Venable Pair Wins World Championship of Ride & Tie

Rhonda and Dave Venable of Toano, won the 47th Annual Ride and Tie World Championship, held on Saturday, July 22 in Orkney Spring, VA. Twenty-eight teams from across the country participated in the 35-mile race, which was held on the East coast for the first time ever this year. Ride and Tie has a long history in the West, where it was first sponsored by Levi's in 1971.

In their eight years of competition, the Venables had won yearlong point championships three times, as well as the past two East Coast Championships; however, this was their first world title.

The Ride and Tie event is unlike any other. Participants alternate between endurance riding on horses, and trail running on their own. The race distances can vary between 20-100 miles.

Strategy is the key. In order to complete the race, each team must get all three members (two humans and one horse) across the cross-country course by alternately riding and running. A favorite strategy is for the rider, being faster, to gallop ahead and tie the horse to a tree before beginning his/her running portion of the race. Subsequently, the team member who started off running on foot will reach the horse, untie it, mount and begin riding, all the way past the first runner. The leapfrog type of activity continues throughout the course of the race, and the strategy comes from deciding where and how to make the necessary exchanges.

Rhonda rode first on her horse Dakota for a 1.25 mile leg. She estimates that her and Dave alternated every half mile, but said that “the distance gets shorter if the competition is catching up.” This year, she said that “someone was within two minutes of us for most of the race.” The Venable couple pulled away at the end and their winning time of 5:43:12 was almost seven minutes ahead of second-place Karen Isaacs and Beth Brinkley.

Dakota was also honored at the race’s end as the best conditioned horse of the top-10 finishers. Said Rhonda, “the vets go over all of the horses very thoroughly.”

Additional background on Ride and Tie is available on the website rideandtie.org.

Rhonda Venable is a teacher at Crittenden Middle School in Newport News, former cross-country coach at Bethel High, and a past president of the Peninsula Track Club. She and husband Dave relocated from Yorktown to Toano in June, and trained at York River Park for the final six weeks leading to the event.

Other area residents who competed in this year's Ride and Tie Championship include sisters Chelsea Portwood (Virginia Beach) and Alison Zeytoonian (Smithfield), and Greg Bradner (Yorktown), who partnered with his daughter Megan Wilson of Springfield, Virginia.