Warming Up To "The Problem"

The physiological purposes of the warm up #6: To increase the force of muscle contraction and to prepare tissue, bone, cartilage, connective tissue, ligaments and tendons to WITHSTAND impending force.

In the last post on Jerry Bailey I included Bailey's description of the career ending injury to Holy Bull in the 1995 Donn Handicap--a snapped tendon--suffered after the horse was hustled max speed out of the gate by Mike Smith trying to beat Cigar into the clubhouse turn, and by the end of that turn--SNAP--. Could this have been caused by anything other than
1. failure at an appropriate warm up, AND
2. zero left lead warm up in the warm up process?

Warming up the left lead is one of the finer points. Take note that any horse with a pony will naturally canter on it's right lead instead of the left. Thus, before the gate most of these horses have done zero left leadd work, and in fact they first land on their left lead at the first turn in the race when they burst onto the lead change. The amazing thing concerning the snapped tendon of Holy Bull is that we have so few of them.

Of course soft tissue snapping, muscles cramping or tearing, cartilage fracture rank way below our biggest fear in racing which is the catastrophic bone fracture. Number one in WITHSTANDING impending force is prevention of the fracture, holding the bone together.

A discussion of this will require some bone physiology which I'll get to next post.

Training:
Thursday June 21 was "one of those days" in our training. Luckily they happen rarely. A comedy really. First, Nob the rider is AWOL. Fine, we'll have a 6f riderless race in the Astride Paddock. I spend two hours mowing down the grass for the occasion, but when I bring in the first two combatants we are met by an army of horseflies. I'd timed it just wrong, at exactly the moment the horseflies come out, and, I've never seen so many of them--6 or 7 to each of the two horses. Needless to say, chaos. Instead of running and racing, despite much effort all I got were two horses ducking and jiving, brushing against trees to get rid of flies and trying to jump the fence. One of them finally did jump a fence and it took a half hour to get him back on the other side. By this time it was almost dark. Just enough to get to Art and Aylward. I exercised these two in the regular dirt paddock. Aylward the horse likes to pretend when he runs with one other horse that the companion is a mare. And with little Art last night he was particularly pesky, bothering Art with every stride, and so that w/o also turned out to be substandard, though Art did give it a game effort. Back to normal tonight, I'm hoping.
6/19/07 Tues. 10 min. play in the Astride Paddock.
6/20/07 Wed. 5x3f riderless at :16/sec speed. ten min walk under tack.
6/21/07 Thurs. 6 x 3f riderless probably at about :16 speed.