Show Jumping was my first love . . .
Endurance became my passion!

Why did I get so passionate about it?  No doubt for all the reasons every other endurance enthusiast gets passionate about it.  It gets into your blood, you live with it all the time, it is all consuming, you spend hours of each day with your horse.

Training! As you can imagine, or already know, the fitness routine is serious! I used to get up at 4am three times a week and ride out in the dark, it was good practise riding with my miners lamp strapped to my head! To begin with Wanderer, my purebred Arab used to try and doge the light beam!  Getting your horse fit is a specialist job in itself, I had to learn all sorts of things; my horses weight, his standing heart rate, his respiration, his normal temperature, his urine colour, his manure consistency, his habits, and very importantly, how to feed an endurance horse.

I guess in a way it was inevitable that I would get hooked, my brand new boyfriend who I was totally in love with, was a high level competitor.  I barely new what an endurance ride was (twenty five years ago) but eagerly offered to help ‘strap’ at the ride.  How was I to know that the Tom Quilty was a 100 mile ride that started at midnight!!! How was I to know that over 200 horses had entered the competition and were nearly all grey Arabs, how was I to know that when they gathered in the outdoor stadium in a thick mist and under starters orders 200 horses would move the very core of my being; I was totally overwhelmed by that scene, I was in hook, line and sinker.

It was a steep learning curve. I was one of four grooms that day, I was designated several jobs, the main one was getting the all important 8 buckets of water ready at a range of temperatures from tepid through to very warm, however, I was not allowed to bathe the horse, twenty years of being around horses myself did not give me that experience, I watched on whilst the experts washed the horses in the way that every competitive endurance rider knows.  I watched in amazement as the first dozen or so horses came cantering into view, they had done 30 miles in around 3 hours and it had included the odd mountain or two!!!!! I watched in further amazement whilst horses urinated on cue to reduce their heart rate and learnt very quickly the importance of reducing heart rate within 30 minutes so they would be fit enough to continue the ride.

As you can tell, it excites me to write about it! There was so much to learn, but firstly there was an Arab to buy!  How lucky was I, my boyfriend, Steve, knew so much, he had ridden in many 100 milers and had been placed in several of them, he  was head groom for the Australian Team in the Olympics, there was not much he did not know on the subject and he trained me very well, I enjoyed every minute of it!

Steve took me on, I became his apprentice, he taught me everything about conditioning for aerobic and anaerobic fitness and stamina.  I loved it and had an exceptional horse with a standing heart rate of 29 before the fitness program began!  By the end of the first year I was out of novice and into the real competition.  My brilliant teacher kept holding me back so that Wanderer would always come home ‘ready to go on’.  His condition and heart rate was always well under the safety nets and his mental state went from strength to strength.  Our first 100 km ride had him coming in 3^rd and considering we had got lost and covered an extra 10k in error, we were very pleased!