Bone Post

Arch colt wins Saturday's Stephen Foster, impressively. We are ok with this! Our boy, momma by Arch(at left), hopefully paying attention since we have a family resemblance!

How do concussive forces affect individual bone cells? I can think of three forces working during speed work: concussion from the ground, the weight of jock and horse from above, and the huge muscular forces operating with the animal pulling through its stride. May we imagine these forces coalescing and swirling withing the structures and possibly a Max Planck equation from the field of materials physics explaining various force vectors impacting individual cells?

For present purpose I was considering that under pressure of equine speed work nano spaces that separate individual bone fibrils, fibril arrays, and even the larger osteonal structures would be pressed together and/or pulled apart by these forces in the repeated squeeze and release pattern of the strides.

We know these bone fibrils have a certain chemical physical nature that under increases in pressure, temperature, fluid flow, etc. might tend to adherence with each other and thus reduction in nano spacing between them. Simultaneously we consider that if two fibrils are squeezed together in a single stride on conclusion of that stride there will be a bounce back effect to original position. We are supposing that the bounce back will begin to diminish after a certain number of strides, and that if we kept on striding to infinity, at some point the two fibrils would remain together instead of bouncing back.

The idea above would be that instead of two separate fibrils there would finally be just one glued together structure that would be denser/stronger than the original. We discovered in the Max Planck articles highlighted earlier in the year that for increased strength in bone density is good, increased mineralization is good!

The above is my own personal supposition after a logical look at what might be happening. I need now consider a little further to verify and also to make some conclusions about practical effect.

Training:

Fri. June 11: Normal off day on which we should have gone, given the coming weather.

Sat. June 12: Several hours of steady rain, then some sun. The horse was trot-walked two times around. Best we could do.

Sun: June 13: after another 1/2 inch of rain this morning the horse was tacked and walk-trotted for about 10 min on very wet pasture. Nob forgot his whip and finally gave up as he could never get the horse out of dodging and shaking flies. The weather is doing us in, again.

Mon. June 14: Off. More rain. Four rain days in a row. RR in F it mode.