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Re: [RC] Log book -- What do you record? - Diane Trefethenk s swigart wrote:Diane said: Actually, I am a little puzzled by your puzzlement, except for the 5 seconds part which I agree was too fine a point. So maybe I need to explain. What I meant was that if my horse's pulse usually takes about 2:00 minutes to recover from a specific exercise, like trotting up a "test hill", it is easy to overlook the fact that for the last month or so he has been taking 1:40 minutes or 2:20 minutes. If he consistently performs either better or worse than his "norm", then this tells me that a) there is a new "norm" and b) either my horse's condition is improving or he has a problem. Additionally, I cannot imagine being able to measure the amount of time it takes to reach criteria down to the second, or even to 5 seconds. That one's easy. Every second you are in a vet check waiting for a pulse to drop is additional ride time. If you run Top Ten, seconds matter both in actual elapsed time and especially the psychological value of scoring on the riders that arrived at about the same time you did. It makes good sense to know how long your horse takes to come down from different degrees of exercise so you can walk or trot into the vet check at the same moment your horse reaches criteria. Or being able to measure the arrival at the "top of a certain hill" down to the second, or even to 5 seconds. I didn't say anything about how long it took to get to the top of that hill, but now that you mention it, that is also a good beta to establish. Or you can just do like me and run the horse up a test hill and seebut by recording that information, we can see these patterns and avoid either over conditioning or the more obvious problems associated with thinking our horse is ready to tackle a ride we have planned when he isn't. Ahh, but your mind is "a steel trap", right? You never forget anything. Mine is a sieve. Stuff leaks out all the time. And I daydream when I ride. I imagine what I'm going to do at such and such a point at my next ride or I calculate the average mph we're traveling. Sometimes I go over parts of previous rides and try to think how I could have done things differently. If my test hill were 2 hours out, I'd never know that we took 1:45hrs or 2:30hrs, or why, if I didn't record when I start, the time I hit significant points in the ride, and the time we finished. Different approaches for minds that function differently. The best approach is the one that works. You remember details well... I don't. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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