Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

Sisu West Ranch wrote:

> After reading the well thought out posts on the inherent problems with 
> lameness grades, and by extension with grading of metabolic problems, 
> I have had some thoughts on the whole thing.
>
> My basic question is: What do we really want the recorded pull 
> information in the database to accomplish?
>
> I have come up with some possibilities, and welcome more and welcome 
> comments on the possibilities


> Much has been made of the percentage of pulls that are RO, and how 
> there could not be this many riders who can not go on. The relevant 
> percentage is the percent of starting riders that RO pull. My math, 
> from remembered numbers, comes out at <1%. This does not seem 
> unreasonable for an extreme sport with aging participants.
When I looked at the pulls for 1996 through 2002 (haven't updated it) it
showed a steady decrease in RO pulls (as a percent of pulls) to 2000 and
from 2000 on they were level. It looked at endurance distances only. I
suspect the '96 throudh '99 was a transition period where the pulls were
become reported correctly. When you broke the 100's out of the mix the
RO pulls for 100's had a somewhat different distribution and the 100 RO
pulls didn't show the same trend down as the rest of the pulls. In the
50's (50 to 95 miles) the pull rate was flat over the peirod. However,
that could as well been an artifact of small sample sets with the 100.
When the pulls were broken into categories, the RO's was decreasing in
percentage over the period, metabolic pulls were flat and lameness pulls
increasing in percentage over the period.

I agree that we have reached steady state and there appears to be little
misuse of RO. Also noting the fact that we have many aging participants
and it can be an extreme sport - especially on hot and/or humid days -
the 1% RO pull rate compared the number of starters doesn't seem to be
out of line. I pulled RO three rides in a row a few years back. First
one the brain dead Arab pulled off a big spook at a big mean gator
hissing at him on the side of the trail, a.k.a. a burned log, and in
staying on I ripped my groin muscle. Since I could hardly stand up when
I got off at the check and had 35 miles to go I pulled. The next two
rides I pulled because my leg wasn't recovered sufficiently to hold up
the the distance.

I tend to think that we don't realy have a problem with systemic abuse
of the RO. Sure there will be individual events of it, but I don't see
it as a problem. One thing that would be interesting would be to track
the vets to see if the distribution of RO pulls is consistent across
vets. But that could also open a can of worms.

Another issue with a more detailed description of pulls is the time it
would take to determine this. While the "one bit quantization" to either
"L" or "M" doesn't carry a lot of fidelity for each incident of a pull -
the data does in the aggregate carry a lot of information.

Truman

--

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite
of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."    Niels Bohr
-- Nobel Laureate, Physics





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