Ep33 - Chilled-Out Conditioning for Type A Endurance Riders

How much conditioning does your horse really need to get ready for endurance riding? In this episode, personal trainer and endurance rider Tamara Baysinger - aka The Sweaty Equestrian - explains why newer endurance horses benefit from a simple foundation of long, slow distance—and how to build toward a first LD or 50 without overcomplicating the plan.

Links:

3 Day Per Week Conditioning Guide - Download my free roadmap to your horse's first endurance ride.

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Sponsor: TSE Fitness – Get endurance-rider fit alongside fellow horsewomen, with The Sweaty Equestrian as your coach.

Transcript

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Welcome to Endurance Riding Optimized with the Sweaty Equestrian. I'm personal trainer and endurance rider Tamara Basinger, and I'm here to help you ride stronger in a day and longer in your life. Hey, did you hear that? You are in the right place. This is the podcast formerly known as Equestrian Fitness for the Long Ride. If you missed last week's episode, you might want to go back and listen to episode 32 all about the newly broadened focus on endurance readiness for the whole horse and whole rider. So we'll still be talking about equestrian fitness, of course, but we are broadening the scope to talk about endurance more generally. And today I want to dig right into one of the most common topics that lands in my inbox, and that is how to condition a horse for endurance riding. And I find that most people, interestingly, actually kind of want a complicated answer. I think it's because those of us who are attracted to distance riding, to endurance, tend to be type A. We tend to be the intense, ambitious, fast-moving, hard-pushing sort of person. We like structure and plans. Maybe we're perfectionists. We honestly, deep down, don't want to hear just ride a lot. We want to hear when and how and where and how much to ride. And then we want to put all of that into a calendar. We want to plan the work and work the plan. And I tell you what, I totally get this 1000%. 20 years ago, when I was new to the sport, I was definitely that type A detail-oriented, nerdy perfectionist. Who am I kidding? I'm still that way. But of course, I didn't want to hurt my horse. I didn't want to make a fool of myself. I did want to read all the things. I read everything I could find, which wasn't honestly a heck of a lot, on endurance writing. And it was potential information overload. I liked reading about all those different conditioning strategies and recommendations, but it left me sometimes wondering: well, what should I be doing right now at this stage? There are all those principles out there about intervals and tempo rides and all this sort of thing. Am I supposed to be doing that? Well, it took me a few seasons. And I actually, okay, you guys are gonna laugh at this. Go ahead and laugh. My first couple years in endurance, I actually attempted to map out all my conditioning rides for the year, like sitting at my desk in January, because somehow I thought that would work. Um, if you two are tempted to try mapping out, calendaring all your conditioning rides for a quarter, let alone a year, I'm gonna tell you this. Give up now. Life will get in your way, things will happen. Yes, you want to have a general plan and know sort of uh where you're going from point A to point Z, but yeah, don't try to map them all out. It won't happen. Anyway, a few seasons in, I settled into regularly conditioning with an extremely experienced endurance writer who happened to live near me. And that was when I started to figure out that I was making it way too complicated. So this other writer who became my mentor for several years knew a lot. Um, she had raced back in the day, and now she was in her older decades and was a consistent mid-packer with horses that she rode year after year for thousands of miles with almost no poles. So that's a great person to learn from, and I want to share some of my observations with you. So this episode will help you cut through the noise to what actually matters as you condition your horse for endurance. We're going to siphon off all the extra information that you don't really need right now and let go of the details that you don't need to worry about until you are a couple years down the trail. So here it is in one sentence. This is almost too simple, but I'm not making it up. One sentence. Are you ready? For the first two years of your horse's endurance career, all you need to think about is long slow distance. Long slow distance. LSD for short, not that kind of LSD. Uh this is pretty much true regardless of your horse's history. Long slow distance is what a horse that is young and green needs. Long slow distance is what your off-track racehorse needs. Long slow distance is what your teenaged horse, who's a veteran of other sports like cutting or dressage, needs. Distance riding places different demands on your horse than what he has done before. So we're going to keep this simple and focus on long, slow distance. For the first two years of your horse's endurance career, you do not need to worry about things like intervals and tempo rides. What you do need to do is lay a foundation of long, slow distance. So let's get into exactly what that means. We'll break down what is long and what is slow. Well, long is relative to what the horse has done before. So if your horse is used to, say, five-mile trail rides, then long for him is going to start around seven miles perhaps, and then gradually over three months or so, in a typical case, move up to where a long ride for him is around 20 miles. Now, what about slow in long slow distance? Once again, this is relative. Slow is relative to the pace that your horse could go, and very likely the pace that he would like to go. Depending on his starting level of fitness, this probably means gradually shifting from mostly walking to mostly trotting. And we want to keep that trot moderate. Moderate, of course, varies by horse. Some are naturally faster than others, and many, again, try to go faster than we need to be letting them early in the conditioning process. So seven miles per hour is a good speed to settle in at for many. We're talking about a medium trot here, not a fast trot. So both long and slow are going to mean different things when you start conditioning your horse than they mean a year from now. But what we're not going to do is lose sight of the fact that all we're doing here is laying a foundation. We are not building the fancy house. We are laying the foundation. It may be kind of boring, but it's also crucial. If we skip ahead to the mahogany staircase and the stained glass windows without a solid foundation underneath, all that pretty stuff, the top 10 finishes, the first place awards, all that is going to crumble. If you hang around the endurance world for a while, you're bound to see the occasional horse and rider who show up as newcomers and blaze their way around the trail. They will probably win some races. And when I see this, I try really hard not to judge, although it is tempting, because I don't know their individual history and what underlying fitness that horse might have. There is a chance that it is not inappropriate for them to be ridden that way. So I try not to judge, but more often than not, horses like that will disappear after a season or less. And that's probably because something broke. They just weren't prepared to perform at that level. They lacked the foundation, and the fancy house came down. So what we're doing with long slow distance, building that foundation, is we are allowing the horse's physical systems and structures to adapt. Now, by systems, I'm referring to things like the cardiorespiratory system. That takes a few months to develop. Structures, things like muscle and bone and soft tissue, ligaments, tendons, those take longer, even a few years for the bone to remodel to the kind of stress that a horse faces on the endurance trail. Now, the younger and or less fit your horse is, the more gradually we need to lay the foundation, especially for the sake of those structures. Because every workout is going to break down the structures just a little bit and they'll build back stronger. And break down just a little bit and build back stronger. It's a long, slow process. Now, it'll go a little bit more quickly in a horse that has a background of regular work, but it still pays to err on the safe side. The good news is there are mental advantages to this long, slow distance as well. This is a good chance to train the horse to chill out, respond to your guidance, instead of giving in to his natural instinct to keep up with the herd, even if it kills him. Because guess what? It can literally kill him. So you have to have that in hand. So while long slow distance can sound boring, it definitely doesn't have to be. You don't have to go fast to keep things interesting and also to build fitness in ways that don't overly beat up the horse's structures before they're ready. Some ways that you can make things interesting and also useful for your horse are to look for hills to add in. You want to climb those hills typically faster than you descend them. Now I'm not saying you should never trot downhill. Some people will say that never ever ever trot a horse downhill. I personally don't agree with that. I think a horse needs to learn to carry a rider downhill at a trot in a relaxed and balanced way. That means that you, as the rider, have to be capable of riding downhill at a trot in a relaxed and balanced way. And that's going to take a certain amount of physical fitness that you can be working on during this whole long, slow distance process as well. You need to be working on that in the saddle, but also on the ground, away from your horse, so that your fitness is progressing along with the horses. But that said, I would teach the horse to trot downhill. I do teach my horses to trot downhill, but I don't do a ton of it in the first couple years. I want them to know how. I want to be able to do it if I need to make time during races, but I don't want to beat up my horses by doing a lot of downhill trotting. I will trot them uphill. It's great for the cardiorespiratory system when they're ready. Um, some cantering is good. It's good for training, it's good for variety. Also, you can teach the horses to cross obstacles, things like water, bridges, bogs. Speaking of bogs, you can build the horse up to being able to work in difficult footing like mud and sand. All these things can be introduced really gradually because you are in the long, slow distance phase. You're not in a hurry. This is a great time to work on any training issues. For example, I am presently in the early conditioning phase with my horse Pirate. He's a six-year-old Arabian, just started under saddled this year. And it I rode him today for the second time in, well, let's see, it he'd had a three-week break because I was traveling a lot. Um, and so he was a little hotter than usual. And I spent a lot of today's ride reminding him that his job is to listen to me and go the pace that I ask him to go. Because every time I tried to move him into a trot, he wanted to zip down the trail a million miles an hour. I was not game for that. Um, so I spent about eight miles walking him along at a nice brisk walk, then sitting deeply and asking him to stop. And if he didn't stop, then I would bend him to a stop over and over and over again. Now he knows this lesson, but he needed it redrilled into him today. Eventually, when he remembered, oh yeah, at the walk and was consistently stopping when I just sat deep on him at the walk. Then we proceeded to doing this as a trot at a trot, and we did it all over again. So that is the kind of ride that I am totally cool with having on a horse in this early conditioning phase. Again, I'm not in a hurry. I am much more concerned about slowly, gradually laying that physical foundation and the all-important mental foundation. This is the time. You don't want to have a raging fit horse six months from now that is not mentally ready for you to handle that level of fitness. You build the body and the mind together. You can also use this time to cross-train with something interesting like some dressage, a bit of jumping. You're going to do your horse more favors by specializing in balanced and diverse muscle development rather than putting in more miles of just going straight down the trail all the time. So, speaking of miles, how many miles are we talking about? Before an LD, a limited distance ride, which is anything under 50 miles, I like to work a horse up to covering about 18 to 20 miles at, say, an average of a six to seven mile per hour pace. Most horses can get ready for a conservatively paced LD in three to four months. Before a 50-mile ride, I like my horse to be able to do the same, to go about you know an average six, seven mile-an-hour pace on trails for about 25 miles. And I try to make sure that that is about the same kind of terrain as the 50-mile ride that I plan to do. So I'm not going to train my or condition my horse on the flat farmland where I live and then go try to ride him 50 miles in the mountains. That's not fair. I need to go out and look for similar terrain to what he will be in at the 50 that I choose. How long does it take to get him there? Six or seven months is a pretty reasonable time to prepare a horse for his first conservatively paced 50-mile ride. Now, the good news is I can easily do those things by riding just three times a week. Typically, that's going to look like two shorter rides and one longer one. Now, I know you type A's out there still want more details. You want a plan because acting on plans is what we do. So I actually have one for you. My three-day-a-week conditioning guide is a one-pager that's going to give you a roadmap to your horse's first six months of conditioning. In that time, you can bring him up to readiness for his first 50. And about halfway through, you can likely enter an LD. So let me try tell you where to get that. It's free. You can get it at thesweateequestrian.com slash conditioning guide. All one word, conditioning guide. I'll put a link in the show notes. And when you grab that guide, it'll also sign you up for my free newsletter. And if you're not on my newsletter yet, what are you even doing? Every Wednesday morning I send out a high value email only to those of you who are on my list. It's content that you can't get anywhere else. And I do write it myself. AI does not write it. And my goal is simply to help you and your horse achieve your goals. So again, the conditioning guide is at thesweequestrian.com/slash conditioning guide. Get that free guide and the newsletter at the same time. It'll take you like, I don't know, 30 seconds. And in the guide, you'll notice one more general principle that I want you to bear in mind as you take this more chilled-out approach to conditioning your endurance horse. As a general principle, go either longer or faster or more challenging in a given ride. But not all at the same time. We don't go longer and faster and more challenging. We build these things up kind of one ride at a time. Maybe we go longer this day, maybe we climb more hills that day, maybe we go faster on the third day, but we're not doing all those things together on Saturday because that's when we can. A side benefit of this whole long slow distance thing, by the way, is that it requires you to train yourself. Often the hardest part for the rider is our own impatience. Our horse seems strong, right? He can do more. He feels great. But bear in mind that if your horse feels strong and also sane, and you're wondering if maybe you're advancing him a little too slowly, then there's a good chance that you're actually doing it right. Keep doing it right. Don't mess it up by going too far too fast. Now there is a time and there is a method for diversifying your conditioning rides to coax optimal performance out of a horse. Absolutely, that is a thing. But that is a thing that you did not approach until after the horse is legged up, after the foundation is laid. So if you are anywhere near the beginning of your horse's endurance journey, his first couple years, just keep laying down that solid foundation. Long slow distance. Okay, that's it for today. So chill out, my nerdy type A friends. Relax, enjoy the ride. Keep it simple, keep it consistent. Long slow distance will pay off in the long game. Want to get more sweaty? Subscribe to my newsletter at the sweatyequestrian dot com slash newsletter. And remember, you have what it takes to be a full athletic partner for your horse. Saddle up strong.