Frequency: Available Evidence

"Fortune" said Don Quixote to his squire, as soon as he had seen them, "is arranging matters for us better than we could have hoped. Look there, friend Sancho Panz, where thirty or more monstrous giants rise up, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes..."
"What giants". said Sancho Panza.

Such is the wisdom of Don Quixote, and please avoid dying before reading that book. Goethe expressed this same concept "to able man the world is not inert", and for our horses I term this "controlling the variables", the idea that for our fragile beasts we need to take note of and arrange every little thing.

To avoid tilting at wind mills though, we have to know what we're controlling. Bill, the exercise physiologist, gives an opinion in the comments, last post. Let's look a little closer.

The blog has presumed that bone remodelling requires certain exercise parameters to achieve race appropriate fracture resistance. Two minumus have been concluded:

speed: 12.5 sec/f
distance: 4f

one yet to be determined:

frequency

and, though I've been in racing 20 years, I still will be interested in my conclusions given all the information that is available these days.

First, how do we look at "frequency" and what do we have to take into account.?What information is available? Bill noted the Maryland Shin study, and quite unbelievably that still is the only research study dealing signficantly with the question. This study concerned bucked shins however, and so while shin study may point us in the righ direction, I'm (as of yet) unsure it holds the final word.

And, we have theories and training protocols, of course. The old timers went every three days. Tom Ivers in his own meticulous manner decided on every 4 days. For Ivers the 4 day spacing dealt more with performance as Ivers believed the 4 day spacing to be the point of maximum acquisition for additional fitness for the animal. Best I can recall Ivers dealing with the idea of fracture would be his observation that we are unable to interval train our horses as human athletes due to structure, and that Ivers believed the horse "could go" every 4 days given the foundation provided by Ivers protocol.

Then we have the modern trainers: Zito and Lukas go 9-10 days, Asumussen with Curlin goes every 7 days, Dutrow and Eion Harty every 6 days, Nafzger with Street Sense last year vascilated from 5-7 days for a good long while without any break at all. Pletcher likes every 7 days with long breaks after races.

Thus we do have available to us a considerable circumstantial evidence. Would it help therefore to look at injury records of these various protocols? I'll look at this next post.

Training:

Our aim is to make a race track visit around Nov. 15. We're plagued right now by some engineering problems in replacing the trailer floor as (unbelieveably) after reinstalling the entire floor there is a 1 1/2 inch gap between the wood flooring and the metal supports. My 22 yr. old helper as it turns out made his initial measurements without a ruler causing now a few more RR gray hairs. My three year old could race 45 days from now. However, we'll avoid the effort with just one horse. I suspect the two year old will be coming on line February to March, and the present thought is to try race at Will Rogers Downs (Tulsa) on 2/1/09, weather willing.

This week we reverted more to some riderless fast work as the horses were getting fat and out of shape with the light galloping routine. We'll commence increasing the gallops this next week:

Tues. 10/7: 1/2 inch raing this morn, and we pass on tack work. paddock track barely usable. The horses however are hepped. Riderless speed as fast as they could motor in the mud. Lots of huffing and puffing they did about 3f between stops for about ten min. nice conditioning work for both.
Wed. 10/8: Art: Easy day after yesterday's hard stuff. 1 mile trot. Rod: 1 mile trot.
Thurs. 10/9 Nob is awol. Riderless at near max speed. 4 x 2f. Total volume is close to 3 miles with runs in and out of heats + warm up and warm down. The two year old suddenly is looking good whereas formerly he'd been very lazy and reluctant to extend himself.
Fri. 10/10: Off