Endurance: Where are the ribbons?

WeAreOnTheLoose Blog - Full Article

by Jamethiel Morse
September 29 2025

Let’s turn our pens towards the annual signs of autumn: The ponies start getting their soft winter fuzzies on, the sun ditches us before 8pm, you have to return to keeping an extra layer in the truck, and…the AERC page starts to get rambunctious again. All ride season long, most folks are busy clearing trails, driving to rides, following Tevis fever, agonizing over keeping their horses sound and conditioned, so our corner of social media gets a bit of a breather aside from gorgeous ride photos. However, like clockwork, being farm bound for the winter gets endurance rider’s fingers itchy to share their opinions, and if we can’t do it around a ride camp fire with a drink in our hands, we’ll take to the AERC Facebook page instead. I say all this a bit in jest, but quite a bit of good discussion can occur there. Endurance riding brings out the strongest of personalities, you have to be to take care of a 1000 pound animal with their own views of the world over miles and hours of trail.

The latest thread to snag my eye was on the future of endurance and how to grow the sport, in a time it is rapidly contracting. Sharing that post to my own page racked up 68 comments, perhaps the most I’ve ever gotten, and the original thread is 450+. In order to put this post together, I used a bit of code I found on Reddit to copy all the comments to a Word document (cause FB sucks for reading comments this way), then edited it down from 200 odd pages to 60 odd (some comments were duplicated multiple times due to the weird rando code I used), tossed this doc into ChatGPT (legit the first time I’ve used it), and it spit out these top 10 categories of concern:...

Read more here:
https://weareontheloose.com/2025/09/29/endurance-where-are-the-ribbons/