Training Causing Injuries: Rider Control

I've covered the preliminaries--track surfaces, shoeing, warm ups, trainer diligence or lack of it, and now it's time to get down to the nitty gritty. Exactly how do injuries happen in "training" in terms of "cause and effect", and why therefore does RR think he has to train in any way but the way everyone else does.

I started all this way back when by commenting on the condylar injury (now presumably healed) of Todd Plecher trained Ravel, wondering about the mechanics of what makes it happen. Presumably, if we know, we can avoid?

There are all sorts of injuries of course, but we can classify them as "soft tissue injuries" of the type that happen to tendons, ligaments, suspensories and occasionally muscles, and "hard tissue" or bone injury that generally refers to fracture, but also involves chips and tearing of the sesamoids.

Let's follow our race horse to the track, and consider what may happen.

Everyone understands the importance of the rider, and I'll take it one step further by noting that much of what separates good race horses from lesser is the ability of the lad or lassie to handle the horse.

Unless you ride you may fail to understand fully how reactive horses are. When your rider brags about their soft hands they're stating their skill at sending small signals to the horse to which the horse responds. Please know that such riding skill is possessed by the few instead of the many, and that my own Nob is excluded to date from this select club.

An immediate example in my stable is the inability of Nob to stop Groovin' Wind on the race track, and the attendant ability of the 110 lbs. jock Renee Torbit who is without any trouble at all in stopping the horse. Nob is a 6'1" weight lifter who tries generally unsuccessfully to muscle the horse, and Ms. Torbit, who knows how she does it. I'm going to ask her.

Another example is a remarkable scene I witnessed this very moment as we were walking Wind onto the track. There's a downhill chute leading onto the Woodland's track where horses enter about the quarter pole. At the top of the chute was a jock on a horse with the horse jumping around refusing to go forward to the race track. The jock was clowning around with the spectators joking about how he was going to back the horse to the track and he proceeded to do so with the horse precariously backing and with every step threatening to back down a very steep hill that might have caused a disaster.

Our Aylward has been pulling this same stunt and Nob always needs assistance. In contrast, our little pinhead this morning, much to my disgust, just ignored the precariousness of the situation and guided his jumpy horse onto the track. Rider skill. It's like other skills, artist, athlete, musician--at some point good riders have so much concentrated practice upon which they mentally focus that they move up a notch in skill to a place ordinary mortal riders are unable to comprehend.

How riding affects the injury situation, next post.

Training:
Voila, the next gate breeze is set. After the impressive two mile gallop Monday we back tracked Wind a mile at the trot at the Woodlands today. A little exercise before tomorrow's tough work, and hopefully a calming influence as this is the first time this year Wind did anything other than take off. He was tired today albeit his usual jumpy self. After the work I walked him all over the place looking for jockey Renee Torbit or her agent Barbara Noll to arrange tomorrow's breeze. Nowhere to be found. Then--how's this stuff happen--I was in the truck turning the key to leave, and Barbara Noll's crimson van comes right by the truck. I flagged her down, and the breeze, presumably is set. Big stuff. We'll be without excuses tomorrow. It will, however be interesting whether Wind is able to recover from that very tough gallop Monday in 48 hours. Art has one more day off due to deep mud. Sun and wind today, however!