I remembered my Garmin. Well, that's not 100% accurate. I remembered my Garmin when I was at the barn and it was still on the kitchen table at home. So, then I remembered to text the hubs to remember to bring it with him to S's house. Which he did. So in fact I did remember my Garmin in the end.
I found a new feature on Garmin connect that breaks each mile down. Be prepared for over analysis 101 :)
We covered 10.85 miles in 2:10 for an average pace of 5.0 mph.
When the hubs runs he is all over the board. He will put in a 7:30 minute mile and then a 10 minute mile. His overall pace ends up somewhere in the 8-9 minute mark, but he is rarely actually within those parameters. Opposite end of the spectrum was me. I would start running and always maintain the exact same slow but steady 10:30 pace. He ran with me once and remarked at my ability to do so. Neither approach is right or wrong. What does this have to do with anything? S rides the way that hubby runs. I ride like I run. So while we averaged a 5.0 mph pace we were all over the board.
For example:
The first mile happened to also be the hilliest mile with a total of 159 ft elevation gain and we averaged 4.6 mph for that mile. Our max in that mile was 9.7 mph. Miles 3, 4 and 5 were at 6.2, 6.5 and 7.4 mph. Mile 5 was when I started to worry we wouldn't make it at this pace. But at that point I had thought we only were going 8 miles, so wasn't overly concerned about making it only 3 more miles. I didn't know we had 6 more to go. Gemmie definitely needed a break after mile 5. Mile 5 also had 120 ft of elevation gain. Compare that to mile 9 which had a 3.5 mph pace for the mile over fairly flat terrain.
The outliers were mile 9 (3.5 mph) and mile 11 (3.8 mph) with the remaining ones generally keeping above 6 mph. I think if S had been alone she probably would have done closer to 8-9 mph with her mare. She just floats down the trail and her long legs eat up the miles much better than Gemmie does. She did note that around mile 8 or so her mare was breathing pretty hard and was showing signs of being tired. I am glad that they are out of their typical endurance shape or there would be no way we could keep up with them. They just naturally go much faster than we do at this time.
In the end it was a great conditioning ride. I don't push Gem as much as I could/should because I am always worried she will get hurt or something. But she can go faster/farther and having someone like S to ride with on occasion will really help me to push Gem more. If we always just stroll down the trail we will never make it to a 50 and having that experienced rider to push us is really important for me.
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