A Race Fit for Man and Beast : Ride-and-Tie Events Test Toughness of Both

Imagine combining the Los Angeles Marathon with the fourth race at Del Mar and staging the event somewhere in Cleveland National Forest. Stretch the course over roughly 40 miles of mountainous Orange County terrain and substitute wiry Arabian mounts for long-legged thoroughbreds.

Each horse has not one but two distance-runner jockeys. They alternately run and ride over the dusty, roller-coaster hills, tying the horse to a tree, bush, stone or post as they take turns switching from horsepower to foot power. Replace the racing silks with running shorts, T-shirts and panty hose (contestants, men and women alike, swear they prevent saddle sores).

Forget an orderly start, with horses shooting out the gate. The beginning of this horse race/foot race looks more like a cavalry charge--horses running at a flat-out gallop with the infantry close behind. And instead of cheering crowds, contestants are more likely to encounter bears, rattlesnakes and acres of poison oak.

Now you are getting a picture of an endurance sport called ride and tie. If a handful of Orange County enthusiasts have their way, a race will be run in the national forest possibly this year or next. An application to stage the event has been approved by the U.S. Forest Service. Blue Jay Campground in the Santa Ana Mountains would be the staging area, with the tentative course winding through Orange County.

The sport requires riding and running ability of ultra-endurance proportions--many competitors run marathons or ride in 50- and 100-mile endurance horse races just to keep in shape for ride and tie. Some competitors readily admit that it takes a touch of lunacy, a quality that gives the sport some of its personality.

Emmett Ross, 42, of Irvine is by workday a mild-mannered vice president of commercial lending for California Federal. His lean, blond good looks, white button-down shirt and slight graying at the temples lend to his successful-banker sheen. On weekends, though, he becomes a modern-day Pony Express rider, heading out in his black Ford pickup to train near Lake Elsinore, where horses Billy and Mogli and his ride-and-tie partner, Gary Polhill, live.

What some may consider foolhardy, Ross relishes as a physical challenge. Once, 13 years ago, he and a friend read about a couple of guys who had run a relay across Death Valley at night. “We thought we’d do it differently,” Ross said, smiling. On a lark, they decided to run the 105 miles during the day, when road temperatures sizzled at 150 to 160 degrees. They completed this jaunt in two days after constant water-guzzling and aggregate weight losses of about 50 pounds each--a compilation of gains and losses along the route.

So a few years later, when a colleague asked if Ross would be interested in teaming up in a running and riding event, the banker’s interest was piqued. His only riding experience was as a boy in summer camp. But like a lot of runners who have become hooked on the sport, Ross learned to ride, then competed in his first race in 1977.

Ross found his athletic calling in ride and tie and has taken to the sport with a missionary zeal, buying his own horse and running marathons to keep in shape. With consistent top-10 finishes, Ross is considered within this relatively small circle of athletes to be one of ride and tie’s best.

Ross is also something of an expert organizer--in between bank jobs he started, ran and eventually sold a chain of retail stores that catered to runners. And during the 1984 Olympics, Ross was picked by Peter Ueberroth to be sports manager of the equestrian events. For years he has helped organize road races for community groups. Given his love of ride and tie, it follows that Ross also is behind the efforts to produce a race in Orange County. He organized a ride and tie last year in Davenport, Santa Cruz County, that drew nearly 200 teams.

Ross is getting help from an enthusiastic Kent McLaren, 38, a hardware salesman and family man who lives in Laguna Niguel. The way some men display pictures of themselves and their big catches on fishing trips, McLaren has a picture gallery in the office of his modern, orderly home with shots of him grinning, covered with mud and sweat after crossing a ride-and-tie finish line, standing next to his horse and partner.

For recreation McLaren likes nothing better than to lace up his running shoes and head for the hilly dirt trails surrounding his home, where he goes on early-morning 10-mile runs to keep in shape. His ride-and-tie horse is about an hour’s drive away in the hill country of northern San Diego County.

No doubt about it, ride and tie is “a crazy sport,” he said, grinning--McLaren grins a lot when talking about the event. The sport, generally held in remote, mountainous areas, “a million miles away” from civilization, indulges his sense of the pioneer spirit and Wild West fantasies.

“Ride and tie is expensive, it’s time-consuming and it’s grueling,” he said. Only the big races offer prize money for top finishers, and that barely covers transportation and training costs.

But once bitten, competitors find it hard to shake the ride-and-tie bug. For McLaren and others like him, the sport conjures up images of the Old West. Ride-and-tie athletes are like “rugged pioneers who are trying to hang on in a modern society,” he said.

“To me, this is my last frontier. I can get out on a hill with a horse and turn the clock back 100 years.” His eyes crinkle into a teasing smile. “It’s a great way to see the country.”

McLaren started jogging during his late 20s to take off extra pounds put on by a Thanksgiving dinner. An enthusiastic soul, he quickly graduated from a few miles to 10-kilometer road races, then marathons. Then the Boston Marathon, the Athens Marathon and the New York Marathon, among others.

In 1982, while living in Park City, Utah, McLaren heard from a friend about a ride-and-tie race that was to be held there. Did it sound interesting?

Sure, McLaren said.

Could he ride?

“Oh, hey, do I ride!” he remembered telling his friend. He shook his head, grinning broadly. “I had no idea (what I was doing), I was just a passenger.

“Then you get hooked, and you buy your own horse.”

McLaren has competed in 14 ride-and-tie races since that first one in Park City. He even came close to finishing in the top 10 once but was foiled by a ride-and-tier’s nightmare--the horse broke its tie and ran away.

During that race McLaren and his partner were among the front-runners. A mile from the finish line, he made the last tie at the top of a hill and came running in. His partner, only minutes behind, was supposed to ride the horse in. McLaren waited. No sign of horse or partner. More time passed; other teams came in. Still no horse, no partner. When they finally did show up, McLaren learned that the horse had broken free, ran off the course and down the side of a hill. His partner had to backtrack and retrieve the animal before their finish could be counted as official--and out of the top 10.

McLaren at one time owned and trained his own horse--like many ride and tiers, he talks wistfully about the special bond that developed between himself and the animal. But the time required to care for the horse proved to be too demanding, and McLaren sold him to a friend.

The grin returned. “Some people have ex-wives, I have an ex-horse.”

The level of horsemanship required to compete in a ride and tie shouldn’t be underestimated. Horses are traveling up to 25 m.p.h, sometimes on a 2-foot wide trail, with a 1,000-foot drop-off on one side. “If the horse should trip or fall, you’d be in a world of hurt,” Ross said.

A well-conditioned horse is a key element in ride and tie; back-yard ponies need not apply. The animal of choice is the Arabian--”drinkers of the wind”--legendary in the horse world for versatility and stamina. A good ride-and-tie horse, in top condition, puts in as many training miles as the runner and can fetch from $1,500 to $12,000, depending on its track record.

But in keeping with the sport’s unconventional nature, not all ride-and-tie horses come from noble Arabian stock. Past entries have included a mustang fresh off the range, a semi-retired racehorse and mules.

Cheryl and Chuck Ayres of San Juan Capistrano, who are helping lay the groundwork for an Orange County ride and tie, someday want to complete a race on their mule. “Nice animals but a little hard to train,” Chuck said. “In horse talk, they’re called survivors.”

Don’t expect to see sleek spit-and-polish show horses at these events. During the excitement of a race, in the flurry of hoofs, dust and mud, runners have been known to pass their horses on the trail or mistake their horse for someone else’s. So competitors paint the animals with stripes of Day-Glo colors or braid the manes and tails with garish ribbons. One team even strapped a radio to the saddle as an audio alert to the horse’s location. The strategy worked until halfway through the race when the batteries died.

Ride and tie began 17 years ago as a corporate promotion for jeans maker Levi Strauss & Co. to reinforce the company’s link with its Gold Rush past. Bud Johns, then working as head of public relations for the San Francisco-based company, got the idea for the event after reading a turn-of-the-century newspaper story about a gang of horse thieves who made off with a Texas rancher’s herd. Left with just one horse, the rancher and his son pursued the rustlers, alternately riding, running and tying until they caught up with the thieves and retrieved their horses.

Although Levi Strauss was already sponsoring prizes for big-time rodeos such as the Grand National, Johns envisioned the ride-and-tie race as a further link of the corporate name to its Old West image and the increasingly popular sport of long-distance running. Fifty-nine teams showed up for the first race held near Glen Ellen in Sonoma County, with some competitors running in jeans and cowboy boots. Today, an estimated 350 ride-and-tie races take place annually, some in Europe and Australia.

As the sport evolved, veterinary checks along the route have become a routine part of a race. While the equine member of the team is checked out by the vet, pit crews provide water and food, and repair broken tack for the humans.

Competitive wear has come a long way from the heavy jeans and cowboy boots. Modern athletes favor lightweight running shorts and shoes, T-shirts, singlets, running tights or panty hose--men as well as women discovered that the nylon reduced chafing caused by rough miles in the saddle.

Over the years, the hybrid event has caught the imagination of a diverse group. One character, who calls himself “Cowman,” shows up for the big races wearing a headdress of bull horns and full war paint, yelping out war whoops along the trail. Others include a Duke University professor, a stunt man whose claim to fame is skiing off Yosemite’s El Capitan for a James Bond movie, former Olympic competitors, firefighters, equine vets, lawyers, teachers, one of San Francisco’s top plastic surgeons and Robert Redford--he competed in a Park City, Utah, race under a fake name.

Because the event usually is held in wilderness areas, runners and riders sometimes have interesting encounters with Mother Nature. Almost everyone has stories of rattlesnakes and poison oak, and a few have seen mountain lions. During a race outside of Eureka, Humboldt County, a few years ago, one man came running up to the spot where he and his partner had planned to tie their horse. He didn’t see the horse at first, but heard a rustling in the bushes. Thinking the horse was tangled in some brush, he dove into a thicket and came nose to nose with a bear.

Margaret Steinberg of Orange, who trains in Irvine Regional Park, describes encounters with rattlesnakes as offhandedly as swatting flies in her kitchen. The 35-year-old woman co-owns Steinberg Discount Tack & Feed in Santa Ana. She was introduced to the sport two years ago through fellow endurance riders.

During training sessions, she occasionally draws stares from hikers and mountain bikers as she “tails” her horse up a hill. That’s when a rider runs behind the horse, grabbing onto its tail as it plows up a steep grade. The strategy spares the horse’s energy for the long haul, she explained.

Although Steinberg’s partner, Susan Gimbel, runs ultra-endurance events--generally defined as 50- to 100-mile races--the team hasn’t had great luck in ride and tie. Gimbel, also of Orange, doesn’t wear her glasses when she runs and sometimes passes up the horse tied on the trail. That means retracing steps, adding extra miles.

But Steinberg doesn’t compete primarily for prize money. Like McLaren, she gets satisfaction from rekindling the pioneer spirit.

“These days it’s hard to find something with such a physical challenge,” she said.

Levi Strauss last year dropped the sponsorship of its annual race, which had generally attracted the biggest field in the sport, but agreed to fund a Ride and Tie Assn., organized in Manhattan Beach on April 1, 1987, by Steve Shaw, a Torrance hospital administrator. The group plans a national race June 19 in Alturas, Modoc County, in the northeastern corner of the state. Despite the remote site, more than 175 teams have already signed up. The best teams are expected to finish the 45-mile course, which will hit elevations of up to 7,500 feet, in about 5 hours.

For next year’s national race, Ross is waiting to hear from financier David Murdock of Castle & Cooke takeover fame on a proposal not only to sponsor the event but also to hold it on about 1,800 acres of Murdock’s property near San Bernardino. Ross figures Murdock may be interested because he, too, is an Arabian horse lover. And he’s hoping Murdock will agree that the fitness aspect of the sport ties into some of Castle & Cooke’s fruit juice products.

If Ross wins Murdock’s approval, it could bring him one step closer to fulfilling a notion of someday having a race nationally televised. Why not? he speculated. The Iron Man triathlon in Hawaii, once considered an aberration, is now a feature on “Wide World of Sports.” Just picture a bunch of war-whooping, wild-eyed riders dressed in shorts and T-shirts, horses in full “war” paint, thundering down the field with the cavalry trailing behind.