Conditioning in the Heat: Road to the Tevis Cup # 50

For my last Road to Tevis post, I interviewed Shane Lesher about his personal road to Tevis with his mule Ticket (see the post here). When I asked him how he prepared Ticket for Tevis, he mentioned three things: 50-mile rides, climbing steep hills, and conditioning in the heat. “Steep and heat training” are most effective, Shane said.

Well, I have been doing steep for a year now. (See the terrain in our playground.) But! I generally try to avoid heat. We have a nice covered arena where it’s about 20 degrees cooler during the day. Fantazia gets a lot of arena work in the summer! (This is actually very good for her, but I get bored…) Of course, this means on a 100+ degree day, it’s at least 80 where I’m riding, but at least it’s out of the sun, and there is usually a breeze.

But if riding in the heat is good (and necessary) conditioning…

Last week I decided to do some heat training.

Because Tevis. When I was hoping to do it this year, I had planned on conditioning in the heat in the final 6 weeks leading up to July 24th. Now, although Fantazia and I won’t be doing Tevis for at least a year, I thought it’d be a good idea to start getting used to the heat.

A side benefit would be doing a longer ride without riding at night or getting up very early. Fantazia and I did one night ride, which was fun (read about our night ride), but I like my sleep. What this has boiled down to has been arena rides and one short 5-mile hill work ride.

For our heat training ride, I planned on 20 miles. It didn’t turn out that way, because there is no water. At least, no water Fantazia would deign to drink.

Above: The ground is very dry, and eroding.

Riding the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in a drought

All of Tulare County and most of the Central Valley and Sierra Nevada are in conditions of exceptional drought. ALL of California is at some stage of drought.

This means that the terrain is very dry. The slopes of the hills have less vegetation (if any), and in consequences are eroding. Paths that wind around hillsides are becoming dangerous. Riding straight up a dry hillside can be impossible, because it collapses under you.

The biggest problem, of course, is lack of water. All the tanks and streams are drying up, even the ponds that had good clean water all last summer. There are still some places where cattle will drink (because they have no choice). In fact, the best way to find water is to look for cattle. They don’t stray too far from a water source, and now that there are so few, they are bunched in watering-hole specific herds. (Normally they are all over).

Above: You can find water by looking for cattle. Unfortunately, Fantazia turned up her nose at this water hole (to be fair, we hadn’t been riding long at this point).

But Fantazia won’t touch mucky water unless she’s very desperate. Because she knows exactly how far we are from home at all times, she refused to drink on our ride last week.

Our first and last “long” ride conditioning in the heat.

Fantazia and I have ridden these trails many times. We know all the potential water holes. The first, about 4 miles in, was dry. Fantazia never drinks that soon anyway, but it was indicative of what we’d find. I chose a route that would take us to a relatively big hole, just over a mile further. It was not dry, though it was low and so mucky Fantazia didn’t even want to sniff it. Because that one had water, I assumed a large pond that has always had water (which she’ll drink) would not be dry.

Wrong! It didn’t have a drop. By that time we’d been riding over 9 miles in 90 degree heat. At this point, rather than continue for a few miles, I headed for home. By the easiest, shortest route, it was 7 miles. (Yes, you can choose less distance–it’s just over 3 miles as the crow flies–but only by tackling much more arduous terrain.) There is a way to do it in about 6.5 miles, but I knew there was no water that way, whereas there was a hole along the 7 mile route. However, that hole is about 2.5 miles from home… Even though Fantazia was really thirsty (her lips were dry, she was licking them, and she wasn’t sweating enough), she turned her nose up at that muddy water and chose to tough it out.

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Troughs are good!

I had also been hoping the cattle ranch we spend most of our time riding through would have filled a few troughs along the way, but they had not. Fortunately, the person who runs cattle on the ranch next to our place keeps a trough full. It’s only about 1000 feet from where she always drinks in our own section of the irrigation ditch, so we never stop there. We did this day! Fantazia must have drunk 4-5 gallons. Then we rode over the hill (65′ up and then down), though our back gate, and to the ditch… where she drank another 50+ swallows (I stopped counting).

Ride stats

We rode 16.26 miles in 4 hours and 36 minutes (4:06:42 moving time). Total elevation gain was 3,996′ (minimum 800′. maximum 2,805′). Average temperature was about 90F, min 81F, max 96F (this is subtracting ten degrees from my Garmin estimates, which are always high). We went slow, especially once I realized Fantazia wasn’t going to be drinking: average moving speed 4mph (max 13.3mph).

I drank every drop of my 2 liter hydration pack bladder, other than what I dribbled on Fantazia’s neck. I’d guess I drank about 1.5 liters of it. I always stuff as much ice as I can in, then fill with water. It stays cold the entire time.

Lessons learned

Heat training is definitely a good idea. Especially if we intend to do Tevis! It’s a lot harder to ride in the heat, especially where we are (all steep hills). But there are a few things I’ll keep in mind!

1. Make sure your horse drinks well before setting out. It would have been a good idea to give her electrolytes the night before. (And I need elyting practice!) She may have drunk well, may not have. She drinks out of the irrigation ditch. The best thing would have been to get up an hour early to feed. She goes up to drink 1-2 hours after I feed her.
   I wouldn’t elyte the morning of the ride, because the water out there IS nasty!
2. Know all the water holes, or at least where there might be water if you are lucky.
3. Know where any potential water troughs are kept full.
4. Rather than ride a long way out from home, stay close to a water source, even if it means doing loops.
   This is what I am doing now.
5. Take a lot of water for the rider!
6. Ride where your horse knows the terrain and the distances so she can make her own decisions about drinking. Don’t forget the horse can probably smell the water (or lack thereof) long before you can see it. Fantazia did not want to go up the hill to the empty pond, and she would have been eager to do so, if there had been water. Fantazia takes care of herself very well when it comes to drinking.
7. Actually horses can get pretty thirsty and then drink gallons of water to replenish themselves, even if you worry about their well-being!