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RE: [RC] Humor me.... - David LeBlancChelsea said: Gee, you guys make Endurance riding sound like SO much fun! I hope you know I'm just kidding. Best things in life take work! Those days tend to be rare, and are balanced out by things like being on top of a ridge at sunrise, seeing the sun come up over the mountains behind you, 2-3 volcanos in front of you, along with a snow covered piece of the Cascades. Or cantering down perfect trails through a grove of old growth Redwoods. Or riding completely around the rim of a caldera of a volcano at somewhere around 6000 ft. Or central Washington with all sorts of twisty windy short ridges, and imagining what it would be like to be a bandit or a posse trying to hide or catch someone - the terrain is just like in the old Westerns. Sometimes, cantering through the sagebrush with a perfect blue sky at about 50-60 degrees is just perfection. And there's the time a friend and I got to the top of a pass and realized we had a _lot_ of horse left since we'd been riding smart, and took off, riding side-by-side, passing people left and right with grins a mile wide, and then coming into the vet check with 6 people in tow, and being the first to pulse down by minutes. Started dead last, walked out of camp on a loose rein, and finished top-10. Everywhere I go in the US (and I think I've only missed 4 or 5 of the lower 48), I always think about what it would be like to do an endurance ride there. Those sorts of things make up for stuff like a 14 1/2 hour ride time 75 where it only quit raining when we went above the clouds. Even that had some interesting experiences - trotting down a road at a fast trot in the dark with heavy cloud cover and no moon - I couldn't see a thing. The next to last ride I did was the hardest 50 mile (actually 55) ride I've ever seen. Huge amounts of elevation change. The last 13 miles were the hardest. I took just under 11 hours to complete, and with vet checks, I was out for over 12 1/2 hours. It was one long, hard, tough day. The finish was about a mile or so from camp, and walking in down a road by ourselves, watching the stars come out and the moon come up over a mountain, having just hit the 2000 mile mark for me and my horse - that was something special. Some of the rides I'm proudest of were the rides where I overcame a serious obstacle, and finished anyway. Maybe last, but I completed. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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