A Startling Conclusion

The photo showing Mr. Nob up on Groovin' Wind relates to what suddenly hit me the other day on the question of injuries in my stable.

For anyone new to the blog, we've been at it 20 years through several serious efforts. The last series of posts has been a summary of our injury situation over the years with the goal of comparing our experience given our training methods to those of conventional trainers.

I've written here that we had few injuries but those that occurred were highly damaging to the operation. Maybe this states the obvious that small stables and small owners have to keep their horses instead of losing them. Everything about racing requires our athletes to be performing free of injury. And, as a correlation, the manner in which you preserve your athletes may well dictate your level of success or ultimately your continuing participation.

I figured this out early, as I posted, with RR Rule #1 that you never do anything with a horse until you're 100% sure you can do it without injuring the horse. Following that little epiphany in 1993 I aimed to avoid injury only to have several hit the stable starting early '98 at the KY Horse Center. I was despite the rule, still injuring horses. But, why and how?

After looking back on all this, what suddenly occurred to me was that we have been without any injury at all since the year 2000. Since that year, through a lot of miles on track and at the farm and a whole series of races with two horses in 2003 the injury rate has been zero. All eight of my horse injuries had occurred in the first 13 years of operation.

Thinking on this i then realized something indeed drastic did occur in the stable beginning in late 1999. That was the year that Mr. Nob the self-taught farrier became our self taught rider. Late in '99 we threw Nob up on a horse and away he went riding and breezing our horses. Nob was riding only occasionally in 2000 learning the skill, but, by 2001 Nob was doing all the riding including the breezing. We've been injury free since.

While from day one of the stable I had always employed the best riders and on most days got perfect rides, it seemed every rider screw ups cost us a horse. With Nob, starting in 2001, suddenly we were without screw ups. A horse would run away, Nob would reign it in. A horse would refuse change of leads, Nob would pull it up. We now had an educated (albeit complaining) individual on board gaging horses in action. The horse is winded, Nob ended it, and so on. While I might trade Nob for a hall of fame jock in a New York minute, the observation that since we've had our own rider with a direct interest in our stable, as to injuries, we simply have yet to have any with Nob (Until today. Jeez... see below).

Today's Training:
1/21/07: 7 min. riderless aborted due to deep mud. Nice tack work.
1/22/07: Day 3 (Burch Training): 10 min riderless with several 1-1.5f spurts in the mud. Again, nice tack work on day 4 of walking in open space.
1/23/07: Day 3 repeated: I'll expound on what happened today next post. Suffice for now that during a second consecutive day of riderless fast work little Art suddenly pulled himself up very lame on the right front. Training error here for which I'm still kicking myself. The good news, after injury check we're without heat, swelling or pain. 80% it is a hoof bruise from running with balled mud in the shoes. Immediate administration of bute. We'll see .