Gemma Bishop gets going for the 2010 Endurance season

Like most other horse owners across the country, 2010 for us has started under a blanket of snow, ice and mud, which has made training for the new endurance season nigh on impossible. If the roads aren’t frozen to the point of treacherous, all the bridleways are under inches of mud which makes doing sustained fast work down right dangerous.

Despite this, Marygold (Minnismoor Mistique) and I headed to the Brendon EC just outside Brighton on the 21st Feb for a short training ride of 26km. It started raining just as we hit the M26, and hasn’t stopped since (it’s now Monday morning!). However, having driven for 2 hours there was no way I wasn’t riding. So Marygold was tacked up under her rug and off we went, soaked through before we’d even started. The rain had made the chalk extremely slippery so the intention was to take it steady. However, as is always the case, Marygold had other ideas and we still came in dead on 13kph and with plenty of running left in the tank. So it’s all looking good for our first 40km competitive ride in 4 weeks.

Maj (Vlacq Majid) is hacking out nicely and so we can start to think about aiming her for a training ride at the end of April.