About Green Bean Endurance

Green Bean the social (endurance) experience was the brain-child of Sharalyn Hay from the PNER.   I have zero credit in the facebook cause of bringing new folks into the sport of endurance riding using that social medium.  Jillane Baros picked up the regional cause and promoted it nationally, and the movement grew.  I found Green Bean quite by accident, and the entire friendliness of the group and the culture of acceptance resonated with me.  It was that elusive thing that I had been searching for in my endurance experience.  We social introverts have a hard time making in-roads in a sport that has long standing members/ with long built social networks.   I always believed that the thing that was hurting the sport, the decline of growth was that new people were  feeling alienated and alone trying to break in to the sport.   The Green Bean Movement gave rise to a solution for this problem.   There has been a surge of growth within the sport in 2015 and so many new and excited faces at rides.  It has honestly given me more satisfaction than "the ride itself."   The end of 2014 Jillane and I had a random sort of what if conversation.  What if Green Beans could ride in teams?  What if competition was geared to that starting place.  How could we do this?  From those conversations Green Bean Endurance was born.   We devised a way of creating endurance riding teams, and having them compete within a pool of riders of similar experience, we opened it up for folks to sign up.  The response was so much larger than expected that we had to limit our teams to 125 riders.  We felt that our competition experiment if you will should be limited until we could determine if we could track that many people and assign points effectively, if riders would embrace the completion aspect of the competition, and ride safely and carefully.   Our riders have not disappointed us.  In fact they have excelled, and grown,  and amazed.  We have a junior TEAM called the FREEKS in the lead currently with over 1500 points, we had a rider (Dale Weaver) complete The Old Dominion, riding cavalry, we had a rider (Laura Spear) complete the Tevis, mid-pack, on a horse called the Spookaloosa.  It doesn't stop there.  125 riders joined AERC (required) and so we support the organization we love.  With three months to go in the competition our riders have thus far logged 7,646 competition miles.  And with that, I am happy ☺   It has been a great year so far, and I cannot begin to say how proud I am of all these new people coming into the sport.    In three more days the Green Bean TEAMS scoreboard will go dark.  We will discontinue posting rides until the end of the competition on November 31st.   We will announce the divisional and high mileage winners at that time.  We are not "quite" done, but I have so many people to thank for making it real...so many.

Thank you to the crazy long list of prize sponsors.  Two Horse Tack, Taylored Tack, Wind Rider Tack, Reid Tack Shop, Custom Corral Wine Glasses, Dabrim, Hooves & Whiskers,  Carrie Shane, Sandi Derr, Shannon Conrad, Carla Richardson, Anne Cornell York, Jana Thompson, Stephanie Huss, Stacey McClellan, and last but by far not least Deb Moe for assisting with the technical end of the competition, spreadsheets, plus things I generally don't wrap my brain around,   and more...So many wonderful, crazy for endurance people giving a large group of aspiring riders, hope, dreams, and aspirations.   

Awesome, isn't it?

If you are relatively new to endurance (less than 1000 combined endurance/LD miles) we hope you join us in the bean patch for a bit of friendly competition in 2016 at http://www.greenbeanendurance.org