Pulse Taking at PAC

["Linda B. Merims" <lbm@naisp.net>]

The big news with pulse taking at PAC is that the veterinarians,
stewards, and ground jury agreed to have pulses taken with heart
rate monitors.  All of the pulse volunteers (and one pulse recorder
who decided to tag along :-) got together at 9 a.m. on Friday morning
for a briefing.  Our briefer was...Roger Rittenhouse.  He showed up
with a kit bag full of the metal handled VMAX hand-held transmitters,
a bunch of monitor/watches, and oodles of tubes of electrode gel.
(See http://www.vmaxept.com/ if, by chance, you've never seen this
stuff.)

I don't know why the vets decided to do this.  Roger didn't say. (Roger?)
My *guess* would be that it was extremely important to have fully
normalized, level-playing-field results at this competition,
and there was no guarantee that a bunch of volunteers could be
counted on to *all* take pulses right enough and similar enough and
accurate enough to match what a HRM could do.

Roger did say, however, that there had been alot of debate
among the vets as to the exact technique that should be used
with the monitors.  They had come to an agreement and this is
what Roger proceeded to tell us:

 - put it on the horse
 - wait until the 0 turns into a number
 - at the next memorable "counting" point, start watching the
   second counter
 - watch it for 30 seconds
 - if you lose the signal, start again
 - but if you get to 30 seconds, take the reading THEN at the 30
   second mark
 - if the horse is 60 or less write it down and pass them through
 - if the horse exceeds 60, keep going for another 30 seconds
 - take the reading at 60 seconds
 - if they pass now, let them through
 - if they fail, they have the option to immediately ask for
   a vet assigned to that task to take a reading using his
   stethescope.

We were supposed to keep the monitor face visible to the rider, if
they wanted to see.  He also told us not to wear any analog watches,
because they can override the transmitter and pulse the receiver
at 60 beats per minute!

We all got our own transmitters, tubes of goo, and monitors and
tramped out to the field by the big white Upwey barn.  Vetting In
was at 10 a.m. Friday and they had decided to have all the pulse
takers practise on the horses before they went forward to
the vets.  This would serve multiple purposes:  teach the
pulse takers how to use the equipment, identify any problems
with the equipment, and identify any horses that were a "difficult
read."  If you look at the pictures on
http://www.vthorse.com/pac/pacpictures2.html, that's what's going
on:  the horses lined up next to the stone wall are all getting
their pulses taken by the volunteer pulse takers before
going on to the vets immediately in front of the Upwey barn.
I'm actually in one of these pictures.  Second row, right.
See the gray horse?  Now see the bay horse behind him?  See
the silver thing on the bay horse's girth area?  See the
hand holding it?  Well, the hand is me :-).  (The grey horse is
Steve Rojek's Smoke Rise Finally who finished 5th and the bay
horse is Dinah Rojek's Phoenix, who was one of the 4 USA EAST
official team members, but who got pulled very late in the
course.)

Things went very smoothly.  The horses were all extremely well
behaved.  A few horses were a bit difficult because of their
"concave" girth build, but in the end we heard that only one
horse couldn't be read with the monitors.

I got one thrill.  During a lull in the action, one of the
officials, an older fellow in a green shirt came up and asked
in a very quiet voice to see the transmitter and monitor.  I
was showing it to him and going through my little routine
describing the procedure and the 2 second samples and the
6 buffers and the 12 second averaging when I glanced at his
name tag.  It was Kerry Ridgeway.

After the vet in finished, I wandered back over to the main
Youth Center building where the offices, vendors, and freebie
food was.  Ground Jury President Jerry Gillespie was having an
earnest head-to-head with Donna Smith Curtain on the veranda.
As I walked by I (as is my wont--I am a hopeless snoop) sampled
the conversation and I realized that he was talking to her
about the procedure for taking pulses.  Moreover, what
he was telling her was *different* from what all the
pulse taker volunteers had been told and had just spent
45 minutes practising!  I spoke up, but it turns out that
they were already aware of the discrepancy.

An announcement went out over the PA--"All pulse taker
volunteers please report to the Youth Center for a meeting."

When we had all assembled, Gillespie explained the change
in procedure that all the vets, including lead vet Jeanne
Waldron, had finally agreed to.  The change was small:
instead of taking the reading at 30 seconds, we were to
take it at 15 seconds.  And, if the horse exceeded 60,
we were to go 15 more & check, if >60, 15 more & check,
if >60, 15 more & check.

Again, I don't know why this change was made.  Roger, can
you fill us in?  It did address one of the problems I had
had during the practise session.  Phoenix had a tendancy
to shift a bit and my monitor kept zeroing and I had to
keep starting over.  At one point I got all the way up
to 25 seconds when he took just enough pressure off it
to make it zero.  Reading for just 15 seconds instead of
30 would make this much easier.


As for the event itself, I functioned as a pulse recorder
at Vet Check 2 (22.5 miles) at GMHA itself (my pictures
come back from Kodak today), and again at Vet Check 5
(60 miles) at the same location.  There were 9 "lanes"
manned by pulse takers, and thus the ability to process
up to 9 horses simultaneously.  Even at VC2 when the
horses were still pretty bunched, I don't think we ever
filled up all 9 lanes at the same time.

As near as I could tell (being only an injun), things
functioned exremely smoothly.  All the handlers were
extremely courteous and let us do our job without hassling
us.  If there were any complaints about using the HRMs,
I didn't hear about them.  Roger?  Almost all of these people
use HRMs themselves to monitor their horses while they
pulse down and using the equipment seemed to sort-of
"trump" any inclination to doubt the results.

I was also amazed at how well all of the horses behaved.  I
keep hearing all these stories about these nutty endurance
horses, but these horses were all complete professionals.
I also got a kick out of the "Shhh! Don't wake the baby!"
atmosphere in the pulse taking area.  The way the handlers
led the horses in was like a mother delicately helping her
toddler take its first steps.

I hope that Roger, as much more of an insider to these
proceedings, can enlighten us on the reasons and the technical
issues surrounding the debate and decisions.

Now the question I want answered is, what is Roger going to
do with two dozen half-used tubes of electrode gel?

Linda B. Merims
lbm@naisp.net
Massachusetts, USA