When Esme announced that she was doing the Challenge Esme series I knew I had to contact her and ask her to try out endurance. It’s a little known sport in the UK but much bigger in Europe, the Middle East, America and Australia. I knew that if Esme gave it a go, Endurance would reach a wider audience and hopefully would inspire some viewers to give it a go too.
I offered her the ride on Tissy, my 14hh 22year old arabian mare, who has represented Team GBR 5 times. The original plan was that Esme would come for a training weekend and then a week later we would do a Novice 40km competition. However due to COVID the competition was cancelled but we took the decision to go ahead with the training anyway, if Esme enjoyed then we could get together for a part two and go to a real competition next year.
On the day we went through the endurance vettings, as endurance horses are vetted before they’re allowed to start and at the end, the longer rides also have pit stops at them where the horses are seen by the vets and allowed to continue or are eliminated if they don’t reach the required parameters.
We then went through the tack as it’s definitely a bit different from traditional leather tack. All of my tack is from Pioneer Endurance, where you get to pick any colour combination and it’s made to measure for your horse.
After that it was time to rock and roll. We had a 20km training ride planned, 8km’s of warm up and 12 km’s of intervals, with walk, trot and canter. We always do our canter intervals faster than we would at a competition to try and increase their fitness levels. If we’d been doing continuous canter work it would have been a much slower pace. It’s all about mixing up the training so that you increase their cardiovascular fitness and improve their muscle strength and stamina.
Unfortunately as Qantas is still only learning he did get a bit over excited about the intervals and on a few occasions went faster than I would have liked, we lost our breaks a little bit and he did throw in a few spooks. But all in all he did a good job of keeping up with Tissy and his heart rate was in the 40’s within minutes of getting back to the lorry.
By the grin on Esme’s face I reckon she might have enjoyed riding Tissy so hopefully a 40km Novice competition will be on the cards for 2021.
Beth Endurance 