Questions And Some Answers

"Everybody wants to be a body builder, but nobody wants to lift no dam ass weights..."--Ronnie Coleman

In terms of understanding the place of physiology and fracture resistance, I'd like to take the reader back again to the point immediately post race where we have the horse back at the barn and we're injury checking those very warm cannon bones simultaneously mulling, what next?

Anybody that's been there understands the perplexity, regardless of the particular performance at that moment in time. In making our subsequent decisions we have a choice of going on feel, instinct and experience, or we can add to that an understanding and application of the science. Chaos theory postulates cause and effect, and thus, for our little bone cells there are decisions to be made, provided we understand.

This blog July to Octobor '08 covered much of the physiology, came to some significant conclusions in the month of September, but some questions were left dangling.

First, I'd like to tighten up the review started last post for understanding as this goes forward.

First we have some assumptions to consider:
1. Dirt track.
2. We're dealing with conditioned bone, i.e. we're declining to pull a Square Eddie, race the horse and then wait 16 days to do a :58 and change.
3. The term "conditioned bone" postulates a mineral matrix and collagen tightly packed with bone glue proteins all buttressed tightly against each other to withstand impact.
4. This conditioned bone material will hold up to any single hit or stride but in the course of 240 hits or strides there will be some damage.
5. We believe the damage will involve partial or whole destruction of the matrix of single bone cells instead of groups.
6. And the destruction will be diffuse (scattered) throughout the cannon bone.
7. In" hard body" training bone traumatized repeatedly will transform itself by remodelling--Wolf's law.

and so:

QUESTION I: How much bone cell damage in a single one mile speed event?

We estimate 1% destruction for every breeze at :12 speed.
We estimate less than 1% destruction at slower than :12 speed

QUESTION II: What percent of the 1% damaged bone cells are completely (as opposed to partially) damaged: 50%--i.e. in the "hard bodied" trained horse .5% of cells/breeze are 100% damaged and .5% have less than 100% damage to their matrixes. Obviously, the partially damaged cell will repair faster than the 100% destroyed cell!

QUESTION III: How long to repair a single partially or wholly damaged bone cell:

30 days

QUESTION IV: How much bone cell damage can we tolerate in a 30 day period? What is acceptable to us?

My answer: 7-8% damage per month is acceptable.

Thus, through early Oct. '08 the blog had calculated the max. upper limits of breezing/racing per month. Preston Burch would breeze a horse in :12s ten times/month and end up with 14% (or less) bone damage on the 30th day. I'd posted that this is unacceptable to me, and that we can reduce the 14% damage figure by a) backing off on number of speed days, and b) backing off on speed to e.g. :12.5s instead of :12s, per the training of TC winner Assault.

That's were I was. Onward, next post.

Training;
Fri. 2/6: After last night's 4 miles of w/o including speed the horses were tired, but gamely each galloped 1.8 miles. Rod did his first "real" galloping and got his first lead change. Art went steady with 50 yards of trot between the .9 +.9 miles at about :19 speed.