Re: RC: racing and long term soundness

[Tivers@aol.com]

In a message dated 2/9/00 9:13:06 AM Pacific Standard Time, cms@fluent.com 
writes:

<< What I want to know
 is, does this type of carbo-loading/speed conditioning method burn them
 out after a while? Do you have any evidence to the contrary?>

"Burn them out" is not the right phrase. The question you're asking is more 
like does strenuous effort lead to excess wear and tear. the answer is, it 
can. But it doesn't have to. The horse can do precisely what it's been 
prepared to do, and benefit, every time, from that exercise. Once you ask a 
horse to do more than it has been prepared to do, then uyou get into the 
overuse/overtraining syndrome and accumulate damage. Flat racers are all 
undertrained and over raced, and come up with so many injuries that the 
trainers are afraid to condition them at all. Most flat racehorse trainers 
think the 2 1/2 miles of easy gallop is insanely too long.

As far as carb supplementation, the idea is not to supercdharge the horse, 
but rather to prevent fatigue--and the injury that often goes with it. By 
happy coincidence, when you prevent fatigue, you also get better racing 
performance.   

> I have
 certainly seen a lot of burned out track racehorses, who no doubt have
 been engineered and conditioned for maximum speed over the short term.>

They haven't been conditioned at all, and they're not burned out, they're 
injured. When you start hitting miles in 1:40 or better, you're approaching 
"speed that kills" without adequate preparation. In fact, miles over decent 
terrain slower than 2:45 rate are all "money in the bank". You're building, 
not breaking down--just as long as you bring those miles on judiciously, a 
step at a time.
 
>Now, there may be a fair number of endurance riders who are focused
 primarily on winning, and have plenty of money to replace their mounts>

Whoops, now you're starting to get stupid and emotional and iirrational--hope 
you don't continue in this vein.


 >after they burn them out, but that's not me (and I'd bet its not most of
 the ridecamp audience, either). My time and money are hard-won, and my
 horse is my partner.>

If he's not fit, he's your object of torture. 

> His long-term soundness and well-being are
 paramount to me.>

If so, then you'll be really interested in the science of exercise 
physiology--the only possible way to keep him fit and sound.

> I don't have another sitting on the bench in case of
 injury. It is not a victory for me if my horse doesn't love his work.> 

Agreed, but my bet is you hae yet to ride a horse that REALLY loves his work. 
You'll know it when you have, and you won't be concerned at all with losing 
as a goal.

> How do you know that your program will work for the long-haul?>

I don't have a program yet. Still working on it. But I'm already being 
stunned at how far in front of my thinking some ridecampers already are. I 
can tell you this, from a modicum of experience with athletic horses--the fit 
horse lasts forever. A few years back a vet from Canada wrote be about 4 
horses he had to retire at 16--because that is the mandatory age for 
retirement in Standardbreds. The animals had untold miles of very strenuous 
interval training under their belts--interval trained from day one--and had 
each raced more than 400 times. All were dead sound and still ready to race. 
He had another half dozen approaching retirement age in the same condition. 

His horses would race on the weekend. For every race, there was another 50 
miles of exercise at a trotting speed faster than a 3:30 mile rate and 3 
miles of maximal speed interval training during the week preceding it. So, 
1200 miles of near-maximal effort (trotting at a 2:00/mile rate), 400 miles 
of maximal effort, and 20,000 miles at speeds faster than you've ever trotted 
your horse, in each career. And these were just "sprinters". 

It's called fitness. 

 >If you've
 covered this before and I've missed it, I apologize for asking you to do
 it again.
 
 Seriously, I ask this with curiosity and respect - please don't insult
 me.
 
 Chelle Sherman
 Plainfield, NH>

You didn't do too bad, except for that one sentence. It's a major error to 
assume that those winning races traveling faster than you are simply 
crippling their animals. Check out what some of the people are saying about 
how they condition winners--these folks are deadly serious, and the last 
thing they want to do is injure a horse that they've put ten times the work 
into than you've ever thought of doing. 

See the logic? You invest, then you reap the rewards--so does your horse. You 
think, get smarter, do smarter things, and you reap the rewards--so does your 
horse. If you don't put in the blood sweat and tears, and don't think long 
and hard about what you're doing, then you just don't have the right to 
criticize those that do. Particularly on moral grounds. 

As soon as you put a halter on a horse, you're playing God. To the extent 
that you don't know what God knows, you will make errors that will damage 
your horse--we all do. Fitness is protection, as is knowledge. If there is 
anything immoral going on in endurance racing, then, it will take the form of 
stubborn ignorance and plain laziness.  Eliminate those characteristics from 
your own approach and you can then begin pontificating and opinionating on 
reasonably solid moral footing. 

Of course, we're all raving idiots when it comes to knowing what God knows, 
so none of us really commands the moral high ground. 

ti