Along-Distance Physical Chess Game
By Patrick Tandy

For Annapolis-based appeals attorney Cynthia Young, happy trails are not necessarily the easiest. Not on horseback, at least, with 50 miles of mountainous terrain to cover.

“I’ve never been one for just walking down the trail,” she explains of her approach to endurance trail riding. “I like to go snorting down the trail at a faster clip. An endurance ride is generally 50 to 100 miles. It’s a race, but it’s also a chess game.”

Young, who won a 25-mile competition last year at Pennsylvania’s Michaux State Forest and has regularly placed in the top 10 for both 50- and 100-mile rides, isn’t blind to the dangers of stepping up the pace, however, especially over uncertain ground.

“I see riders [who] sometimes are extremely scary because they’ll go over terrain that I would prefer to just take one tiny step at a time,” she says, “and they just go barreling over it. I’m flabbergasted sometimes that the horse can do it. I’m in awe that the horse can do it.”

But no horse that’s not up to it sets hoof on the trail; the organizations that govern these rides, such as Eastern Competitive Trail Ride Association (ECTRA), which sanctions rides from Maine to West Virginia, see to that.

“[Your horse undergoes] a veterinary exam before you start on the trail,” says Young, who has logged approximately 3,700 miles in competition, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of miles she’s covered conditioning horses. “The vet looks [them] over for wounds, injuries, anything really apparent. They also look over the horse to see if it’s sound. If it’s limping or carrying one leg, then obviously it’s not fit to start on the ride.”

And neither horse nor rider is ever really beyond the reach of the Long Arm of sanctioning bodies like ECTRA (www.ectra.org). The conspicuous presence of mandatory equipment such as riding helmets and horse bridles is balanced by the not-so-obvious absence of others, notably drugs.

“Riders can eat whatever they want or they need, but no drugs in the horse,” Young says. “You can’t give painkillers. You can’t give energy-enhancers. The only thing that they allow is electrolytes because you’ve got horses that are sweating large quantities. You’re not allowed to put any ointments, salves or liniments or anything like that on your horse. If your horse gets a cut, you have to decide, ‘Is this cut bad enough that maybe I need to withdraw and quit for the day?’ or ‘That’s just a thorn scratch – that’s going to stop bleeding before I get around the corner.’ So you have to make a decision.”

Vitals such as circulation, pulse, and metabolic rate are also carefully monitored throughout the ride, at veterinary checkpoints called holds.

“On an endurance ride there will be at least two, sometimes three (holds) on a 50-mile ride, and there will be six, seven, maybe eight on a hundred-mile ride,” Young explains. “You have to make every vet stop. You have to pass every vet stop. If you don’t pass a vet stop you get a free trailer ride back to base camp, or you can just walk your horse back to your trailer and go on home.”

And, of course, between points A and B there is getting there. The trails are marked with everything from surveyor tape to pie plates to cardboard arrows. “Sometimes they give you a map,” Young notes. “Sometimes they don’t.”

“The maps are pretty worthless, anyway,” she laughs, producing a washed-out sheet of paper. “This is what happens to a map after 30 miles - it gets soaked with water, from your drinking, your sweaty hands. And as you go along, you cool the horse with a sponge on a string. You hold onto one end of the string and you hurl the sponge down into the water source. You give it a quick yank and you open your hand and you catch the sponge simultaneously and then you squeeze that over the horse’s neck to cool him down. And on a really hot day you squeeze it over your neck and your shoulders and your t-shirt and everything else you can cool down. It gets pretty hot out there when you’re doing this at 95 degrees.”

Naturally, speed isn’t everything.

“There actually are a few people out there who can canter a good deal of this, which is going at a 15-18 mph pace,” Young explains. “On a horse that’s pretty fast. A horse walks somewhere between two and four miles an hour. Four is a pretty good clip. I mean, that horse is moving. [On foot], you would have to take a few jog steps every now and then to keep up with that horse. The horse generally trots somewhere in the 6-12 mph range. So the trot is the most economical gait. It takes the least out of the horse metabolically. Obviously the walk is easier but you don’t get very far very fast.”

The horses are given a final examination at the end of the ride, with any deterioration from their starting condition duly noted (although the deterioration, as Young points out, is often less apparent in horse than in rider).

“Some of these horses will come in off a hundred-mile ride and they’ll look like they just came out of their stalls,” she says. “They are perky, their ears are up. They’re pulling on their lead ropes. They want to take their owner over to the grass and eat all the grass they can.”

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“Some people think you should get the most energetic, wild-eyed horse that you can find because he’s really going to rip down the trail,” Young says. “I don’t think so. Horses don’t think in the same terms as humans do, but you want an animal that is going to think at its own level and not risk everything in some blind rush of speed. You want an animal that is thinking for its own preservation.”

Although the sport has flourished in the Americas, it has strong roots, as do many of its equine participants, in foreign lands, particularly the Middle East.

“Saudi Arabia has sponsored [events] for a number of years,” Young says. “The sport actually developed in the United States, but the primary horse is an Arab or an Arab-cross, [which] are the ideal horses for this sport. They’re bred in hot, dry conditions, or historically evolved in hot, dry conditions. They were used as a war horse, of course. They were expected to go 50 miles, conduct a cavalry-type fight then ride 50 miles home. Otherwise, they were going to get killed if they couldn’t retreat! So here are horses that in maybe a one- to two-day period were going up to 100 miles in travel, plus doing battle.

Of Young’s current stable of five horses, her “primary athlete” is Shamrock Jafar, an eight-year-old Arabian gelding named for the villain from Disney’s 1992 movie Aladdin.

“I didn’t name him,” she laughs. “He came that way. I broke him as a three-year-old, mainly because I couldn’t find what I wanted all ready to go at a price that I was willing to pay.”

Young has bred horses in the past, with mixed results. “It’s almost impossible,” she says. “You have to have been doing it for decades to do a breeding program geared to the sport. You’re better off looking for physical and mental characteristics in an individual horse and taking that horse and putting it into the sport. There are some very successful breeders that get nice prices for their horses, but they’re doing it as a full-time job. They don’t practice law. Some of them don’t even go to these events – they just breed the horses for the sport.”

	Sanctioning groups allow horses to take part in 25-mile rides beginning at age 4, followed a year later by rides of any length, according to Young – well before what she considers a horse’s prime in the sport.
Cynthia Young (left) leads her daughter, Jessica Duvall, on an endurance trail ride

“I actually find that the ideal age for a lot of these horses is between 12 and 16,” she says. “They are just all sinew and iron strength. If they are injured somehow, it seems that they have an almost instantaneous recovery time because they’re just so physically fit. And once they’re fit, they’re almost fit for life. You can let them have a month off in January because of too much snow or rain or whatever. Take them out the beginning of March, brush them off, start a little bit of conditioning a couple of times a week, and by the end of March you’re ready to go do whatever you wanted that you were doing at the end of the year.”

Endurance rides are held throughout the United States, and are generally run in the mid-Atlantic region between March and November. They are, as their name suggests, rain-or-shine events. Winter weather offers the most prohibitive conditions, not so much for the ride itself, but transportation to and from the event.

“Ice and snow are a travel problem for anybody, and as we all know from common experience, a tractor trailer on the road is a real danger in the snow or slick conditions,” says Young. “Most people are using a truck and a trailer of some kind, and you’ve got a jackknifing possibility when you do that.”

Young hauls Shamrock Jafar – along with everything from hay and grain for the horse to water for both of them – to and from each event in a four-horse stock trailer, which doubles as her on-site living quarters, behind her diesel Suburban. Tents are out of the question because, as Young notes, “horses get loose at these rides occasionally, [and] you really don’t want to be run over by a horse while you’re lying on the ground.”

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“I got started in horses when I was about 12,” Young recollects. “My father wanted to take us to a vacation resort where they offered horseback riding, and he thought it would be a good idea before I just went there and rode that I had a few lessons. I went on the vacation and I ate it up. When I came back I continued with the lessons on through high school.

“Once I got out of high school things got sort of patchy for a while about what I could ride, when I would have time to ride. I basically cajoled friends who had neighbors who had horses into going in and knocking on their door and saying, ‘You know, you’ve got a really nice horse standing out in the pasture, but nobody ever rides it. It would be great for the horse if it got ridden once in a while.’”

Young’s involvement with endurance riding began in 1981 with a newspaper ad that caught her eye.

“I saw an ad in the Sun papers that said, ‘Competitive trail ride, Patapsco State Park, come do 30 miles of trail,’” she explains. “And I’m thinking, ‘Thirty miles of trail…how much is 30 miles of trail? I guess I could ride that far. I don’t know if my horse could ride that far.’ At the time I was probably riding three or four times a week, and I’d go out anywhere from [one] to three hours and just rip-snort down the trails.”

Today, family life and varying interests have cut Young’s riding to a few hours each weekend, though she manages to compete in about one ride per month. The limited challenge offered by the level farmlands of home presents its own limitations as well.

“[Shamrock Jafar] needs far more than what I can do,” Young says. “Even if I rode every day, I could not get him fit enough because of the terrain, so I end up having to use a trainer in Pennsylvania.”

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By Young’s estimate, there are approximately 30 “really active” endurance riders in Maryland – “quite a few,” though there could always be more.

“I would love to help somebody get into this sport,” says Young, who suggests www.endurance.net, the online newsletter of the American Endurance Ride Conference (www.aerc.org), as a valuable resource for anyone interested in hitting the trail. “There’s an archive in there. You can learn about what you need to do with your horse.”

Given her druthers, Young’s own horizons might include the annual Western States Trail Ride (also known as the Tevis Cup Ride) out west, as well as the much-closer-to-home, 100-mile Old Dominion Ride in Virginia. “If I did any rides out west, I would lease a horse [out there],” she notes. “It’s just too much on the animal.”

And too much on the animal is simply too much on Young.

“For me, a horse is an enabler because I can’t walk 50 miles,” she says. “I couldn’t run 50 miles on a treadmill. But on a horse I have legs that can take me anywhere. I can go to the top of the mountain easily, I can come down the mountain easily. It makes it that much more enjoyable for me. I’m not an athlete.”

Young also sees tangible parallels between riding the trails and her practice of law. “I do appeals only, which are relatively time-consuming,” she says. “It involves a lot of writing. It involves a lot of thinking. Hence, the parallel to playing chess on the trail. You have to plan a strategy. You can’t just say, ‘OK, 50 miles, here I go!’ There’s a lot of preparation involved. You have 20 minutes of show time at oral argument in the court of special appeals. You get 30 minutes in court of appeals. And to some extent that’s what the ride is: you have 50 miles to show how well you’ve done your homework and your background. If you haven’t done the prep, you can forget it. The event is the tip of the iceberg, just as it is in an appellate practice.”

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Publications : Bar Bulletin: August, 2003