At 06:55 AM 7/11/2003 -0400, rides2far@xxxxxxxx wrote: >Just
curious. What's the shortest reading you ever got? I've gotten >private
e-mails from riders who have done "50's" as short as 32 >miles...and
consistently below 40 on a 3 day ride, one day of which was >billed as a
55.
I've gotten 24 miles once :+>. The ride was in the trees,
and it wasn't accurate. Most GPS readings are *not* going to be
accurate. I've used an external antenna which makes it considerably
more accurate. It still does not always pick up everything.
That can be remedied by going over the trail on the map software tho, and
you can still get a general feel. Most rides are within 5 or 10%
either way by GPS readings. At a lot of rides since so many people
have GPS's now the differences that each person gets can vary quite a bit
so take it all with a grain of salt, you are absolutely not going to have
an accurate reading without using an external antenna OR on a ride that
has canyons, tree cover or even cloud cover. Once you've ridden
enough rides with a GPS, and on the same horse like I have it generally is
pretty easy to figure out how long a trail is, or how fast you are
going. After trotting on a horse a few thousand miles at XX speed
you get a feel for it.
>So shouldn't that make your ride times look
*slower*?
Okay, let's say I do a one day ride and each time I go into
the vet check I have a long walk from in-time to P&R, or I'm not the
fastest person at removing my horses bit and tack, so I blow 10-12 minutes
each time. That is 30-36 minutes of wasted time. Then, let's
say I get ready to leave camp but the out-timer is 5 minutes farther away
so I blow that too. That is 10-15 minutes there. That makes my one day
ride time 7:50. On a multiday I only have one vet check, don't have
to pull tack so I just mosey on in, I can take the same ride time -- 7:50
once you subtract holds but now my horse has basically had all day to use
up that additional 45 minutes of time going at a slower or more consistent
pace. Or, let's say it is one of the rides that has a vet and go
with no hold time, the only thing is that I get into the check with only 2
vets and 12 riders ahead of me. so it takes me 35 minutes to get
thru that check, so that adds on to my ride time. Now I'm up to
almost 8 1/2 hours. I could have done the multiday ride in a faster
time but ridden the horse slower. This is an example based on
reality (mine, others may vary <G>).
