Last weekend I finished my first endurance season with my cute mare, Sandy! This was our 3rd ride together and I’m feeling a mix of sadness as the season comes to a close and extreme excitement for what I have in mind for next year!
This last ride was a doozy, there were tons of wins and tons of hard-learned lessons!
THE RIDE
We traveled to the Autumn Sun Pioneer ride, which is only just an hour away from me! It was so nice to be able to make this a quicker trip than the last few!
A couple of things about this ride that I had been warned about:
It’s extremely rocky
And It’s extremely rocky 😅
So, I went in preparing for this to be a relatively slow-going ride with some scrambling. But the ride manager team fully made up for the hard terrain.
The ride manager had thought the route through and did her absolute best to keep the riders and horses safe. At each water stop she had set out hay bales and carrots for the horses and a cooler of water bottles for the riders. (Even though its fall, riding in the desert is no joke! )
THE RESULTS
Sandy and I finished 7th this ride and were able to compete for best condition again!
Sandy recovered better than any other ride with her pulsing down within a few minutes of coming into camp and being all the way down to 48 bpm at the vet checks!!
If you’ve been following my journey this year, you know how much I’ve worked on getting her to recover like this. To say I was excited is an understatement! It was so gratifying to see all the time, studying, and miles we’ve put in paid off!
She also had flying colors at the vet checks and came in so much better hydrated than the last ride. But this is where we’re going to detour slightly.
QUICK SIDE NOTE
After our last ride, Sandy struggled with a lack of hydration. She had lost a lot of electrolytes from sweating and even though she drank well it wasn’t enough for her to recover, and we came home to a slightly colicky horse.
This freaked me out, if you’ve ever had a horse colic you know it’s nothing to mess with, so I immediately started researching the best ways to keep her hydrated and electrolyte her and began to put that into practice every day leading up to this last race, and I’m happy to say it was worth it! She was one of the best-hydrated horses there (completely my opinion lol) and coming home has had no signs of colic and is just a happy little camper!
THE BIG MISTAKE
But I said this was a detour, and it is. Because where I did well with Sandy’s prep, I significantly neglected my own.
I came to this race with a very swollen ego, I told myself “It’s only a 25, you don’t need to be as crazy with your prep”. I held up my amazing recovery from my previous 50 and 25-mile races and mistakenly told myself that I would be fine and didn’t need to be so diligent….. 🤦🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️
So I skimped on my last two days of carb loading and didn’t bother taking my own electrolyte packets, and I’ve been paying for it ever since.
Coming off this race I have been so sick and because of my poor choices, I haven’t been able to train or work as productively as normal. All because I didn’t take care of myself the way that I should have.
This is something I’ve noticed a lot, as horsewomen we are so diligent in making sure our horses are well taken care of, then we neglect ourselves and wonder why we don’t feel good!
This was a much-needed slap in the face for me and you bet I’ll be making sure not to skimp on my own prep going forward!
As this season comes to a close I already have some big goals in mind for next year! Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
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