Hiatus

So, it turns out that having a (human) baby greatly reduces one's available free time for writing blogs (and many, many other things!).  It's been  2 years since I last posted - our son is now almost 20 months old.  We've moved, the boys are back in boarding, and Daria returned to her breeder's herd.  I'm going to just pick it up where I left off, writing posts as I can and sharing my horse life with my readers.

Run for the Cactus 50 mile Endurance ride, August 17, 2019

Rhio is 19 and still going strong!  I guess an old(er) rider and horse team can learn new tricks, as I changed a couple things with his protocols for the ride and he scored better on his vet card all day than he has in the past few years.

Ride prep starts the week before the ride.  Unfortunately, a new batch of hay at the stable gave both boys a bit of diarrhea and "gurgly tummy," so I started them on a new-to-me probiotic ASAP.  It was wonderful!  It really seemed to make a difference, and I kept Rhio on it all week and through the ride weekend.  I have used probiotics frequently over our years of competition, but I haven't felt that I could decidedly tell a difference with prior ones.  With this product, he was eating extremely well, and even ate most of a flake of alfalfa-grass mix hay in the trailer on the way to the ride on Friday night!  That is a very rare thing for him, as he is not a good eater on the trailer.

Beet pulp mash with electrolytes and probiotics in the week leading up to the ride. 

I also started syringing him with plain kaolin-pectin (the pink stuff - it smells like bubble gum but the flavor is pretty mild/bland) a couple days before the ride, to get him used to the taste.  It's a buffer used to help make the electrolytes less harsh on the stomach.  He hates being syringed and in the past has refused to eat after I've given him electrolytes via syringe at rides.  I'd decided to pre-mix my powdered electrolytes with the kaolin-pectin at home in the blender, then add a bit of liquid electrolyte solution at the ride, and dose before and during the ride via syringe.  I'd been just putting the powder into his mashes, which he typically doesn't consume very readily during the ride,  anyway.  So the few days of just the pink stuff did acclimate him to it, and dosing during the ride was easy-peasy!  And, even more important, he kept eating!

Kaolin-pectin 

Besides getting Rhio ready with diet/supplement tweaks, I also washed my girth, saddle pads, and half chaps.  Packed everything needed for 1 horse, 2 dogs, 2 adults, and 1 toddler to camp, eat, sleep, poop, and ride for the weekend.  Prepared food to feed all said beasties, two- and four-legged.  And completed various other myriad packing and prepping tasks.  It truly takes me all week, in between daily life, working, and being a toddler mom.  We had a plan to leave immediately after my husband finished work (i.e. I'd be all loaded and waiting for him in the back alley with the truck and trailer, since work is 30 minutes from home in the direction we were headed.) It was going to be a 4 hour drive, and we'd be getting there at or after dark.

And then, my carefully constructed plan imploded with both hubby and I getting late patients, and then hubby deciding he and toddler and 1 dog would stay home, after all.  So, I hurriedly unpacked a bunch of the stuff, fetched the toddler from daycare before they closed, went to the stable to load Rhio (with a small meal of Outlast and a handful of senior for his tummy prior to hauling), and meet hubby back at home to hand off the toddler.  Whew.  Ok.  Ready to go.  It's only 6:45 pm, 1 hour and 15 minutes after I'd planned to be on the road.

The trip was uneventful, with Rhio hauling calming and quietly as he usually does, Smokey riding shotgun, and little traffic.  I pulled into ride camp at 10:30 pm, having no difficulty finding it (whew! my night vision is TERRIBLE) and even saw a spot to park right there next to the entrance drive.  I pulled in, trying to be as quiet as possible, and proceeded to get Rhio's electric pen set up, his mash made, hay and water fed for the night, the tent set up, and my contacts out and teeth brushed in exactly an hour, under a beautiful full moon.

11:30pm Friday night, all settled in for the night

I slept poorly, as I usually do the night before a ride, and "helped" by the extremely bright moon keeping the inside of my tent nearly light enough to read without a headlamp.  I checked my phone many times, worried I'd overslept my 4:20 alarm.  When 4:20 rolled around, I got up and got dressed in my riding clothes,  put Rhio's hoof boots on, and then walked up to the office area (in a building with electricity! how nice!) to get my ride card and a map and a quick run down of the vital information for the 50 miler.  One of the vets was ready to vet me in, so I traipsed back to the trailer to grab Rhio, and vetted in, still in the dark.  I'd lugged my vet check stuff up with me as well, so I quickly got that set up for myself, and went back to get ready.  I remembered to eat something, I forgot to take my ibuprofen, and I was ready to head out pretty much at start time of 6am.  It was 6:05 when I left camp, the last 50 heading out on trail.  I knew Rhio would catch up to the next horse in no time, which he did.

We rode briefly with the second-to-last horse before Rhio decided he had more horses ahead to catch, and we proceeded to catch and pass the next group of 3 riders.  He wanted to keep going, so we stayed just a little ahead of them until the first water stop.  As we arrived, the next group of riders was just leaving, and so Rhio set his sights on those horses, and didn't want to stop, drink, eat, or relax at all.  We caught and passed that group as well, but I knew we weren't going to sustain that pace for the rest of the long first loop (22.5 miles) so I jumped off at the second water stop and waited for the group behind us to catch up.  From then on, all 5 of us rode the entirety of the rest of the ride together.  Which is shocking to me, actually, as I typically do not like riding in groups larger than 3.  But all the horses and all the riders got along so well all day, with zero disagreements or even crabby ears, that it was fun and relaxing to ride together.

Loop 1, about 11 miles in, 7:30am 

Sweet, clear, cool water 

The river! 

Single track - note the yellow and blue ribbons for trail marking. 

Loop 2 - water stop next to a bean field.

The bridge coming and going to/from camp.

The best part of this ride was the river! We stopped here on every loop, and it is undeniably the best water access/drinking/sponging place I've ever seen on a ride.  The water is perfectly clear, the bottom is perfectly firm with zero rocks, and it's level and mostly shallow.  By the third loop (hottest part of the afternoon), we were spending 10 minutes here sponging our horses and letting them cool down.  I'm pretty sure the horses looked forward to the river as much as we did!

The trails were great footing, and a nice mix between knee-knocking single track and two-track were you could easily move out and cruise along side by side.  The only difficulty we had on trail was an irrigation contraption that was spraying water about 15 feet above us, from the other side of a row of trees.  So we couldn't see the machinery, but we could first hear it (what's that noise?) and then see the water spraying through the tops of the trees (!!), and then feel the water hitting us and the trail (!!!!).  Wow, that was an "obstacle" that I had never dreamt of seeing.  Basically, we had to run through a giant sprinkler on our quivering horses.  But, we did all survive.

Loop 3

We finished in great shape with a ride time of 7:36.  All five of us completed with happy, sound horses.  Rhio ate and drank like a champ all day, took his syringed electrolytes without much fuss, and had the best vet scores he's had in forever (all As on hydration parameters and gut sounds the entire day!).  We had a few rubs - a slight girth rub after loop 1 which caused me to switch from mohair to fleece and add a coating of zinc oxide ointment to his armpits, and a very minor amount of rubbing from sand in the gaiters of his hind hoof boots, so that I pulled his boots and did the last loop barefoot.  I got a few rubs myself, more than Rhio actually, and am still nursing along a very bad rub on the side of my neck from my hydration pack (see my last post on the blog, from 2017!).

Overall, I absolutely loved this ride and can't wait to come back.  I'd forgotten how much I love to ride 50s.  And I am very proud of my pony.  We are within 1 year and 1 more endurance ride of both our Decade Team and 1000 Endurance Miles with our national governing body, American Endurance Ride Conference.

And, hubby and toddler survived their boys' weekend at home just fine.

The morning after

Completion prizes - first aid kit for the diaper bag, big hook for the hay bag (or whatever), and a new jelly scrubber (I've lost all my other ones).  I couldn't have gotten a more perfect bag of stuff!