TWH for endurance in West Australia

Well I guess we will see. I have another rider who has offered to work him a little while I am gone, I have been thinking I might take her up on it.

Comanche has been doing low impact soft sand training for a couple of months now. Thinking of taking him for his first 40km training ride. The problem is, his heart rates are not low like I am use to with Arabs. I am afraid my TWH endurance experiment might not be panning out. Has anyone else had problems getting their TWH heart rates down.

For example, we will go out and do a 20km training session in soft sand. When we get back, and I strap him down for 10 minutes, his heart rate is still in low 50's.

Anyone having the same results?

LOw 50's is good !.. wish I could ge there. Usually our rides in the US require a pulse down of 64 to 60.

Its all about the temperature. Sorry can't do celsius, but anything over about 85 degrees and I am unable to get Bo to pulse down, even when riding at barely finnish speeds.
My second horse emma has several things going for her that make her much better suited. I am just now getting her in shape, Planning on a 25 miler (41km) Limited distance ride in Nov. See how she does. SHe has a much more efficient gait than bo does. Bo has a high stepping rack, emma has a true flat walk/ run walk and can really move out at a shuffle. We shall see. Hopefully I can at least turn her into a happy consistent finisher.

Also not sure what "strap him down" means. Are you using lots of water ? Water on water off, ice water on also, concentrating on neck, whithers and shoulders., Avoid the butt, you can cramp them.

Yep, strapping down, is the cooling and feeding of the horse between legs of endurance or LD's, that is what we call it down under. Where we train all we have is a lot of deep sand, hopefully this means when we finally get out to the LD training site, that we will have lower heart rates.

He is doing 9km/hr with his running walk that he can keep all day, his rack is very high stepping, and very quick at 24km/hr....too bad he can't do that all day, if he could that speed is fast enough over here to win some races :)

Well if my TWH does not work out for HW division, I have been offered a nice 9 year old Arab that has tons of potential.

Picture of the 9 year old Arab gelding I am looking at.

Another Arab prospect I have in mind if my TWH does not work out :)

All things being equal I'd avoid the black one definitely. Go for the greys or the very light tannish browns. All things being equal, lighter colored horses will handle the sunny hot days better.
Don't believe me ? Go jogging in a black tshirt on a sunny day. Or check out the color of Bedouin clothing.

Good thing nobody has told horses like Heraldic that dark-colored horses don't do well in the heat. Also seems suspicious that thousands of years of desert breeding didn't eliminate everything but grey if such a thing actually made a difference.

A good horse is never a bad color.

A horse's way of dissipating heat is nothing like a person's, regardless of what color shirt they are wearing.

If you leave the black horse out in the sun, he won't stay black anyway. My "black" horse has faded so that she is lighter than my bay.
She won't be black again until her winter coat starts back.