May 2005

AERC VICE PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

A look at trends from 2004

By Mike Maul, AERC Vice President

In 2004, rider entries grew almost 10% and ride distance days grew about 5% even with increased fuel costs. Membership was up a little less than 3% so members are riding more in 2004 than they did in 2003. This is compared to 2003 where there was almost no growth from 2002.

The 50-mile ride entries -- including multidays -- grew 13% and limited distance was up by 6%. The Tevis anniversary helped 100-mile entries.

Growth by regions was highest in the Northeast, Mountain, and Southeast with the least growth in the Midwest and Central regions. While the number of rides didn't increase much, the number of multiday rides grew significantly, providing more ride days.

Completion rates stayed at the rate of 86% to 87% for LD and endurance rides with 100s maintaining about a 60% completion rate nationwide. As you might expect, rates vary by region with a low of 81% and a high of 92%, with hot, humid regions having lower completion rates than dry, cooler regions.

Website use up

Our website, www.aerc.org, received about 20% more hits in 2004 than during 2003. Our average visitor to the site spent about 12 minutes reading material. Most of the activity is during the week (of course -- everyone's at a ride on the weekends!) and from 9:00 a.m. until midnight.

The site contains lots of useful information about our sport and is a reference for almost anything you might want to know about endurance and the American Endurance Ride Conference. We are always looking for suggestions on material that you would like to have added to the site.

New features added to the website during 2004 included an AERC photo gallery of rides and riders, new forms for online feedback to ride managers, horse registration, new member registration, top 100-mile rider/horse lists and interviews, a 100-mile ride summary for rider/horse history, and many educational articles from Endurance News. There are a lot of interesting interviews with members who have done many 100-mile rides and information about successful horses with large numbers of 100s to their credit.

New website features for 2005 will include pedigree links to the part bred Arabians as we now have with the purebred Arabians, correction to ride history for the archive period of 1985-1995, addition of some rider/history prior to 1985, and member access to our database for statistical studies. We would also like to start gathering GPS basecamp location data so that members can see all rides within a given distance of their home on a map.

The survey was returned by more than 1,500 members which, when family members were included, represents about 40% of our membership. There's a lot of interesting and useful information in the survey responses that the Membership Committee will be analyzing during the year and reporting in EN.

I'll be riding a number of miles this year getting one of my guys to 4,000 miles and the other to 3,000 miles. I hope to see you on the trail.

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