Re: RC: The story of Cairo's 50 km (long)

[Bette Lamore <woa@stormnet.com>]

What an incredibly exciting life you lead! Thank you for your wonderful
account!
Bette

Maryanne Stroud Gabbani wrote:
> 
> It is my firm belief now that all ride managers go directly to a heaven
> where they get to ride beautiful, well-mannered horses with comfortable
> saddles while being offered large icy glasses of perfectly chilled lemonade
> or white wine, as the mood hits.  Our 50 km ride convinced me that ride
> managing could be used as a form of cathartic psychotherapy/weight reduction
> program/skin abrasion treatment.
> It wasn’t really my plan to manage this ride. My plan was to ride it on my
> fairly recently acquired mongrel (Arab/New Forest pony???) who had completed
> the 20 km with no problems, but he slipped on some cement and incurred a
> hairline cannon bone fracture, so no riding for me. When a tractor trailer
> demolished the side of my new Jeep a week before the ride, I decided that I
> might be getting some kind of divine, or at least noticeable, message.
> Now as I detail the day, please keep in mind that this is the second real
> endurance ride that we’ve ever done in Egypt and we really don’t even have
> any available models to draw on (at least none that we really want to use).
> We laid out two loops from the same club that we used the last time, one of
> 25 km and the other of 30 km. So it was really 55, oh well. The owner of the
> club decided that since we were holding the race on the main holiday,
> Friday, we could only have half the space that we’d used last time. I
> predicted disaster, but happily on that score was proved wrong. But it did
> mean that traffic control had to be very, very strict. Last time people had
> brought cars up to unload horses…this time they had to unload about 50 yds
> away then drive out of the club to wait, and saddles and bridles actually
> had to be carried in from the cars. Don’t laugh. Some people were not too
> happy.
>  There being some current disputes about what sports body is responsible for
> endurance racing (please don’t complain about AERC…at least you have it and
> don’t have to be creating it), the applications got out late. However, most
> of our riders had things together by Wednesday, which was the cut off.
> Thursday afternoon we had a briefing and a vet check for the riders within
> walking distance to take the pressure off the Friday morning. As before, the
> UAE crew arrived late the night before the ride, but we had our local vets
> and the students to do the first check. The students were a joy as they don’
> t get much hands on experience and they really blossomed this time. There
> wasn’t actually a designated ride manager…mistake number one…and, as the
> work for the event had been done by committee and no one had said anything,
> I assumed that one of the guys from the breeders and/or Jockey Club would be
> taking charge. When that didn’t really happen, I stepped into the gap sort
> of. The thing is that all these guys are actually sort of executive types
> who are used to having staff take care of everything for them….right, Toto,
> it really isn’t Kansas. This is when being old enough to be most people’s
> mother, having graying hair and that growl that most mothers of teenagers
> acquire, being bilingual and not owing anything to anyone politically or
> socially comes in handy.
>  So Thursday we vetted in about half of the horses and staggered home to
> sleep. I had to be up at 4:30 am to drive my daughter to school as she was
> leaving on a theatre trip to London that morning, so I just made extra
> coffee and went straight to the Club. We had some horses on hand at 5:30 am
> and by 6 were vetting in the ones who’d had to be trucked over. The FEI guys
> had arrived and there were some familiar faces, which was nice to see. I
> warned all the vets to be tough on ageing the horses (most people here have
> no idea how old their horses really are unless they are registered) and to
> be brutal on soundness….and to send any complaints my way since as a mother
> of teenagers, the complainers were likely to get very short shrift. That at
> least relaxed our local vets who are used to being bossed around as much as
> listened to. We had about 115 riders apply to the ride and about 100 started
> out.
>  We ran into the first problem in very short order when someone called in to
> say that the tractor pulling the water tank to the water stops had bogged
> down in the sand and we had to come up with alternatives. Some of the water
> was delivered by the tractor pulling a flatbed trailer thing, while I
> commandeered a bunch of people, mostly teenagers who I knew could drive in
> sand, to ferry out boxes of bottled water. The kids were amazing, driving
> all day hauling barrels and boxes of water, checking on horses and riders
> and keeping in contact with me by mobile phones. The water issue slowed the
> ride considerably and the horses got a longer rest in the middle while we
> made sure there was water out there for them. But the midpoint vetcheck
> knocked out another 15 or so horses. Frankly, given our inexperience, my
> feeling was the more the better.
>  The way the timing worked, the first group to depart came back just after
> the second group left and the same thing happened after the break. That did
> give people some breathing space, although the sand storm that blew up about
> noon didn’t. It wasn’t unrelenting, but one clever rider boasted about
> thinking to bring a toothbrush to pick the grit from her teeth at the vet
> check! The only people who got no break were the kids I had running water,
> and myself because various people refused to believe that we weren’t
> allowing chase cars or that they couldn’t just come up and park on the grass
> even if they were from the newspaper sponsoring the ride. Actually, the
> politics of the whole thing got rather ugly at one point, and it was a good
> thing that there were some of us who had no group affiliations so we could
> ignore the rest. Kind of like “This ride has been brought to you by the
> Hatfields and the McCoys.”
>  The whole ride wound up about 4 pm, having had the first group go out at 8
> or so am, and with a lengthy break for the midpoint to replenish water
> supplies. That night I wrote out a lengthy report to the committee on the
> things that went right and wrong. We didn’t lose any horses, despite the
> fact that some of our riders from some rather remote farms had no idea of
> what they were doing…these are guys who can’t even read and write. I stopped
> one rider myself whose horse was obviously bone weary and in some trouble
> and took his saddle back to camp with me. We sent out a vet who put the
> horse on a drip and walked slowly back with it. One problem with the desert
> is that we have no way to get a trailer out in the sand. That is a major
> concern in planning the route for the next race….but then Tevis isn’t all
> that accessible too.
>  At one point I was out just checking on things and I met a gold colored
> jeep that I didn’t recognize so I stopped it and demanded to know who they
> were and what they thought they were doing out there. (Like it was my
> desert!! A testament to the basic-training by Arab mothers that a number of
> young men didn’t just flatten me!) The driver, who spoke perfect American
> English, said he was with some Kuwaiti riders and one of them was lost. I
> firmly explained that chase cars were not allowed and said that if he wanted
> to be out there he could look for his rider, but while he was at it, he
> could pick up some boxes of empty water bottles at the next water stop. OK.
> They finally found the rider, whose horse had gone to a nearby farm and
> refused to move out of sheer orneriness (a rental and a smart one at that),
> and I ran into the driver later and found out that he was filming and taking
> notes for the Kuwaiti equestrian club that was sending some people for the
> next race??? Got his revenge by telling me he had me on film reading him the
> riot act for messing up our desert with his car. Carried another load of
> trash out though. Pretty good guy, after all.
>  I finally finished things about 6:30 pm when the vets had finished with all
> the horses that needed extra work (only 3, which wasn’t bad for a group that
> included so many clueless riders) and packed it in. I figure I lost 2 kilos
> in weight and gained 3 in sand.
>  The next race is a real one. 100 km and not set speed. The politics of this
> thing are mind-boggling and could make you retch. I know why I’ve never
> joined the any of the groups here. I told them that if they wanted me to
> manage the next ride for them and be the ground manager, they’d have to more
> than double my pay. I really wish they’d get someone from outside to do it,
> but I have a feeling that I may be stuck with it again. I have warned them
> that I’m not making a practice of this.
>  Good things to come out of it all: Our wonderful student vets who are
> getting hooked on equine medicine and who really felt like champs after
> working so hard. They all volunteered to help us out with a bunch of short
> (25-50 km) rides that we are going to run independently next year. Now
> everyone knows that we really can have our own endurance rides without big
> money support or outside help because we vet-checked half the horses
> ourselves, took care of our people on the trail ourselves, and, frankly most
> people are pretty annoyed with the infighting among the organizing groups. A
> common attitude is “Who needs them?”. Fine. All in all, I’m really happy
> about how things went, even with the problems. Would I do it again?
> Probably. Am I totally nuts? Undoubtedly. Would I rather be riding? Do you
> really need to ask? But I know I get to go to heaven.
> 
> Maryanne Stroud Gabbani
> Cairo, Egypt
> gabbani@starnet.com.eg
> "The future will be better tomorrow."
> US VP Dan Quayle
> 
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-- 
Bette Lamore
Whispering Oaks Arabians, Home of TLA Halynov
http://www.stormnet.com/~woa
I've learned that life is like a roll of toilet paper, the closer it
gets to the end, the faster it goes. Smell the roses!