I rode two of my horses today as I am trying to figure out a 'training regime". I put on my Camelbak, a water hydration backpack, which has a 10 lb sack of sugar in it, to simulate the 5 kgs we are allowed in the race. It has not been too bad so far and today it may have provided some padding as Polly, my flighty mare dumped me when the large blue heron who lives on the stream flew up unexpectedly. Lucky for me Polly did not run off but looked a little surprised to see me on the ground below her. The heron flew off! Falling off keeps one humble and I was thinking, after remounting, that it is going to be a real bummer if I fall off my Mongolian pony and it runs off. There are lots of stories of participants running miles after their ponies, across the steppe. Lynne Gilbert, a Mongol Derby 2013 participant, close to my age, told me she could run at least 13 miles. The horse stations are 25 miles apart so that 13 miles was the maximum she figured she would have to run, either forward or back. I like her logic and I ran for an hour both Saturday and Sunday this week. I really dislike running but after my son William told me, in no uncertain terms, that I had to be in a "serious" training program, I decided to run an hour several times a week. I am not fast but I just keep going and my knee has actually been OK.
That has been my biggest fear, that my knee, which has an old ACL injury, would give out. But so far so good. Michael says he will run with me on the weekends and he very sweetly offered to get the bikes fixed so we could go biking. I guess this is cross training. So for the next 16 weeks I am trying to get fitter. Between riding for a couple of hours 3-4 days a week, running an hour 2-3 times a week and my regular schedule of stalls, yearlings to train, and general life to keep up with I hope to be fit enough to ride 600 miles in 10 days! I have talked to some endurance riders; Linda Crandall of West River sent me to her son John in West Virginia and I am going to do an introductory 18 mile endurance ride in two weeks with him. I am confident that my foxhunter, Red, can do 18 miles. When foxhunting in Georgia and Virginia we often did 20 miles, galloping long stretches for 3 or 4 hours, until our quarry went to ground. Normally I turn him out in April and do not ride again until August. But this year he will have to wait for that vacation until I leave for Mongolia! After the endurance ride I hope to meet some folks that may let me ride a horse of theirs that can do a 50 mile ride. That would be great training.
The other "adventure" today was hours on the computer trying to print out an emergency medical evacuation policy that a Mongolian insurance agency had forwarded to me. It was too small to read and I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to get my computer to enlarge and print it. Being computer handicapped to the degree that my generation is normally, I finally just scanned the very small page /print back to my computer and made the pixels greater and voila', it was readable. I was informed that a 30 day policy to " medical evacuate me if needed" and the rest of such stuff it covers would be $200. A true bargain when without insurance it would be $300,000 to get me home. Then it said "fill it out and give to your nearest B_ _ _ insurance agent"! What? More texting back and forth as I asked if I send a check snail mail or how do they want me to pay? Between that one and the hours spent trying to figure out how to get pre-exposure rabies vaccine, it made up the hair pulling part of my day. The medical coordinator for the Mongol Derby had emailed me saying she knew how confusing it all was but if she had one vaccination to recommend it was the rabies one. "Dogs on the steppe are not pets, used to guarding, and are not friendly." Ok I was going to skip this one because it is approximately $700 for the three shot series, but maybe I won't.
