting at a medium pace (7.5 minutes per mile or approximately 8 mph) for fifteen minutes at a clip on reasonably level ground, take a 1 minute walk break, and be ready to do another fifteen minutes of trotting. If you've never done competitive trail or endurance riding before, this speed is probably A LOT faster than you typically trot. The easiest way to make sure you're up to speed is to measure out a mile of your training route and time yourself over it. It should take you 7.5 minutes to trot one mile when your horse is fitted up. Expect to spend approximately 8 weeks conditioning to get your horse from pasture potato to ride-ready. Conditioning is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN DO to get ready for the competitive ride.
3. Tack fit and shoeing. Avoid point losses on things like tack fit (girth sores, back soreness, tack rubs) and interfering/forging/clipping by making sure your horse is set up with tack that fits him and seen to by a farrier who can meet his needs. Train the way you plan to ride at the actual ride, with the same gear, and pay attention to your horse after every workout. Fix the problems when they are small to prevent them from becoming big. Pay special attention to the girth and back (for saddle fit) and the legs-below-the-knees/hocks (for forging, clipping, interfering) when you groom before and after riding. Plan for (in your training) several longer rides -- more than ten miles -- so that you will be in the saddle long enough to notice things that will be problematic during longer rides.
4. Pre-ride tactics. Realize that the ride does not start at 8:00 AM on a Saturday in late September. The ride starts in May or June when you start to condition for it. The ride is going on when you notice that your neoprene girth doesn't really suit your horse and switch to a cotton string one that breathes better and rubs less in mid-July. You're working on the ride when you up your critter's grain ration in early August because he's starting to drop weight from the workload. You are competing two days before you haul up to the ride site, when you are holding your horse on lush alfalfa and loading his belly up with fresh, juicy green forage. Your ride is happening at 5:30 AM the morning of the ride when you get up to feed your critter so that he has enough time to get started digesting before the 8 AM start.
5. Post-ride tactics. Realize that the ride doesn't end when you cross the finish line. You're still competing after you cross the finish line, while you are sponging like a madman to make sure his pulse and respiration are below criteria. It's going on when you change from riding boots into sneakers so that you can trot your horse out to the best of his ability instead of hobbling along beside him so slowly that he has to do a toe-dragging jog thing instead of an honest, springy trot. You are pulling ahead of your competitors (who mistakenly think the ride is "over") when you groom and care for your horse post-ride so that he vets out well -- the soaked alfalfa hay to get some wet into him, the apples that he'll eat even when he's tired, the vigorous currying to relax his muscles and help him be less sore. The ride ends after you have vetted out, cared for your horse, attended the ride awards thing, cleaned up the camp site, driven the truck and trailer home, cleaned everything and put all of your competitive ride stuff away for next year.
6. Hydration. Hydration is key. Assuming your horse is used to pasture, you can load up your horse's belly with fresh forage on Thursday and Friday before the Saturday ride. It can take up to 48 hrs. for food to pass through a horse digestive system. So, Noon Saturday (end of the riding part of the ride) back 48 hours is Noon Thursday. Anything moisture-rich that you can pack into your horse after noon on Thursday is good. Lush alfalfa is good if you have it, green grass is good too. We start 'em on alfalfa, as much as they will eat, and then switch to grass once they won't eat the alfalfa anymore. You don't want tired, dried up pasture for this. You want lush, juicy green grass, with clover. I take a lawn chair and a novel and simply hold my horse in-hand on the alfalfa field and then the hayfield. It takes about an hour, hour and a half, to fill a horse up by grazing. This is important because, if your horse does not drink "strange" water very well, he can pull water from his gut and remain hydrated... but he has to have the water in the gut to work with at the outset. That's what you're doing with the green forage. Fill up the tank before you start. Obviously, keep water in front of him at all times at the ride. Offer him drinks from buckets, puddles and streams if available. But first and foremost, fill up the gut with fresh, green forage for 48 hrs. before the ride.
Six things to improve your competitive ride game.
Pacing
Conditioning
Tack fit and Shoeing
Pre-ride tactics
Post-ride tactics
Hydration
Level up.
Okay, "Ride an Arab" is not really the way to win, but it helps. It helps a lot. They're thin-muscled and shed heat beautifully. They handle distance mileage and sustained trotting very well. They recover from exertion rapidly. Competitive trail and endurance is what Arabs are made for. It is their sport. You can do dressage on something other than a warmblood with its big, warmblood movement... but the top riders ride warmbloods. You can play around at cutting cows on something that's not a Quarter Horse... but the people who win ride Quarter Horses. And you can do competitive trail and endurance on a non-Arabian...
That said, you have the horse you have and there are a lot of things that you can do to maximize the performance of your horse at competitive trail. Here are some (nearly-free) ways to level up your game.
1. Pacing. Improve your pacing at the ride itself. The 4-H competitive ride that we attend has a window of time for completion of the trail. It'll be like 4hr, 28min to 5hr, 3min. If you finish at 4:30 or if you finish at 5:00, you score the same. You lose points for going faster than 4:28 and also for going slower than 5:03. The point you should be homing in on is that there is no advantage to going faster. Actually, since you are being judged on stuff like mechanical fatigue and metabolic fatigue and pulse and respiration, there is a significant advantage to going slower. I try to use every minute of time that I am given (without going over). Finishing earlier in the window gains me nothing and robs my horse of valuable walk time. If you choose this route, be sure to keep careful track of time -- going OUTSIDE the window costs you a point-per-minute. Since the winning scores are in the high nineties, being careless about time means you go away empty-handed from the awards ceremony. Wear a watch, keep track of time, and pace yourself.
2. Conditioning. Condition your horse. Basically, this means trotting. Also be sure to condition over the type of landscape that the ride consists of. For the ride we attend, that means blue gravel state forest roads up and down central Pennsylvania mountains. To be ride ready, your horse should be comfortable trotting at a medium pace (7.5 minutes per mile or approximately 8 mph) for fifteen minutes at a clip on reasonably level ground, take a 1 minute walk break, and be ready to do another fifteen minutes of trotting. If you've never done competitive trail or endurance riding before, this speed is probably A LOT faster than you typically trot. The easiest way to make sure you're up to speed is to measure out a mile of your training route and time yourself over it. It should take you 7.5 minutes to trot one mile when your horse is fitted up. Expect to spend approximately 8 weeks conditioning to get your horse from pasture potato to ride-ready. Conditioning is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU CAN DO to get ready for the competitive ride.
3. Tack fit and shoeing. Avoid point losses on things like tack fit (girth sores, back soreness, tack rubs) and interfering/forging/clipping by making sure your horse is set up with tack that fits him and seen to by a farrier who can meet his needs. Train the way you plan to ride at the actual ride, with the same gear, and pay attention to your horse after every workout. Fix the problems when they are small to prevent them from becoming big. Pay special attention to the girth and back (for saddle fit) and the legs-below-the-knees/hocks (for forging, clipping, interfering) when you groom before and after riding. Plan for (in your training) several longer rides -- more than ten miles -- so that you will be in the saddle long enough to notice things that will be problematic during longer rides.
4. Pre-ride tactics. Realize that the ride does not start at 8:00 AM on a Saturday in late September. The ride starts in May or June when you start to condition for it. The ride is going on when you notice that your neoprene girth doesn't really suit your horse and switch to a cotton string one that breathes better and rubs less in mid-July. You're working on the ride when you up your critter's grain ration in early August because he's starting to drop weight from the workload. You are competing two days before you haul up to the ride site, when you are holding your horse on lush alfalfa and loading his belly up with fresh, juicy green forage. Your ride is happening at 5:30 AM the morning of the ride when you get up to feed your critter so that he has enough time to get started digesting before the 8 AM start.
5. Post-ride tactics. Realize that the ride doesn't end when you cross the finish line. You're still competing after you cross the finish line, while you are sponging like a madman to make sure his pulse and respiration are below criteria. It's going on when you change from riding boots into sneakers so that you can trot your horse out to the best of his ability instead of hobbling along beside him so slowly that he has to do a toe-dragging jog thing instead of an honest, springy trot. You are pulling ahead of your competitors (who mistakenly think the ride is "over") when you groom and care for your horse post-ride so that he vets out well -- the soaked alfalfa hay to get some wet into him, the apples that he'll eat even when he's tired, the vigorous currying to relax his muscles and help him be less sore. The ride ends after you have vetted out, cared for your horse, attended the ride awards thing, cleaned up the camp site, driven the truck and trailer home, cleaned everything and put all of your competitive ride stuff away for next year.
6. Hydration. Hydration is key. Assuming your horse is used to pasture, you can load up your horse's belly with fresh forage on Thursday and Friday before the Saturday ride. It can take up to 48 hrs. for food to pass through a horse digestive system. So, Noon Saturday (end of the riding part of the ride) back 48 hours is Noon Thursday. Anything moisture-rich that you can pack into your horse after noon on Thursday is good. Lush alfalfa is good if you have it, green grass is good too. We start 'em on alfalfa, as much as they will eat, and then switch to grass once they won't eat the alfalfa anymore. You don't want tired, dried up pasture for this. You want lush, juicy green grass, with clover. I take a lawn chair and a novel and simply hold my horse in-hand on the alfalfa field and then the hayfield. It takes about an hour, hour and a half, to fill a horse up by grazing. This is important because, if your horse does not drink "strange" water very well, he can pull water from his gut and remain hydrated... but he has to have the water in the gut to work with at the outset. That's what you're doing with the green forage. Fill up the tank before you start. Obviously, keep water in front of him at all times at the ride. Offer him drinks from buckets, puddles and streams if available. But first and foremost, fill up the gut with fresh, green forage for 48 hrs. before the ride.
Six things to improve your competitive ride game.
Pacing
Conditioning
Tack fit and Shoeing
Pre-ride tactics
Post-ride tactics
Hydration
Level up.
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Date: 2011-09-25 11:17 pm (UTC)1. Demand permanent height certificates at registration for all ponies. That way, nobody gets mistakenly classed as a "horse" when he or she is really a "pony".
2. Ask for t-shirt size on entry form so that nine year olds aren't going home with shirts they can swim in. Put shirts in stacks of 10 (pinnie 1 through pinnie 10) and have people line up in number order to turn in pinnie and pick up shirt. After this, pinnies will be neatly stacked in numeric order, shirts will be sized to suit rider.
3. When announcing the results, announce the score of the first-place finisher in each category. It's different every year, is why this needs to be done yearly. People need to know what is possible and how far away from that they are. Also, I personally want there to be a "highest score awarded to any rider at this ride today" award so that I can try to win it. Even if it's not official, if the ride announces first place scores for everyone, I will then KNOW whether or not I have beaten everyone that there is to beat. (Yeah, I have issues. Lots of 'em. Sue me. It's like Waylie said... like to WIN.)