Bones And Distance

The graph a couple of posts ago indicates my conclusions that from commencement of breeze to finish in the first 2f we have minor remodelling effect which increases geometrically about the 2.5f mark and continues to increase sharply until it levels off at about 6.5f. My interest now is in describing what's happening within those leg bones from beginning to end.

First we observe that the remodelling, of course, will take place later, after the breeze is complete, and the time this takes will be the subject of a later post.. The question for now is what happens to cause SUFFICIENT remodelling, and where does it become too much.

On this subject I've done almost zero reading and am just putting together what I already know.

For 3-4 year old horse racing and training a certain quality of bone is already there at the commencement of the breeze. And, presumably this bone has been properly warmed up and alerted to impending activity.

We already know that as the work commences certain forces begin to act on the bone from all directions. The concussive forces coming up from the track surface, the weight bearing coming down from the horse, various torsional and twisting forces as the horse motors through its stride, and various "strains", anterior, posterior, medial, lateral. I am also supposing that these forces generate through the bone tissue in various manner, vibration, shaking, colliding etc.

I suspect that what happens in the bone is somewhat similar to what happens in any solid non-living object when you beat the heck out of it. We've all attempted to shake something apart and we increase the force of the shaking until the thing finally breaks.

If we analyze this shaking as to what occurs within the object and start from the smallest particles of matter we may imagine perhaps the little electrons and protons at the atomic level that form bonds from atom to atom becoming mildly disturbed as the forces commence and continue.

At some point microscopic clumps of matter held together by all sorts of "bonds" begin here and there to lose their grip with each other, and as this process escalates we eventually get actual separation between matter at the microscopic level. However, note that in my posts on warm up I presented the concept of "sacrifical bonds" which are bonds that give and give and give before they actually will break.

I'm thinking that the above "disturbance" process and its affect on at the microscopic level undoubtedly increases geometrically as the forces continue. Where tiny specs of matter may hold together initially, as any part of the whole starts to give way the velocity of the process increases until at some point the whole thing will give. This is called in mechanical engineering "fracture" and the bonds fighting the fracture is called "fracture resistance".

From what I've read this is exactly the process that happens to the bone as the horse goes down the track. Of course we hardly ever get to the point of shattering or breaking of the entire body. How far the process might go at given distances, next post.

Training: despite 30 degrees and windy today for only the 3rd time since November we were able to use the regular running paddock. Muddy, but usable. Nice10 minute fairly fast run. They're in decent shape from the Astride paddock work. Skipped tack work due to the cold wind.