Injury Prevention Finales: Controling the Variables

Ophelia: "But, good my brother, do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny path to heaven."
Hamlet

Dwelling on injuries probably seems like horse racing's steep and thorny path. And yet, I think there's way too little interest in what ought to be an obvious subject: if you're unable to keep you horse running, you're out of the game.

There are three approaches to this that I can discern:
1. The ostrich--bury your head in the sand--it just happens--approach. You ignore the issue and takes your chances. Success rate: problematical.
2. The numbers game approach to horse racing played these days by most of our trainers. Success rate: give me enough horses and eventually one of them will win.
3. The RR approach on this blog: i'd term it obsessively and scientifically "controling the variables". RR success rate--so far very little.

I was in horse racing for some time--probably 5 years--before I'd figured this out completely. Stuff kept happening to my 3 horses despite close study of Tom Ivers, despite every bit of the great precautions taken. One day it hit me that horse racing is totally Murphy's Law and that if anything bad could happen it would. It came as a sudden epiphany to me that anyone wanting to keep a horse healthy would have to control literally everything that happens to the horse.

Control with horses has it's limits, of course, but when you break it all down step by step, most of the things that cause injuries can be controlled.

#1 of course is awareness. It is necessary to discern what in fact causes injuries. The below list is hardly exhaustive and is merely what comes to mind at the moment. Each of these things will do in your horse in a NY minute. Avoid thinking these are equivalent or have the same weight. Some of them have far more significance than others:
lack of appropriate warm up
lack of condition in the horse for what it is being asked to do
any sort of surprise to the horse--change of rider weight, change of rider manner
any unusual change up in the exercise etc. etc. any surprise.
failure to religiously get lead changes
rider errors of all sorts and kinds
speed work over cuppy surfaces

That's an incomplete list. How dicey it gets, how delicate--how about this one--the horse finishing a 6f breeze in 1:12 and the idiot rider immediately puts the horse into a walk. The horse's heart in this process is still going at 180 beats a minute and because the horse was prevented from trotting out to dissipate its heart rate, the pressure in the capillaries of the lungs caused by transition from fast gallop to immediate walk causes capillaries to burst. And, on and on. More next post.

Training:
Meanwhile back at the ranch here is Rollin'Rodney during his shoeing last night. He sports now a permanent harmless bump on that left knee. Will post the last nights minor disaster tomorrow. Long story.