Nitty Gritty

A prominent proponent of post race "rest" is the fellow saddling this horse. While I'd want to have a talk with this fellow to discover his thought process, apparently the thinking goes that the race does so much damage that three weeks recovery is necessary before breezing recommences. Hence the Plecher pattern: race, 3 weeks without breezing, 5f breeze, 5f breeze, 5f breeze, race, 3 weeks without breezing. With this sort of work we have such as Momba or the three million dollar colt Dunkirk fracturing as he crosses the finish line of the Belmont, et. al.

The emphasis here is the speed work "pattern". This blog has been focusing on establishing a minimal pattern that will produce fracture resistance (FR) in equine bone structure.

Given all of the physical variables discussed here ad nauseum, what is the manner we may go about establishing the breezing pattern that will work for FR? What is too much? And, what is too little?

I will reserve for now the question of too much, although this has been dealt with before, way back when. It was thought that consistently doing speed work ala Preston Burch every three days might be long term too much. The damage done to bone fails to heal 100% in this short a time period and there is a cumulative effect that probably will eventually fracture.

If every three days is too often--and again, since this is P. Burch I'll come back to this--then regardless of other physiology we need look at repeating speed work at more than every three days.

But, what do we look at? Hopefully a sufficient frame work has been developed for a rational conclusion.

If you put everything together that has been discussed possibly one of my initial concepts--that of "rearrangement" or the generalization that speed work produces a rearrangement of materials at the nano level predominates. Rearrangement was further looked at in terms of specific effects:

bone glue protein increases in volume and buttressing effect.

denseness increases due to contraction of atomic structures of the mineral lattice.

fibrils are moved or aligned into ideal directions.

fibrils adhere to increase density and calcification

The above "effects" immediately run into the opposition inertia that I call "bounce back".

Given all this the logical assumption would be that if there is a bounce back effect in the material--at that point where there is 100% bounce back we will have the same bone as we had pre-race. Stated differently--if we wait too long, instead of getting bone remodeling from the speed work, we are likely to get very little.

But, how does this work? We may think that "bounce back" will operate in certain ways as time passes post race. We may consider the "rate" of "bounce back", and what we need do in terms of how slowly or quickly bounce back happens.

To determine the rate of bounce back we need again consider the physiological processes that operate. And, since these have hopefully been fairly extensively documented, I will be dealing now with generalities and conclusions involving bone tissue, materials science, chemistry, physics, and so on.

Possibly it's easiest to look at this in terms of a model:

Bone Fibril #1 pre-race--#1 during the race--#1 post race for 24 hours, 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, and so on. What happens in the course of this to Fibril #1? Is there anything from this we may extrapolate that would apply to many fibrils, all fibrils or the entire cannon bone in general?

Training:

Sun. 7/11: arrived at the farm to a total mess. 1.5 inches of rain Sunday. We'd had a fairly hard preceding two days, and took this day off.