8 Back to Novice 25km

So after getting George to the point of completing our first novice 80 I was now back at the very beginning with a new horse.  Unfair!  I was going to have to do just about the whole novice thing twice before getting to be an open rider. 

New Zealand’s novice system has a minimum of two 40km and two 80km novice rides that must be done by the horse and rider before either is “Open” and thus no longer controlled by novice minimum ride times.   Once open you both must complete an open ride of 80-110km before you can enter a 120, and a 120-130km ride before you can enter a 140 or further.  There is an intermediate step where you can race distances below 70km once you have completed over 200km of novice rides 40km and over.   So George and I had got to intermediate and had completed one 80km ride, we had been just one step (or 80km) away from Open.  It was a little shattering to be honest, once you’re experienced and been doing endurance for a while it’s no big deal, but when you’re just starting out getting through novice is a really big thing!

This time I would get it right, no more obsessing with being the first novice home!  This felt a little like doing penance for getting it wrong the first time around.  Although in my defence George being standardbred covered the ground amazingly well – his medium trot was 20km/hr – and it’s not like we were galloping or anything, in fact I can’t remember cantering George very much at rides, if at all.

Kerry helped me getting Lace’s floating issues sorted, lots of patience, some reliable horse friends for company and a few short trips, initially with no partition, then partition included.  The interesting thing was she was no more difficult than a horse with absolutely no floating history, I do wonder, with the sedation whether she didn’t actually remember the bad bit.  Thankfully she has been a good traveller ever since.

I remember thinking very early on with Lace that she was one tough cookie, and that could be a good thing if I could only get it pointed in the right direction, if she could come to like endurance it could be a force to be reckoned with!

With most of the drama over (or at least covered in the previous chapter!) training for our first endurance ride was underway.  The fact that I don’t remember much about it means it must have been relatively uneventful!  I well remember milestones like successfully riding down the steep part of our normal training circuit, and again having her shy and not go nuts if I got off balance a little.

In early February I started recording our training rides, so now it was clearly for real!  I had started doing this with George, just recording the type of ride, distance and time.  Working in a data based laboratory I do tend to be a tad data obsessive…  So now I can look back and see exactly what we did in the two weeks leading up to our first ride at Okoroire… a ride every second day, shorter during the week, 12km the weekend before then just a 7km ride on Wednesday before the big day.

And yes I have been keeping up with this basic system ever since, but with average speed added… like I say a tad obsessive!

So here’s Lace at Okoroire saddled up and ready for her first endurance ride.  Tongue over the bit problems were still being solved with a noseband at that point, and it seems I had not yet bought my matching zilco breast plate, had just a basic, cheap Saddlery Warehouse saddle – Endurance model though!  And as you can see from the saddle cloth, I had not yet met Beryl!  (Supplier of lovely, colourful saddle blankets) This is the bridle I was so excited to find at a saddlery shop in Hamilton (I don’t think I’ve seen endurance gear in there before or since), George was a fidget and it was always a mission to get the halter off and the bridle on without getting your feet trodden on!  I kid you not… the number of times I would end up yelling and flailing at George as he trod on my foot and then didn’t notice and kept it there were probably more numerous than the times he didn’t! 

I rode with Kerry on Stella who was also having her first endurance ride, Nicola on Ngapa Phoenix (who I had tried when looking for Lace) and Anne doing her one and only endurance ride (so far) on Thomas her quarter horse.   We had a lovely ride, well behaved horses and nice company on a very nice course.  Lace was more laid back and relaxed than she was to be for many subsequent rides as she had no idea what was happening.  We were actually not far from base when she was clearly of the opinion that we were obviously never going to stop… and she was hungry!  She was trotting through lush grass about six inches long with her nose only a foot or so above the grass and “saying”… “I’m hungry…this looks good”.  Then we got back to base and again you could almost see her working it all out, “so you do a loop, and you come back, and then they feed you…ok, got it”.                                                                               

25km successfully completed, endurance pony number two underway.