Season starts in Egypt and some compugeek questions

["Maryanne Stroud Gabbani" <maryanne@ratbusters.net>]

Thanksgiving (for the Americans) weekend saw the first ride of the season
for us. We are in the process of setting up a riders group, Egyptian
Endurance Association, to handle a series of mostly LD and training rides at
this point. There has been some contact between Egypt and the UAE again
about their funding some rides here, but they work with the FEI and they
would have to deal with the EEI here. We wish them luck, but plan to simply
do our own thing for the time being. I've done a lot of reading and
downloading of rules and regs from numerous locations in an effort to
collect enough ideas to find a format that will work best for us. So far we
are working set speed rides (UK and CTR) of lengths this year from 20 km
(12.5 miles) to maybe up to 70 km (44 miles). UAE rides start at 50 km
(31.25 m), 80 km (50 m.), and 100 km (62.5 m). What we learned as many
people spent the summer with horses recovering from tendon injuries incurred
last spring as they tried to keep up with UAE horses is that we are the
greenest of greenies in this and need to work up slowly, hence this year's
very conservative plan.
Right now, because of my recent knee surgery and my horses' rehab work (I
have 2 sound now, and one somehow off..doing some blood work to find out
why) I was RM again. The ride itself went well, despite our doing it 100%
without outside help and we learned a lot. One important, and ridiculously
simple, point is that distance riders MUST wear watches! We had some
problems with people coming in too early and realised that they didn't wear
watches. Must admit that 6 hour meetings with bankers and lawyers has helped
in being able to argue nose to nose with some rather rough pyramid stable
riders....and vice versa. My 25 yr old Nimbus did her first 20 beautifully
(HR 40 to start and 50 to finish) and we thought we'd get the fogey award
(her rider was 24), but had to give it to a 62 yr old who did the 40 on a 12
yr old mare. (We looked at the sum of ages)

All in all a lot of fun, but now to the serious part. Judging a winner by
time (even with the speed limits) is straightforward as long as we have the
right layout on the vet card (space for time in, vetcheck time and time
out). One of the things we are looking for is a formula that can be used
with an Excel spreadsheet to generate Best Condition scores. We take pulse,
respiration, hydration (skin fold), Girth/Withers/Back, MM, Cap Refill and
Gait. Most times at this point, we haven't been dealing with CRI as our vets
are as green as we are. Everything except pulse and respiration can be
scored as 1,2,or 3, making calculations pretty easy. We are going to play
with some of the data collected at recent rides to see if averaging the
pulse scores works or what, and how, if at all, scores should be weighted.
When we've watched best conditioned judging last year, it looked extremely
vague and subjective as performed by our imported judges, and no one could
tell us how they were doing it. So myself and the committee's chief
technogeek are trying to work out something that our riders can understand.
Any and All Help Appreciated.


Maryanne Stroud Gabbani
Cairo, Egypt
maryanne@ratbusters.net
www.ratbusters.net