Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

Julie,

A wonderful post. A good horse is a good horse - but a great horse is a 
great horse. We all ride many good horses but the great horse is rare. 
There is more to a great horse than "many endurance miles." There is the 
life altering bond - something I think only a few people ever understand.

Not many of us ever find a great horse and many that do don't give the 
relationaship the chance to grow.  It is something granted to us and it 
is very rare that it is granted to us more than once.

Thanks for sharing.

Truman

Marinera@xxxxxxx wrote:

> I rode *Marinera, a Peruvian Paso mare, in the 1966 and 1968 Tevis Cup 
> Rides. (okay, I know most of you were not born then) She finished in 
> the top 20% both times.  I was a very enthusiastic, but totally 
> ignorant rider and the fact that she survived my incessant demands was 
> only by the grace of God.
> The conventional wisdom in the 60s was that a horse had only one or 
> two good hundred milers in it in a lifetime and then you should retire 
> the horse to pleasure riding.  (Not that the Tevis wasn't pleasure but 
> it does have a high stress factor to mute the bliss) In the thousands 
> of miles I rode *Marinera, I do not think she ever stumbled. She 
> picked those front feet up high, placed them down and never dragged 
> them forward.  She never shied or veered from the path I indicated, 
> never reared or bucked.  Highly strung, our most joyous rides were by 
> ourselves through the Santa Cuz Mountains without the competition of 
> other horses.  She left us at age 30 with two of her nine offspring to 
> take her place and carry us effortlessly through rugged country.   She 
> took a middle aged housewife and made her Ten Feet Tall (shameless 
> plug); forced a  family to move to the country so I could be near her, 
> had a ranch named after her, a road named after her, a publishing 
> company named after her, an e-mail address named after her.  She 
> changed the course of my life and for that I will be ever grateful. I 
> can see her burial spot from my window as I type this.   Julie Suhr
> PS She was not named after the spaghetti sauce which is spelled 
> differently.  They dance the "Marinera" in Peru. And, my, how she 
> danced over these mountains.



--

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm 
not sure about the former."  Albert Einstein





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