Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

The calculation is correct. It was meant to show the minimum needed for maintenance - which explains how the assumed requirement could be so far off for so long!

 

Electrolytes during a race also come from what is already present in the intestinal tract, and from food the horse eats during the day. The severity of the imbalance is simple arithmetic. It's the difference between what is available to be absorbed (and what the kidneys can conserve) versus what is lost. The diet is a very important source of all electrolytes except sodium. Depending on the diet, the combination of what the horse eats during the ride, and what is already present in his digestive tract from what he ate the prior 3 days or so, may or may not be adequate to keep him out of trouble.

 

Both finishers and nonfinishers, winners and nonwinners, have these electrolyte changes when racing. What separates them is factors such as level of sweating, conditioning, available supplies of all the electrolytes.

 

If a horse is performing well with the way you are managing him, obviously there's no absolute need to change anything. That doesn't necessarily mean though that he couldn't be doing even better with some more support! Whether we are really smart enough yet to know exactly what that support should be is an even bigger issue, but we're learning all the time, even if it just amounts to learning what questions need to be asked and answered.

 

There are also several different ways to define what the horse "needs". If a horse can finish well without EL supplementation, he didn't "need" them to finish - so far at least. That doesn't change the fact that he may be skating on very thin ice metabolically and at the end of that race the horse's body is severely depleted of key electrolytes. This has been very well studied by researchers such as Dr. Ecker and Dr. Coenen. It has also been well documented that water and electrolyte deficits can sometimes take days to correct without proper replacement.

 

Eleanor

 

 

 

There must be something wrong here in the calculation. Our endurance horses are eating 5kgs of hay per day or 11 pounds, as a minimum.

I don't want to be the one launching again this EL discussion :-)   But how can Eleanor explain that successful European horses perform without EL administration during the race...

Leonard (www.endurance-belgium.com)

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