We hit 4.9 mph today! 8.95 miles in 1:50. It's hard for me to justify spending more than 2 hours riding my horse for fun, so I think we'll stick with 2 hours and just try to cram more and more miles in. If I can get an endurance buddy out and do more miles on the weekends, great, but if not, 2 hours should be enough.
One of the things it's hard to tell with any of the tools I have is how her intermediate stamina is progressing - can she trot/rack/pace/whatever at, say, 8-10 mph for a longer distance than last week? The Garmin site graphs our speed, but the length of the graph is static so the results are skewed. I have a couple of spots where I always ask her to move out at an intermediate speed for as long as she can, and she's definitely going a little further every time. Today she did every intermediate gait, sort of at her whim. I'm very happy.
Today we went about halfway along the trail into Palomino Valley. There's a house with two loose pit bulls at the halfway point, so we went til I saw the house and turned around. We made a friend, too - a Great Pyr came trotting up from its house and joined us. I thought it was all going to go horribly wrong - visions of this enormous white dog eating my little yellow dog and Dixie bolting and me flying into a tree were flashing through my head. But Cers got along great with the GP, and the GP is apparently imprinted on guarding horses. She (I think it was a she) went about 5 miles with us. Dixie did not approve, but she never approves.
Tomorrow I'm going to the convention. I am so nervous. I'm a yahoo from Mississippi, and I haven't even completed an AERC ride, and it's full of strangers. Oh well, it's a small nervous in the grand scale of things - taking the bar will be much, much worse.
Oh, by the way - good luck with the bar exam - I'm betting you'll do fine!
ReplyDeleteHave a good time at convention! I got to go last year, VERY jealous I am missing out :) You will just die at all the very pretty horse gear they will have there. Wish I could go with a thousand bucks in my pocket!
ReplyDeleteYou'll have a blast at convention. Remember: endurance people are friendly!
ReplyDeleteYep - we are a friendly bunch - just don't tell us we can't feed our horses in the vet line! LOL. But seriously. I would go if I could. I'm sure you are going to learn a ton and I'm counting on you to share it with us!
ReplyDeleteSounds like you are right on track with Dixie. So proud of you both! It's AWESOME that we get to follow your progress on the blog. I only ride over 1 hour if we are doing a conditioning ride, which I do every 1-2 weeks. Its so exciting to do rides/times which a few months ago left us both sweaty and tired, and now we do it twice as fast without a drop of sweat!
Kate - argh, thanks, I hope so >:( You remember what it was like.
ReplyDeleteEG and AX - Sigh, I definitely wished I had $1000, for a used saddle.. or $4000 for a new one... or $30k for a LQ trailer...
Mel - how'd you get Farley in shape? Surely you rode more miles per session earlier in her training. I just don't see how the equivalent of a sprint could help with marathon training... I know I don't need to ride a full race before the race, but I feel like she should easily handle 50% of the race a couple weeks before.