Journey's pegging right along. We had a short ride this evening, but it is oppressively hot and humid. I know I keep saying it, but it was actually worse. 85 degrees with 67% humidity. You want heat training? Come to Indiana, if the heat doesn't kill you, the horse flies will. The goal this evening was just to shave a hair off our time, or add a bit to our time average. It worked out that we did a bit better on time. She did well with her pulse down considering I was only armed with "The New Fangled Cooling Device." We went from over 80 bpm down to 54 in about the half the time we normally would. She's been wanting to bolt towards home, and that has been somewhat of a battle. We lap the neighbor's field, drop behind his property, back up onto our's, trot the uphill to our back field, shimmy down to the creek bottom, back out of the woods to the logging road which is only about a quarter mile from home. The first time she bolted, and I tried to wrangle her in and it was just a mess. The next lap around I'm thinking I don't want to walk this, and I don't want a runaway either. So I "encouraged" her to run, she hit run-away speed for about three seconds, and then settled into a nice canter. Which I asked her to maintain back to the house, and low and behold....Journey wanted to trot. The next three laps we'd kind of breeze in, and then hit the trot, and I think it sunk in that a full out gallop on an uphill grade is "work." It could have not worked out well, but it did. The fact that Journey doesn't like to over extend herself worked in my favor in this instance.
Her top speed is about 17 mph. For about two seconds ☺
Due to the heat I kept it under an hour today. I'm very happy with her progress so far.
The little case for the heart rate monitor works great! Everything stayed put, and the velcro attachments for my saddle bags held great. The sponge bag remains untested, but it's still pretty!
No comments:
Post a Comment