When Mike Tracy bought his first horse, he was a 40-year-old with next-to-no horse experience, but he was intrigued by endurance riding.
His brother, who participated in endurance competitions, advised him to look for an Arab, and Mike found that he was attracted to a 4 year old half-Arab that was for sale at the Human Horse Connection in Hayward in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“Three or four girls wanted that horse,” Mike recalls, “but they couldn’t stay on him. He was $400, but he pranced around like he was $4,000. He got loose from the hitching post. He took my baseball cap off my head.”

So Mike looked at other horses, but he kept coming back to revisit Aron Moon +// (HA Shah Ghalleb x grade mare) because “he had pride.”
When Mike took Moon home, he found that staying in the saddle could be a challenge. “He was hardly broke, let alone trained,” he recalls. “He’s very athletic. You could be in the saddle and he could bring up his leg and kick you. I lost count of how many times I was thrown.”
Awards A-plenty
It was an unlikely beginning for what would become a winning partnership that would eventually earn Aron Moon honors as the 2006 winner of the Arabian Horse Association Distance Horse of the Year Award.
During his outstanding endurance career, Moon had 95 completions out of 108 starts, giving him an 88 percent completion rate and a total of 5,625 miles.
Last year, when Moon and Mike competed in the Diablos Pistoleros ride, they marked 18 years of American Endurance Ride Conference competition without a missed season, a record that is second longest in the sport, Mike says.
Moon earned 536 Achievement Award points from the Arabian Horse Association during his career, reaching the prestigious Legion of Excellence level. His many honors include five national titles (including 1991 and 2001 National Endurance Ride Reserve Championships) and 11 regional titles in competitive trail and endurance riding.
As the winner of the 2006 AHA Distance Horse of the Year award, Aron Moon’s name will be engraved on a perpetual trophy donated by the Arabian Horse Owners Foundation and designed by Joe Staheli. Mike will receive a matching plaque.
Aron Moon’s illustrious career almost ended on one of Moon and Mike’s first outings.
Having owned Moon for about two years and having gained some skill in staying on, Mike decided to tackle the Western States 60, a 60-mile endurance race that traversed part of the same ground covered in the 100-mile Tevis Cup competition in the Sierra foothills.
Mike wanted to see what the terrain was like in order to attempt the Tevis Cup later that year.
Mike was in third or fourth place in a field that had 108 starters, and he had been closely followed by Pat Frederickson on Gambler. She suggested that she pass him so that their horses would feed off of each other’s energy, Mike says, and he didn’t realize that “Moon was not a follower.”
As Moon tried to get ahead, he slipped off the trail. As they tumbled down a steep slope, Mike grabbed a tree branch, but Moon continued all the way into the American River.
Mike clung to a tree limb, and Pat got off her horse and worked her way down on hands and knees to help Mike get back on the trail.
Hair Raising Adventures
When Mike reached the river, Aron Moon appeared unhurt, but the banks were too steep for the horse to climb out.
A river rafting guide suggested that Mike get on the raft and they would float the horse farther down the river in hopes of finding a place where it would be easier for the horse to get out. Mike held Moon’s lead rope as they floated many miles down the river toward Auburn, but he suddenly realized that Moon had stopped kicking and appeared to be drowning.
Mike jumped into the freezing waters and held Moon’s head up. “I grabbed his halter and was keeping his head up with one arm, and I thought, Jehovah, don’t let my horse die, and I kept praying, and somehow I got to the shore and Moon stood up.”
However, when Moon attempted to get out, he slipped on the slick shale and fell back into the river.
“I just put my hands over my eyes. I thought he was dead, and I’m never going to race again,” Mike says. But when he opened his eyes, the horse “was just standing looking at me with a goofy-looking expression on his face.”
After another attempt, Mike finally got Moon out of the water and back to the trail.
The horse was vet-checked and found to have only a few minor scrapes, so Mike decided to finish the race even though it was almost 8 p.m. and other riders warned him that he would have to cross the American River again. Mike was such a novice at endurance riding that he believed that there would be a bridge at the crossing.
“I got there and thought, ‘where’s the bridge?’” he recalls. Not surprisingly, Moon was reluctant to cross the water, and Mike got down and led him by the dim beam of a tiny flashlight. They finished in 84th place – but they finished.
Despite the rocky start, Mike loves endurance riding. Unlike some other horse sports, in which the competition takes only a few minutes, “when you do endurance, you’re being engulfed in the activity for a long period,” he says
Miles Away
Through trial and error and logging lots of miles, Mike’s partnership with Moon grew. The team went on to finish six Tevis Cups, including a 13th place finish in 2001, and a variety of other competitions. “I was still getting top 10 finishes when Moon was in his 20s,” Mike says. “He’s like a Timex watch. He takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.”
Of course, Mike’s excellent conditioning and care of Moon has helped the horse have such a long and remarkable endurance career.
Mike learned about the importance of proper saddle fit, and uses a Synergist saddle that is fitted to Moon.
One of Mike’s businesses is selling Assured Health Products nutritional supplements. The vitamins and protein powders are sold in health stores and gyms to boost athletic performance in humans, but Mike says he has found that they also benefit horses.
He mixes the contents of Muscle Amino Complex capsules in Moon’s grain. “It helps prevent him from tying up, which can happen to horses with a nitrogen imbalance,” Mike says. “It seems to work very well for him.”
He also swears by Equithotic horse shoes, which are made of aluminum and rubber, and his farrier Phil Hartley. “You wear Nikes,” he says. “Why not spend on the best shoes for your horse, too?”
But, he adds, all his measures to care for Moon weren’t what made him a great endurance horse.
“He’s got an adventurous spirit. He’s got this willingness to go,” he says. “There’s just no quit in him.”
Nor, it appears, is there any quit in Mike Tracy either.
To learn more about endurance racing and Arabian and half-Arabian horses, visit www.ArabianHorses.org or www.aerc.org.