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Kat,
Beautifully said!
It appears that a lot more ER use gadgets such as HRM in your country than
we do here. I hardly ever see a HRM on a horse at a ride in Australia.
Perhaps we are Luddites, perhaps we are suspicious of technology! Perhaps
most of us just use our HRM's at home?
I have a HRM on the shelf in my tack-room. I had better pull the batteries
out of it before they corrode! Five years ago, I used the HRM as a useful
tool for Nikita's conditioning. The numbers it showed me were most
interesting, and I used it to help my understanding of the effects of the
various workloads I was putting her through in training. In other ways it
was distracting, focusing my attention on just one measurable parameter. I
used the HRM on a few endurance rides, and found the data interesting, but
only a small part of the "art" of riding. Even when I set the hi/lo alarm
beeper, so I didn't have to watch the numbers, that distracted me from what
was going on around me.
Funny story: When I was a kid, I fitted a new speedometer to my pushbike. In
the first few days I would pedal like mad to see how fast I could go. Guess
what? Instead of looking where I was going, I focused my attention on the
speedo. Bang! Straight into the back of a parked car! The bike was never the
same after that. Maybe I suffered a minor head injury. Look what happened,
now I am an endurance rider!
I stopped using the HRM and relied on my own intuition and communication
with the horse. Nikita has completed 4430 km in competition, with only two
vet-outs, the last of these was 3000 km ago.
Now that I am training up another horse for competition, I will again use
the HRM from time to time as a training aid, and make note of the data it
provides.
The HRM provides a useful source of data, but I will rely on the subtle
messages the horse is giving me with its whole being, rather than just read
the "tachometer" and keep off the "redline".
Enjoy your riding.
Regards,
Luke and Nikita and Sarah and Shadrach
Riddells Creek, Victoria, Australia
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