Night Riding and Blind Faith
Roach and I have only ever ridden once at night before this ride and that night was a beautiful full moon out in the open on a familiar home trail. The stars were shining. I remember looking up at the moon thinking, “I almost wish it were darker.” This ride was not that ride.
The previous day we had not ridden faster than a trot because we wanted to make sure we had enough in the tank for the following two days. The race start was 4 pm. We decided to try to knock out the first 15 miles as fast as we conservatively could.
This, I think, is one of the fun and challenging aspects of endurance riding. You have to manage your animal’s energy reserve. They only have so much to give and you need to manage it wisely. Roach doesn’t know we’re doing this three days in a row but I do. So I need to make sure I keep my asks below his threshold.
Overall Strategy
So even though we wanted to knock out the first fifteen miles fast to hopefully gain some daylight time, we couldn’t do it aggressively because we had another ten miles after that initial fifteen AND another twenty-five miles the following morning. Remember, this ride is also following the previous day’s twenty-five miles.
Thankfully, the night ride followed the same route as the previous day’s ride. The thing that sucks for cautious riders is there is a portion of the trail that runs along next to the road way for about two miles total on either side of the ride. This trail is very narrow and has a lot of small trees cut down. There are tiny little stumps in the middle of the trail and those are very stressful for me. Are they stressful for Roach? I have no idea, but for me, I ride very cautiously through there, definitely no cantering. So this bit can eat up a little bit of time.
In the weeks prior to this race, we had a ton of rain. Several portions of trail were either covered in water or deep mud. Again, this slows you down and you have to allocate for that. Sure, you can run through water and mud. Have at it. But for me and mine, we walk. I don’t want to be taken out because we pulled something in the swamp. How embarrassing that would be for this Florida native.
Vet Hold
We came into camp at 6:36 PM. We pulsed down in ten minutes consistently all three days which is a big accomplishment for us. We rested, I did undercarriage care (there will be a post detailing that all important, underdiscussed topic), and everyone ate.
In endurance racing, there are mandatory vet holds. Your hold time does not begin until the horse’s heart rate has returned to at least 64 bpm. This is called “pulsing down.” For the LDs (Limited Distance, 25 to 30 miles), there is one mandatory vet hold between your first and second loop. Your hold time is a part of your overall completion time and your allotted time. For LDs, that’s six hours total.
Night Riding
When we went out to complete the final ten miles, it was 7:32 pm. You can see from the photos thanks to our friend, Pam (who does most of the camp and vet photos), just how dark it was when we set out. We chose to use red lights since it doesn’t interfere with the horses’ vision. We also had red lights attached to our saddles so we could see each other from behind.
“Horses can see only two of the visible wavelengths in the light spectrum because they have only blue-sensitive cone cells and yellow-sensitive cone cells. Thus, they see blue, green, and variations of the two colors, but do not see red or shades of red.”
Iowa State University, Equine Science
We lost ALOT of time due to nerves on our (the riders’) parts. Some portions of the trail are nice and wide, but most was very enclosed with lovely low hanging branches. We walked the first 2.5 miles or so. If you recall, I mentioned the trail leading out to the rest of the trails make me nervous. Aside from that, we were new to riding at night.
All that aside, we knew we weren’t going at a pace that would allow us to finish. I was just watching the time tick by on my watch.
One of the things I’ve been repeatedly told by more veteran riders when discussing my anxiety over night riding is, “You’ll be fine. Trust your horse.” Over and over again, “Trust your horse.” So, because I didn’t want my ride buddy, Angel, to hear due to my embrassment, I leant foward into those wonderful long ears and whispered, “I trust you, buddy. If I can’t trust you then there’s no equine in the world I can trust. Lets do this and bring us home safe and sound.” We picked up a trot and off we went.
Let me tell you, it is a bit unnerving when you first pick up that trot and trying to find your balance. You’ll be going down the trail and all of a sudden feel yourself listing off to the side like Jack Sparrow come ashore.
I took two non-drowsy Dramamine before we set out since I do know I get motion sickness and I decided better to head it off at the beginning and I finally figured out that if I used “soft eyes” as described by Sally Swift in Centered Riding, and kept my primary focus just in front of his ears, I could balance decently well.
Slowly, our confidence built and we realized just how much we lost in our anxiety. Aside from that, we took a wrong turn and lost an additional 1.5 miles between that and having to back track.
Blind Faith
My anxiety was building for a new reason now, if we didn’t do something, there was NO WAY we were going to finish by the 10 pm cut off time. Jessie was starting to have enough of being in front and Angel was getting mopey too. I couldn’t have that. Roach and I came here to finish. I don’t care if we finished dead last in every ride over the three days, we were finishing.
So, I kept telling Angel, ride on. Trot, man, trot. “What if we hit the gravel?” (Roach was still barefoot without boots). At this point, focused on finishing, I decided to put all my chips in with Roach: “I trust him, he’ll stop and tell me we need to slow down.” That’s exactly what we did. It was incredible how well he took care of us. We couldn’t see ANYTHING except branches with JUST enough time to duck for them.
One of the most amazing things I witnessed on this ride, was Roach’s incredible ability to navigate in the dark. One, I board so I miss out on being able to just observe. Two, I’m a big ol’ chicken, so being in before sundown has always been a big deal to me. I’ve never had the opportunity to appreciate Roach’s ability to navigate in the dark.
There’s this one track of trail that was a real narrow single track, more of a deer trail than a horse trail, switch back that you could hardly find in the day time. Jessie was done being leader so Roach took up the lead and I asked him to find the trail.
Wouldn’t you know it? Roach’s ears tipped straight forward and his head dropped literally looking and picking his way through that trail. I think he was smelling the other horses that passed before us. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was so cool. Then he picked up his trot once we were on the much easier to find wider trail. That was something he had been doing over the course of the ride. I would ask for a trot and if the terrain was good, he’d give it. If it was bad, he’d literally go “Hold that thought.” Pick his way through the bad area and without any prompting from me, pick up the trot. I have been absolutely blown away by this animal.
The Final Count Down
9:54 pm and a half mile to go. In LDs, you have to be in camp by the cut off time but you have 30 minutes to pulse down. I said, “Fuck it, we’re finishing. I don’t know about you, but Roach and I running in. If we don’t pulse down in time, no one can say we didn’t try.”
And we were off. Never did I think I would be galloping a horse through the woods when I can’t even see whats in front of me except those big beautiful ears. I’m so happy Pam was able to get the photo of us coming in. The dark photo with the red lights is me and Angel running in. Roach and I are in the front, Jesse and Angel right behind. We were shouting our numbers as we made it to the gate.
I heard an observer in camp yelling something to the effect of “way to make it!”
We made it at 9:59 PM. Holy crap. We made it. We pulsed in 10ish minutes and passed our vet check, cleared for the next day which started at 9 am.
The only thing I could think of reflecting on the ride and as I was riding as fast as I could in the full darkness of night, was once again how God has always spoken to me through horses. This is what blind faith was. I can’t get confirmation from Roach that he’s got my back. He can’t use words to tell me everything will be okay if I just let go. I had to trust he could get us through when I couldn’t see. If I didn’t give up control and go all in with faith and trust in my animal, we wouldn’t have finished in time. Not a snowball’s chance in hell would we have finished on time had we done things MY way and at MY comfort level. No. I had to let go and trust.
The veteran riders were right. Night riding is all about faith.
