> gaits for any pleasure activity - naturally gaited, but a little to the > diagonal side. She tends to default to either running walk or foxtrot > and > she can canter. She's a lovely horse, but she is what she is. She's > not an > Arab, and I'm not complaining.
Your friend appears to equate endurance with racing. For that mind set only a small percentage of Arabians, even, will do, especially if looking at LD or 50 miler times. One of the most amusing moments I had at an LD was when I on my Peruvian and my riding companion, Sarah, on a very green arabian gelding were walking quietly the last mile back to camp on the Eastern High Sierra 30. Suddenly four girls came charging up behind us and asked for thrail and Sarah (a hot shoe racer a decade earlier) looked at me and asked "no you want to race them?" and we both went "Nah". It had been a lovely ride (except for some very challenging batural obstacles) and we had mostly walked the whole way. So we moseyed on in, jumped off and yelled for the P&R person (an LD ride dosen't end until the horse meets pulse criteria). My horse, Rosa Blanca, was at criteria right away and we got a time of 5:58, Sarah's horse pulsed down two minutes later. Both horses trotted sound for the vet. And the horses that raced past? -- one took another 25 minutes to pulse down, and the other three cramped up during the pulse down period and failed their soundness check and were pulled. (The annoying thing? -- that ride gave a Turtle Award for last place that was the same as the first place prize . . . and it went to the surviving racer wannabe!) But that ride showed me that Rosa, who had been an annoyingly pissy mare for the slower NATRC Novice rides, *did* have the "heart" for the longer distances and more challenging trails. The obstacles (for example, boulder filled Sierra trout streams in full snow runoff flood) were awful and she kept dealing with them without resistance. She kept her cool, ate and drank on the trail, made the ride time easily, and stayed sound. That's heart. Lynn Kinsky, Santa Ynez, CA http://www.silcom.com/~lkinsky/
