Long trail, little glory

Steve HOEFT sways back and forth with exhaustion. Nine hours and 85 miles in the saddle. Fifteen miles to go. Victory. Right there. Except that Crockett Dumas, one of the cagiest endurance riders alive, is out there in the dark desert, closing in.

Denny sags too. Shivers ripple across the stallion’s sweat-drenched coat. But the chestnut’s heartbeat is strong.

“You feel pretty good about your horse?” one of the veterinarians asks at this, the last of five mandatory rest stops in the 2003 national endurance riding championship.

“I don’t know what I think anymore,” says Hoeft, a self-employed builder in this hamlet north of Reno, and the hometown favorite.

Hoeft wants to win this race. Badly. Still, he asks, “Do you have a trailer if I need to take him out of here?”

The veterinarians glance at each other. Too many horses are dying in this increasingly popular and competitive sport. They’ve just pulled one and have been carefully eyeing Denny and another horse being ridden -- perhaps too hard -- by a willful 15-year-old girl. But veterinarian Jamie Kerr has judged countless rides. He knows Hoeft is not the sort of egotist who will ride a horse till it collapses.

“You’ve got 14 minutes, Steve ... come back and see me then,” he says. When Hoeft trots Denny back out, the veterinarians nod. “He’s really tired, but he’s OK,” says Kerr. “But you’re going to have to take it slow, Steve, no matter who comes up behind you.”

“He’s gonna be up over me like a pack of wolves,” Hoeft says. Shunning the saddle to keep weight off the horse, he jogs Denny out of the rest stop just as Crockett Dumas rides in.

Love and death

Distance riding has been tangled up in heroic myth since its inception -- which probably dates to when humans first began climbing on horses’ backs. Organized endurance riding was born in the U.S. 49 years ago, with a bet that modern steeds couldn’t do what Pony Express teams accomplished -- cover 100 miles in a day. Recently, the sport has been suffering growing pains.

Last year, more than 6,000 endurance riders trotted and galloped across a combined 782,000 miles of open country in 770 races nationwide. Many of those, traditionalists note ruefully, were 25-mile canters favored by yuppies out for a weekend thrill. But even those jaunts pose one of the sport’s biggest challenges: trying to stitch together routes, a task that gets tougher each time a developer dices up another parcel of open land.

Overseas, oil-rich sheiks are getting caught up in their own mythology. Inspired by images of noble steeds kicking up the dust of Arabian deserts, they’re pouring money into the sport and joining a cadre of Europeans who are pushing for it to be a televised Olympic event.

As the sport gets more competitive (some championships are now broken into four riders’ divisions, featherweight to heavyweight) another problem has arisen. Horses are dying. Six have perished at high-profile U.S. events this year, including one that had to be euthanized the morning after the prestigious Pan American Endurance Championship in September. At the World Equestrian Games in Spain last year, two endurance horses dropped dead of exhaustion.

“Endurance riding is probably the most fun thing you can do on a horse,” said Dane Frazier, a Lebanon, Mo., veterinarian who works with equine regulatory groups. “But there is risk.”

Endurance riding is a joyful, four-step slow dance over trails, open desert or winding fire roads, a crazy, jouncing beat that leaves minds numb and thighs tender for days. It’s tough on riders, but the horses do the hard part. Serious riders know every inch of their animals. Lightweight, strap-on monitors about the size of wristwatches link many racers’ arms to their horses’ hearts. When the vital signs move out of healthy range into aerobic deficit, a rider knows. Riders are also obsessed with their animals’ intake and outflow. At one rest stop, Michel Bloch, a French crepe maker from Cool, Calif., pauses and raises a finger, politely requesting silence for a sacred moment. His horse, Monsieur Joseph, is about to urinate. The clear, light stream means all systems are go.

Endurance rides in the U.S. are laced with required rest times and “vet checks,” similar to Formula One pit stops. Veterinarians armed with stethoscopes move swiftly from horse to horse, checking gums to anus. If a horse doesn’t trot cleanly, if its heartbeat is too high and its eye too dull, it’s out.

The best endurance horses are often runty Arabians that flunked out at the racetrack, too excitable to run just two minutes. Arabians have hearts as big as basketballs, evolved over millenia on hot Bedouin sands. But they have limits. Too little food, cold water hitting a stomach wrong, even poor genetics, and a horse can “crash.”

“There’s always that little black cloud hanging over your head, asking, ‘Am I asking too much of him?’ ” says Dumas, 57, who has raced 25,000 miles and “never had a horse go belly up.”

Watching horses jockey for position, hearing their aggressive snorts and whinnies, leaves little doubt that their primal instincts are as pleasantly revved as their riders’.

“The horse loves it. Just loves being out there doing the miles,” says Hoeft, 52. “This is what he’s made for.”

Camptown races

In the darkness before the ride, Dumas, jocular and expansive, sang out greetings to “pretty ladies” as he prepared himself and his horse. A retired Alaskan park ranger who “once spent the night rassling a grizzle bear,” he sports a huge handlebar mustachio and cowboy hat, entitled to the affectation as the owner of a Utah ranch where he grows his own hay and breeds his own Arabians. Nessous, the loyal horse beneath him, is a descendant of the oldest equine bloodlines on earth, called “Drinkers of the Wind.”

Endurance race base camps bustle with an Old West meets Kampgrounds of America ambience. Dogs frolic, the aromas of urine and sweet hay waft and rock ‘n’ roll drifts from giant speakers. Men and women sport ponytails and tights. And at the center of it all are the horses, their names like fairy tales: Always a Star, Maximum Potential, Kings Flash, Gandhi, Omar’s Apatchee. Penned in temporary corrals after rattling hundreds of miles in narrow trailers, they munch wordlessly on “smorgys” of oat hay, alfalfa and carrots -- the equivalent of a marathon runner’s pasta feast.

As Dumas saddled up and flirted, Hoeft galloped in the cakey dirt, eschewing conversation. Then they and 34 others were off, hooves churning up whorls of sage-scented dust in the “danged cold” 27-degree dawn. The last rider would cross the line more than 20 hours later.

Thirty-two miles in, Monsieur Joseph had the lead. “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,” Bloch called out on the trail. “Peace and love.” During the hour rest stop, the little horse stuck his nose deep in a pail of feed, then dozed off. The horse would not be happy to be awakened, Bloch said. “He thinks we are done.”

By midafternoon, the sun slanted low, pouring down the steep hills rimming Bedell Flat, a vast, silent desert expanse. Gray green sagebrush turned molten gold. Spread out over 40 miles, the horses trotted steadily through a peaceable kingdom of light and sky. Herds of wild mustangs turned their heads and watched. The Dogskin Mountains uncurled on the horizon. The horses were losing the spring in their step. Hoeft fell behind Bloch and two other front-runners. Clip clop, clip clop. No sign of Dumas.

Dark slices across the desert. The temperature drops 19 degrees in one hour. At the fifth vet check, “rump rugs” are thrown across the sweaty, rapidly chilling horses. Salts and nutrients drain out in that sweat. Volunteer crews hold what look like professional caulking guns to the horses’ gums, squeezing electrolytes down their throats.

Dumas grins as he takes off, chasing Hoeft. “Life is opportunity,” he says. “Always be in a position to win.” All day, he has maintained a steady 8-mph pace, keeping Hoeft in his sights so he can pounce out of the dark and finish first “with plenty of horse left.”

Ahead. Hoeft sings softly to Denny. A few miles out of the last vet check, he had heard the liquid shift in the horse’s stomach, saw him get his second wind. Elated, he hopped back on.

“Just a little bit more to go, nothing to this,” he croons now. “And by the way, where do you think that old Crockett is?” Denny’s ears prick up.

Hoeft loves this animal. Donated by breeders to a vet school, Denny spent five years as an oversized lab rat before Hoeft bought him from a trainer via the Internet. He paid $3,500, saved up from working “7-10s” -- seven-day weeks, 10 hours a day.

Hoeft nurtured the skinny weakling through worms, diet trouble and a shoe injury that took months to heal. Slowly, he built up his tendons, heart and bone mass, doing sprints up and down the nearby hills beside him. The last two months, Hoeft has had to leave training to his sister-in-law. Work has been too busy. He’s paying the price today; his legs are killing him.

A harvest full moon rises like a giant headlight, filtering down through junipers. Hoeft and Denny float across the silvery flats, chasing their own shadow in the gorgeous light. At every turn, the rider peeks back.

The finish line

Near the race’s end, Dumas hears the whine of horseflesh hitting metal wire. A woman in the lightweight division has ridden into a closed cattle gate. She flies “top over teakettle.” Her horse leaps the fence after her, and stands trembling, a bloody gash across his chest.

At the finish line, a knot of people wrapped in horse blankets strains to see down the dark, dusty road.

Ragged cheers erupt. It’s Hoeft and Denny.

“He got his second wind!” the winner shouts, marveling at the animal beneath him. Minutes later, Dumas follows, second in the heavyweight division.

Grabbing a bourbon, he plunges immediately into the storytelling. “Going 100 miles in a saddle burns all the impurities out of you,” he says. “I kept thinking I would reel him in, but I didn’t. My hat’s off to him.”

For the next several hours, riders arrive -- 23 out of the 36 who started. No horse appears to have suffered serious injury, although the 15-year-old’s winces when its back is examined by a vet. The riders are wired, talking loudly, pumped full of endorphins. The horses can’t sleep either. They eat anything they can get their lips on, doze, then jerk awake. They will be watched through the night, walked every few hours, fussed over as if they’re women who have just given birth.

Ask endurance riders why they do it, and they belly laugh.

“It’s either sit home at night and beat myself with chains, or do this.”

“It’s my obsession.”

“Ask a psychologist.”

“For 100 miles, you go places no car will ever go.”

“The outside of a horse is good for the inside of the man. Some poet said that.”

The next morning, horses are trotted out for “Best Conditioned,” the highest honor in endurance events and a sign that so far, anyway, the humans are still reining in cutthroat instincts that take advantage of horses’ big hearts. The award, given for the horse in the top 10 that appears most fit after an endurance ride, goes to a rider from Temecula who finished sixth overall.

Hoeft misses the ceremony. At 5 a.m., he is back on the job, pouring 45 yards of concrete.

“You’re talking to the national champion now,” he tells everyone he sees.

“What do you mean?” they ask

“Endurance riding,” he replies. They have no idea.