Paul, as I said in my original post, is a class
act. My wife and I will be back, and to the best of my ability. We will take the
riders that I am trying to encourage from my area in Southern IL.
First time for that trail to have an organized
competition type of ride.
First time for the basecamp facility to host
that type of event.
As near as I can tell, the first time for a
ride on a rails-to- trails trail.
Two first time Endurance Vets.
About a dozen first time riders.
Two different state bureaucracies to deal with.
(One of which insisted that I was to somehow hand remove all the horse
manure from the 25 miles of trail)
Given all that it went great. No wrecks.
No horses treated. The Riders seemed to enjoy it.. We introduced a lot
of new people to our sport. We received good publicity from the local
newspapers and made a good impression in the communities we passed through.
They have all asked us to please come back again. We gave a good impression
of our sport to all whose paths we crossed. Those were my goals for the
ride, and they were all accomplished. Anything else was
gravy.
As for the number of vets, I agree we could
have used more. When we were deciding back in January how many Vets to hire,
we had to look at ride attendance for spring Rides in our area, and then
decide how many Vets we needed. Over the past two years, our area spring
rides have had between 13 and 63 riders show up. The average turnout is in
the mid 40's total for all distances. I was told a new ride could take
a while to get established, and that attendance might be lower than
average. There was also concern that $4.00 fuel might cut into ride
attendance. I bit the bullet anyways and signed up three vets
plus four vet students due to graduate next month. That should have easily
covered the normal amount of entries we get this time of year.... Or not as
it turned out.....
I personally thought we would get more riders
than average as my master plan was to promote the ride to non-traditional
Endurance Riders. The plan worked. We did get good attendance . We got
about a dozen first time riders. The New Rider meeting was huge.
We got four or fivenew AERC
Members. We had 52 LD riders and 23 start the 50, for a
grand total of 75 starters.
As all Vet checks were out of camp, and the
50's and 25's had a different vet check location, we got slammed. At the
finish, we had some traffic jams as the BC judging for the LD riders
was going on, more 25's were still finishing, the first 50's were
coming in, while the slower 50's were still coming into their last vet
check 18 miles away. We were spread out over a lot of territory. The new
vets did good, but tried to be careful and conservative. That caused
them to take a little more time. That is not necessarily a bad thing this
early in the year and with so many newbie's. The Head Vet, Dr Jeanie Hauser
did great keeping it going as well as possible.
The Riders had good attitudes and were patient
with the delays. It went fine. The general impression I got was that
we had a higher smile ratio than the normal ride.
The ride times were interesting as the Head Vet
had some concerns that the ease of the trail might lead some riders to go
too fast. Finish time for the fastest 25 was 2:27.. The fastest finish
for the 50 was 5:13. This was on a cool day, on a perfect surface, over
a basically level and straight trail. Decent times but not blazing
fast.
I do have one question for other Ride
Managers. I was amazed about how little I knew about what was going
on, while it was going on... I had no idea of the exact number of starters
(we had 8-10 entries show up the morning of the ride).. I missed the
finishes and had no idea who finished 1-2-3 etc, and the ride times...It
seemed all I did was run around in circles like a chicken with its head
cut off trying to prevent little glitches turning into big disasters.. Here
is my question to you: "Is this normal or does it get better the
next time?".... Being a RM wore me out more than riding the OD 100
and Tevis...
Paul N. Sidio
Ride Manager
State Fair Express
"?You don?t have a soul. You
are a Soul. You have a body.?." ~ C.S.
Lewis
