[RC] Endurance rider? An outsider's perspective. - Tracey Lomax
I’m not an endurance rider or a distance rider of any
shape, form or description.I
regard a three hour hack as pure torture and I derive pleasure from spending
half an hour of intensively schooling each of my four horses (which makes for
two hours max because, spoilt tart that I am, I get my groom to prepare each
horse beforehand and I just leap from saddle to saddle). That gives me more time to do the other
things which take up an enormous amount of my time :
running my yard, my business, my home and spending time with my child and my
dogs.Occasionally, it also gives
me time to ride my liveries’ horses, under protest.
The reason I’m telling you all of this is because when
somebody tells me that they’re an “endurance rider”, I don’t
immediately go “Ah, someone who does 100 mile rides and is about to get
her fifth Tevis buckle”.What I think is “ah, somebody who rides
for a lot longer than I do”.Which could be anything from 10 miles to 100 miles.
I don’t get the whole LD / Endurance debate.I don’t feel any particular need
to get it either, so please don’t regard this as an invitation to start
it up again.The point I’m
trying to make is that, to the uninitiated, anyone barmy enough to ride any “distance”
on an Ayrab (God forbid!) is gonna
get some respect in my book!!Whether
I’m going to give you any more respect that than depends on a lot more
than how you describe yourself, but rather the amount of knowledge you
exhibit.I know some people who can
quite safely call themselves “A grade showjumpers”,
having jumped A grade tracks, but I wouldn’t trust
them to hold my horse’s lead rein!!
Respect is earned, not because of what you call yourself,
but because of how you behave.
This recent spat has diminished my respect for a few posters
on this list, which I find a little sad, because frankly I’d like to learn
about how it is that you wonderful people feed, condition, train, and shoe your
horses, and not whether you’re a LD / Endurance rider!!
Tracey
(who has no earthly clue what to call herself……”dabbler”,
perhaps??Is there such a thing as
a “dabbler”?Can we
have a category for “dabblers”?)
