Distance and Soft Tissue

Anybody catch this? 101 years old training for a marathon. That's him at left looking every bit of 65, maybe. We've seen a shriveled up shell here and there engaging in this or that astounding athletic feat at advanced age. I just watched the CNN video of this dude. He's for real, ducking and jiving and running strong enough in his training that you might picture him on a horse. A role model, to be sure.

I wanted to say a word about breezing and racing distances and soft tissue injuries, and here we're talking tendons and suspensories primarily, but also ligaments, muscle pulls, and cartilage problems that develop such as in the horse's shoulder.

While I might consider 5-7f breezes sufficient to develop bone fracture resistance--and remember this is strictly in terms of the distance of the breeze--and I've posted that 4f might actually do it when we include the 1f gallop out, my opinion, it's a completely different story with the soft tissue.

Let me declare it outright as an immutable rule. 4f, 5f and probably 6f is insufficient breezing distance to race injury free at a mile and 1/8 or thereabouts in terms of soft tissue injury. If you engage in that sort of training non-sense, and most of them do, you are 100% guaranteed to pull something, probably sooner than later.

To put it into perspective, Todd Pletcher's powder puff 5f breezes in 1:02 in the 3 weeks pre-race might be like a human miler confining their training to a 440 at 85% race speed once a week for the three weeks pre race, than going on to run the 1600 meters at max speed. Can we imagine this happening without such a runner pulling every muscle in his or her body starting with hamstrings, and going right around the corpse?

Why do horse trainers engage in this sort of non-sense of breezing insufficiently for racing distance in terms of soft tissue injury? To avoid writing a book I'll list what I consider the main reasons in no particular order:

1. Obliviousness and lack of motivation re exercise physiology. This btw would include 75% of those that coach human sports. Love to run into these types coaching the opposing team.
2. Fear of hurting the athlete in training. This too is a human mantra as fans, writers, rich owners talk about the dreaded injury to the athlete in training or pre-season. It's stupid, and completely illogical in the long run, but that's what questionable trainers, managers and coaches are about.
3. Money and pressure to the get the horse into the race. A lot at stake if the horse fails to make the big race, eh? Takes a bit of a backbone(see 101 yr. marathoner above) to train appropriately on the edge through that sort of pressure.

Training: First real nice day. Farm is starting to dry out. Two year old off on 3/11/08. Three year old did some medium speed riderless work 5 x 3f and 5 minutes trot under tack aborted when Nob reported himself too sore to continue. Nob has been suffering weather related arthritic problems.