Re: This Sport as a Sport

["Susan Garlinghouse" <suendavid@worldnet.att.net>]

>If you say that people who do know their horses' VO2 Max would beat me
>in a "contest" of seeing who can get their horses to the finish line
>first in a 50-100 mile sprint, you may be right.  If you say that such
>people will reap all the glory while I will have to make due with some
>"mediocre performance," well...that's fine with me; I am uninterested
>in glory.  If you say that such people are better sportsmen than I, you
>are wrong.

As probably the only (endurance) person on ridecamp that does happen to know
their horse's VO2max, I've been beaten every single time out (not that I was
really trying) by people that undoubtedly didn't even know what VO2max was.
Still had fun, anyway.  Didn't notice them weeping into their beer over
their ignorance. <g>  My horse will do just as well in the future without my
knowing his VO2 max, it was just fun for me because now I know that he has
the cardiovascular potential that I bred and hoped for.

VO2max and all that other stuff is fun if you have access to that kind of
equipment (not many do) to assess a prospect or plot conditioning progress,
and have an interest in playing around with that kind of stuff.  But most of
the good horseman I know already know essentially the same thing just by
knowing their horse.  They just don't have numbers to go with it.  Big deal.
:-))

Susan G