Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

At 10:41 AM 2/24/2004, you wrote:
> Might want to test your unit in your car first to calibrate it.

done that....use the GPS to the laptop when I travel in the truck.  It's 
pretty amazing how accurate it is.  I haven't been riding with one 
recently.....but maybe I should start back again!!!

I should also caution people that just because I said that some of the best 
multiday horses can and do trot at 14 mph or over, that there aren't that 
many that do that, we're only talking a handful, and those horses are in 
the hands of experienced riders and have been developed over many seasons 
to be able to work like that.  I never let my own horse Rocky go at any 
kind of speed like that until he probably had more than 1200 miles (at 
least), and never have felt comfortable letting him do it often.  That may 
be why he is approaching 7,000 miles. :-)   I know when I go out on 
training rides that we trot at XX speed (whatever it is) because I've got 
measured trail and have ridden it a bazillion times.  Yet, even tho I know 
I am at times trotting at a fairly fast rate, I only average about 5 or 6 
mph for my overall speed.  I have to work fairly hard to get an average 
speed that high!   If I am feeling up to it, I can go out and gallop a lot 
of it and then my average goes up a bit but because of the couple of miles 
I spend walking to get to the trail and back (warmup and cooldown), it 
really makes my average much slower.  One of the best training aids I've 
used in the past was the Suunto watch which would let me set a target zone 
for HR and I would then build up the horses to spend more time working in 
that zone, and think that worked best over miles, speed, etc.  I found out 
how much I had to pay attention to actually keeping the working rate up for 
ten minutes or twenty minutes, and could increase it gradually.  karen



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You don't have to be a 100-mile rider or a multi-day rider to be an
endurance rider, but if you want to experience the finest challenges our
sport has to offer, you need to do both of those.
~ Joe Long

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