In the last week of August an endurance ride (Þolkappreið) took place in Iceland for the first time. And three of our horses were part of it!!! Annie Whelan from Kentucky, US took part for team Íslandshestar and we were happy to lend her three of our horses. We chose the strong guys Strókur, Fjalar and þróttur. All of them have been running on our Kjölur tour before and were in good shape. The idea of having an endurance ride in Iceland had Aníta Aradóttir from the icelandic horse association Landssamband Hestamanna (LH) who rode the Mongole derby in 2014. The route was going along the Kjölur from the north to south, approx. 240 km. Every rider had three horses, riding 2 per day, each horse for about 30 km while the other one was on the trailer. Breathing, pulse and regeneration has been checked in between by the vet Helgi Sigurðsson and could lead to penalty points.
The results after 4 days riding:
1: Iðunn Bjarnadóttir (IS), 18 h 40 min, Team Riding Iceland Saltvík.
2: Annie Whelan (USA), 18 h 51 min, Team Íslandshestar.
3: Hermann Árnason (IS), 19 h 3 min, Team Hermanns Hestaferðir.
4: Musse Hasselvall (SE), 19 h 4 min, Team Eldhestar.
Congratulations Annie! We are proud of you and of course of our guys Fjalar, Strókur and þróttur! Congratulations also to Iðunn for winning the event and thanks to everyone making this possible (there have been some crazy camera men running quite some miles too, looking forward to see the results ;-) ).
LH hopes that this event will be hold regularly to rise the interest in the icelandic horses and showing the strength and diversity of this breed.
Articles about the event:
Iðunn (left) and Annie (right) with Fjalar