Some of you may know that I've been agonizing over whether to try our first 100 at Pine Tree this year. We've got 440 ECTRA/AERC miles if you count Acadia (and I do). This includes completing the Pine Tree 50 twice before... 2003 and 2006... and the Justin Morgan Memorial 50 three weeks ago. He's been getting stronger each time he goes out, but our ride times have been relatively slow. In 2003 we finished in a ride time of 9:53, 30th out of 47 starters (33 finishers), and in 2006 we finished in a ride time of 8:43, 27th out of 42 starters (33 finishers). At the Justin Morgan we finished with only 15 minutes to spare, but I don't know our ride time because I can't remember the total time spent in holds, and if I had to guess I think we finished 19th out of 28 starters (21 finishers). I'll know for sure when the results are published. I didn't mind the long ride time because the terrain and weather made it SO TOUGH!
So like I said, he's been getting stronger and stronger, and I thought we were ready to move up in some fashion. I registered for the 50 but kept wondering if we should try the 100. I asked a bunch of folks what they thought, and most of them said go for the 100. The thought seemed to be, you know you want to to step it up sometime, so why not now? I was still mulling it over on Thursday night while packing, on Friday while driving, and even after I got to camp. (In case you're wondering, no, I didn't get lost on the way there, but I did miss the last turn and have to turn around because the AERC sign got knocked down in the high winds and driving rain.)
When I got to ridecamp at around 1:15 it was raining lightly and there was thunder rumbling in the distance. I got a great parking spot not far from the vetting area and just far enough away from the outhouse. I took my time setting up camp, including the new First Up canopy from WalMart (on sale for $79). My neighbor Steve was nice enough to assist with that part. (I love that canopy. It was almost as good as having a roll-out awning. Really big, easy to assemble, and stayed put in the wind! I put my four folding chairs and two tables underneath, and there was still room for my saddle stand, two coolers, and a center pathway.)
Before I picked up my ride packet, I told Dr. Art King (seemingly the east coast's busiest endurance vet) our history and asked what he thought I should do. He told me that because the average speed goes down once dark falls, unless we were accustomed to fast 50s, there wasn't much chance of finishing a 100 before the cutoff. He said with our previous 50-mile ride times we'd end up doing the last 40 miles or so in the dark. Even if we did finish before the cutoff, we'd be out there a LONG TIME and that would be hard on both of us... harder than doing the whole thing faster would be. His argument made really good sense to me, so 50 miles it was! My goal became to see how fast we could finish and still be in good shape at the end.
I should mention that other folks did also suggest that we stick to a fast 50, but they suggested it from a competitive finish viewpoint rather than from the "you can't finish in time" viewpoint. These folks just knew that if they were in my position they wouldn't start a 100 if they didn't know they could finish near the front. Nothing wrong with that viewpoint, I'm just not competitive so I was happy with the thought of just finishing before the cutoff. Art's explanation of why he didn't think we could finish by then made sense and won me over.
Zephyr vetted in with all As, and wowed the crowd by cantering away from the vet during trot-out. I understand bets were being taken on whether I was going to stay on my feet there at the end. I swear, between his mid-trot-out stop-drop-and-roll at Justin Morgan, and the canter at Pine Tree, I think people will be making sure they watch his trot-outs to see what he will do next and how I will deal with it!
My crew (husband Louis, and friends Heather and Craig) arrived at around 7pm, just in time for the ride meeting at 7:30. We took a couple minutes to set up their tents and then headed up. Ride Manager Tom Hutchinson gave a brief description of the trail, with some comments here and there about how this color or that color would be replaced for a while with this other color because he'd run out during the middle section of the trail. He also talked about how we'd recognize a lot of the trail sections, but that because ridecamp had moved, everything would come at different times than usual and a lot of it would be in reverse. Even the away holds would be in a different spot, this time in a field just down the road from the old ridecamp at the fairgrounds. The 50-mile ride would start at 5:30am, thirty minutes after the 100. The weather report was for low 70s and overcast, with winds of 15-20mph. As Mary Coleman would say... the forecast was for Morgan Weather!
After the ride meeting, Heather (who had crewed for me at Justin Morgan) and I talked about my speed goal. I asked her to calculate ride times for each loop based on a 7-hour ride time, which would have been a mid-pack finish based on previous year's finish times. It would also have been 1.75 hours faster than my fastest time on this course in the past. We also went over the tacking-up and un-tacking process a little bit, because as a non-horse person she'd wished last time that she could have helped more, at least with the un-tacking anyway. Meanwhile, Louis cooked a late supper and got everything organized for a hot ride-day meal during one of the holds. I asked him to be sure and have a hot dog ready for me, as I was sure my belly wouldn't manage a hamburger! Then I gave Zephyr a pan of wet mash with a heaping helping of Perform n' Win, which he slurped up with abandon. Craig helped Heather load the truck bed to her specifications. She had definite ideas about where she wanted to put what, based on her experience at Justin Morgan.
Then we all spent a couple hours of sitting around under the canopy with a good wine and the company of our neighbor and new friend Pete. He and Louis spent some time talking about pilot stuff... Pete's a commercial pilot and Louis is a General Aviation pilot. We own a share of a club-owned Cessna 150.
Louis and I crawled into our tent by maybe 11:00, and I spent the next five hours laying awake listening to the wind and the bullfrogs. For once, I couldn't hear Zephyr chewing his hay, drinking, peeing, and pooping... so of course I worried that he wasn't doing any of that. I laid there and waited for the alarm to go off at 4:00.
I started to hear people moving around at 3:30, and I got up a few minutes before 4:00. Fed Zephyr, went in the trailer to get my breakfast and tried not to wake Heather, who was sleeping there in my tent cot. Unfortunately the wind blew the trailer door shut with a really loud CLANG so I was sure I'd woken her, but I didn't hear any rustling. WOW, I thought, she really does sleep like the dead! I finished fetching my breakfast and climbed back out to eat. Breakfast for me was the same as the last couple times... some raw Old Fashioned Oatmeal (not quick oats) with Protein Crunch Cereal on top, diced dried fruit on top of that, and cold milk. I forced myself to eat the whole thing before doing anything else.
I went to the truck to get something and when I opened the back door, Heather sat up from the backseat and gave me a heart attack! It turned out that she hadn't been able to sleep in the tent cot and had moved to the truck thinking maybe that would help. Unfortunately, it hadn't, and she'd been awake most of the night too.
I woke up Louis and Craig at 4:45, just before I began tacking up. Craig held Zephyr for me so I didn't have to move my saddle stand from where I'd left it under the canopy. There was nowhere to tie Zephyr on that side of the trailer, because the canopy and all our other stuff was in the way. I was in the saddle and warming up by 5:10, and made sure to take a picture of ridecamp from up on the hillside.
Between Friday night and Saturday morning, I think as many as four different people looked at Zephyr and commented how nice it was to see endurance horses trending towards bigger bodies and rounder barrels, instead of the skinny underfed creatures of years past. Enough people said that about him that I started to worry that he was fat and wouldn't be able to pulse down well! He didn't look fat to me, but...
I checked in with the out timer (RM Tom) at 5:15, and crossed the start line at 5:30 in a pack of the first five horses. We all moved along at a fast trot (which is to say, Zephyr pulled my arms out of their sockets) until we hit the first big climb, described by RM Tom as "the worst trail in the whole ride". He was right. It was long, it was steep, it was rocky, and it was muddy. But it was over relatively soon, even at a walk. We did pass one horse and rider on their way down that hill with a lameness issue, I think it was a 50-mile horse but I don't really know. Wendy Bejarano commented that "at least the hill would settle the horses."
As soon as that yucky hill was over, we all took off and Zephyr started stretching my arms for me again. I yelled forward to Wendy "yep, the horses sure have settled down!" I think she laughed but I couldn't quite hear her because of the wind rushing by.
Heather had calculated my goal ride-time for that first 11-mile loop to be about 1.5 hours, and we arrived at the first crew stop just as they did. They were shocked because they didn't expect me for at least 15 minutes, and they were even more shocked to hear we were running second. They sponged him really quick and we were off again, having fallen back a couple places because two horses didn't stop at all. He galloped up the hill to catch them, and didn't even blink at the photographer sitting in the bed of her pickup truck.
I can't tell you a whole lot about the trails on this loop because I spent a lot of it with my eyes shut and my head down. There were a lot of woods trails with low-hanging branches, and I had to keep both hands on the reins for a semblance of control, so I couldn't brush the branches away from my face. I also couldn't see the footing so I just had to rely on Zephyr's judgement. I got slashed across the face a few times and just decided to put my head down and power through. This is the same reason I don't have any pictures... the whole time, I was either in too much of a hurry to stop, or he was in too much of a hurry to let me take a hand off the reins! I think there was also a good bit of sandy two-track trail.
I think Zephyr and I actually led the ride for maybe a quarter of the first loop, which felt REALLY WEIRD and which didn't make me all that happy. But I figured hey, what's the real difference between being in the front of a group of six horses, and being in the back? They're all going the same speed anyway, and Zephyr was a little calmer when he was in the front. But still, I resolved to leave the hold a minute or two after them on purpose (if the pulse time didn't force me to), so I could choose my own pace a little better. His heart rate had been fine on that loop... trotting at 90-120 and cantering at 100-140... but I didn't want to stress him unnecessarily.
We walked into the vet check at 6:42, having done the loop at an average speed of 9.2 mph. On paper it doesn't sound that fast but lemme tell ya, to me it felt like we were flying! I think we came in to camp in third place but I'm not sure. He took a few minutes to pulse down to 64. I thought about removing tack before pulsing in, but just as I removed the breastplate he started dropping fast. I probably could have taken him over sooner but I wanted to make sure it was thoroughly down... it was the vets who were actually taking the pulses, and there was a long walk between the pulse timers and the vets. I didn't want his pulse to spike back up over 64 on the walk over. He pulsed in with a 52 and got all As.
When we got to the truck for our 30-minute hold time, I loosened the girth some more and he dove into his chopped alfalfa, and beet pulp / grain slurry. He ate well but didn't drink, which I expected. He usually starts drinking at about the 15-mile mark. I'm sure as he gets more experienced this will improve. My crew tried to get me to eat but I couldn't, my stomach was still too keyed up. Right at the end I dosed Zephyr with a syringe full of applesauce mixed with Perform n' Win, rinsed his mouth with a shot of water, and mounted up.
We left right on time, and he started on Loop 2 with enthusiasm but not pulling my arms out anymore. We did this 11.3-mile loop at an average speed of 6.35 mph, not blazing fast but still feeling like we were moving well. We met up for a time with a woman named Jean who had also gotten caught up with faster horses, and wanted to slow down a touch. I think we rode all but the first 3 miles of Loop 2 together. This loop was all dirt roads, a straight section leading to a loop, then back to the hold along the same straight section. (They call this type of route a lollipop.) Zephyr started drinking somewhere on this loop, I don't remember where, and drank well for the rest of the ride. I was surprised to pass 50-milers leaving the hold to start out on that loop when we were on our way back... I'm not used to being in the lead!
Somewhere on this loop, a couple things happened. One, my GPS clip broke and I had to tuck the GPS into the center pocket of my pommel pack. And two, the center pocket of my pommel pack flopped around too much with the extra weight, and it came open! Luckily, my GPS was still attached by a string to the pommel of the saddle, so I didn't lose it, but I did lose my sunglasses, my trail map, two granola bars, and a sandwich baggie of jerky. Yes, I was indeed spewing jerky down the trail once again! (See the Justin Morgan story for more jerky tales.)
We got to the second 30-minute hold and pulsed down in four minutes. Again, I was being cautious about pulsing down far enough that he wouldn't go up again on the walk over. It was a good thing, too, as he pulsed in at 60 (the requirement was 64 or less). He got all As again. Heather went to get our out time, and came back reporting that Jean and I had arrived at the hold in 8th and 9th place. At the truck, I ate most of a 6" turkey sub while he chowed down on fresh beetpulp/grain slurry and chopped alfalfa, and drank. I changed out his saddlepad for a fresh one. Louis fixed my GPS clip so I didn't have to leave it behind, hooray for handy hubbies! I dosed him with elytes again right before I mounted up. We actually left two minutes after our out time, because at the last minute I remembered that I wanted to change the way my pommel bags were hooked on.
Loop 3 was 21.4 miles long, and we did it at an average speed of 7.5 mph. I rode much of this loop with Jean, and then Mindy and her Morgan, Thunder, caught up to us. The three horses really boogied well together. Zephyr started to slow down at the middle of this loop but picked up nicely after the first of the two crew stops. It was the wierdest thing, my crew and I kept getting to the crew stops at exactly the same time! I'm not sure how they managed to time it so perfectly. I do know that before one of the crew stops they got totally lost when the directions and the map didn't seem to jive, and they went about 20 miles by road instead of 6. They were very relieved to see that I hadn't already gone through!
At the second of the two crew stops on this loop, the one closest to the middle, I wanted to electrolyte Zephyr but we hadn't prepared a syringe in advance. I mentioned it in passing and before I knew it, Louis had filled a syringe and was offering to dose him for me. I said no, Zephyr had been reluctant to take the elytes so I would get off and do it, but Louis insisted. Sure enough, in just a few seconds he'd done the deed. Louis isn't a horse person so I was impressed... Zephyr gave him a hard time but Louis didn't take no for an answer!
I had been worried that this loop would seem never-ending but it went pretty fast. I don't remember much specifically about trails on this loop, but it might have been the loop that had a lot of nice sandy two-track trail. I do know that towards the end it followed the pipeline trail, which has a bunch of really nice stream crossings. The water was pretty deep at the one where the photographer was waiting.
Right after we passed the photographer, Mindy and Thunder took off at a canter. Zephyr wanted to keep up but I asked him to trot instead. We had a thorough discussion about that, with a lot of whinnying on his part, which is unusual. I finally got him to canter calmly and settled for that. I was satisfied because his heart rate was nice and low. I was occasionally able to back him off to a trot for a change of muscles. It wasn't long before we were at the third hold, which was back at camp.
When he got into the field at the edge of camp I think he believed he was done. It was all I could do to get him to walk at a reasonable pace up to the vet check area. This hold was 40 minutes and we were required to remove his tack. He pulsed in at 52 in four minutes, and got all As again. He enjoyed his same selection of snacks while I had a hot dog with all the fixin's, courtesy of my husband. Another dose of elytes for Zephyr and we were ready to go.
The last loop was only 6.1 mph. Leaving camp, I knew that I was in 9th place with nobody close behind. My goal was to settle into a nice easy trot and cruise in, but he was alone leaving camp and the trail headed straight up a long, rocky, fairly steep hill. He was feeling a little unmotivated and my spurs weren't really doing the trick! We did manage an 8mph trot for most of the loop. I was so distracted by trying to keep him trotting that I wasn't really paying attention to the markings, and all of a sudden I realized we'd been following orange ribbons for a while, not green! Oh no! All I'd wanted to do was hang onto 9th place and we were going to lose it from getting lost again! I backtracked about 25 yards before my tired brain remembered what RM Tom had mentioned at the ride meeting, about how he'd run out of green ribbon and gone to orange for a while in the middle of the last loop. Oh goodie, we can turn around again and keep going!
We didn't see another horse until about a mile out from camp, when someone passed us at a canter. He perked up right away and cantered after them, with a heart rate of about 110bbm. Yeah! We passed two 50-milers right about that time, who I thought were on their last loop but who it turned out later must have been on their third loop. (This section of trail was repeated on the third and fourth loops.) We caught up to another horse, the little Icelandic that had been camped next to us and was entered in the 30-mile ride, and the two of us trotted across the field to the finish, where I found out Zephyr and I had indeed come in 9th. Our ride time was 6 hours flat... almost 3 hours faster than our previous best time on this course!
I didn't want to stand for Best Condition (BC), reasoning that Zephyr wouldn't win and had nothing left to prove anyway, but my crew told me they were going to make me do it, even if just for the experience. So at the ten minute mark we brought him to Art for his pulse (36) and his completion exam. We'd done it, he was "fit to continue"! The new Thinline pad seemed to work; despite our high speed, there were no back soreness issues. With Art's strict admonition to be back at the one-hour mark (after finish time), my crew and I took Zephyr back to the trailer.
I changed my clothes quickly while someone took Zephyr off to find some grass, and then I walked along the camp road holding a feed pan under Zephyr's nose while Craig walked him up and down. After ten minutes we took him back to the trailer, cleaned him up a bit, and then Heather and Louis took a bag of hay and walked him up and down the road for the last 15 minutes before we had to bring him up for the BC judging. The BC vet judge looked him all over in the same manner as Art had, then had him trot up the hill on pavement and back down. Finally, I trotted him both directions on a circle.
We went back to the trailer to relax for a while before dinner. Just as dinner was announced, Tom came and told me I needed to change back into my riding gear and weigh myself with all my tack! I'd forgotten this was a requirement for BC judging. I wish someone had told me earlier, but that was OK. It didn't take long and then I was done and got to change back into jeans for dinner and awards.
If I heard correctly, there were 26 finishers out of the 33 starters. I've been proud to hear my name called before, but I've never been prouder than when Tom said "And in 9th place, Sharon Levasseur and Zephyr's Elegant Gift". Only I and a very few people there knew what this meant to me, but I think everyone could tell from my face how happy I was. I won a bag of grain, but really I won so much more.
Three days later I'm still riding high.
Footnotes:
I have decided to do another few fast and/or tough 50s before attempting our first 100. I think before we make the attempt, he and I both need to be feeling a lot fresher at the finish than we did on Saturday. For various reasons I could not have gotten back in that saddle for another 50. Our next ride, if all goes well, will be the Moonlight in Vermont 50.
