Advantages of Traveling to Endurance Events

In addition to being able to camp with your horses during the race, there are many other huge advantages of EquiTraveling in conjunction with an endurance.

For all of these reasons I always strongly suggest doing a travel vacation that includes an endurance race or competitive trail event because even if you just mosey down the trail at a walk, don’t make time or even just do the first loop and quit – you STILL get all of these perks! 

Perks include are:

1. At most locations, every ride you take (during the race or otherwise) will have water troughs at regular intervals for your horses. These troughs are set up for the race but usually replenished regularly before and after the event as well as during the race
2. At an endurance race you’ll be surrounded by veterinary support. There usually is an on site farrier in addition to emergency veterinarians and even veterinary emergency stalls fully decked with IVs and beyond. You’ll also receive veterinary checks throughout your stay – something that is fantastic when you’re far from home.
3. Though many of the trail systems races are held on have some trails with markers, they usually aren’t perfectly marked on a regular basis. At an endurance race event every trail will be marked with ribbons or placards every couple hundred feet. Often the race trails even take you to new unmarked trails that you usually wouldn’t even have access too.
   
   Additionally, at endurance events there are many pre-determined routes to ride as well as meetings to talk about trail conditions, obstacles and answer any route questions.
4. You get DOZENS of volunteers to help you, support you, check on you and just entertain you.
5. Fully catered dinners are either included or available for an added fee that are delicious and offer excellent opportunities for networking with other horsemen and women, veterinarians and more.
6. A professional photographer is usually on site to take photos of you on the race which you can purchase later for a small fee.
7. A mobile tack store usually shows up at the bigger races so that you can buy anything you forgot, broke or just simply want to splurge on.

This is why many of our EquiTravels trips that we host are in conjunction with these events. Many of our travelers are NOT ENDURANCE RACERS, but they do the event for the opportunity to feel safe riding solo or in pairs while far from home instead of feeling like they need to riding in a large group with everyone in the travel group. 

It’s totally worth it to go to a race and just ride the first 10 to 15 miles at whatever pace you want! 

Or you can race, your choice!