Finishing The Work

By all accounts the horse in the photo is still very together as it finishes. The rider, if you draw a line through the center of gravity of this situation is perfectly placed to move forward into correct position as this "bound" progresses. This vid also shows the interesting elevation the front of the the horse gets that we normally miss in live views from the ground. This elevation also shows when I freeze framed the Rachel Alexandra vids.

Looking at this jocks hand position it should be obvious that nothing is happening in terms of bit manipulation and that this jock is merely doing an excellent job of staying with his horse's motion through the jarring and concussion absorbed by his ankles and thighs.

And so, as I on my mythical animal am motoring down the stretch in a 2m gallop that will finish at the 5f what am I doing? As I cross the finish line I am starting to try to pay attention to my horse's breathing. This is difficult because there are wind conditions where it's difficult to hear anything past a certain speed. Stick your head out the window of your car at 35mph and you get the amount of wind jocks get riding in :12s.

What I am listening for is whether the horse is breathing normally, whether there's any lock up in the breathing and to what extent my horse might be laboring in this work. I certainly want to pull the horse up and stop the work at any sign of lock up in breathing certainly to stop any flipping of the palate, but also to avoid discouraging the horse by driving him past the point where he can breathe. This monitoring the breathing is much more important at full speed than it is at the 2m gallop, although for the unfit horse even breathing well for a mile at :15 sec/f can be a challenge.

Trainers, wrongly, imo opinion, particularly early in training send their horses out to do 3f works or 4 or 5f works when what they should be doing is telling the jock to send the horse until the point on the race track where the breathing locks up. At the breathing lock up the work aborts. This of course happens farther and farther down the track as conditioning improves. An e.g. of this--when I was doing Preston Burch every three day breathing work at Eureka I'd noticed at the outset that my mount was in the throes of breathing lock up after about 4.5f. Within two weeks this was happening after 6f and so on. Breathing improves as the horse conditions and is an excellent monitoring device for the fitness of our animals.

Thus as my horse crosses the finish line heading for the Club House turn in addition to doing everything I'd been doing--holding the horse together in optimal stride, monitoring the speed with appropriate points of urging, planning the lead changes where, how and how fast etc., at this point late in the work I've got my head a little forward listening for the breathing.

If all is going well our work merely continues till it finishes at the 5f and at this point I am calculating how well this went in terms of where we are in the training and what this particular horse will be able to do next. It is a tremendous training advantage to be riding your own horse, and short of that to have a rider with whom you may communicate that is able to tell you more than "he went good".

After this 2m gallop finishes at the 5f we are into the "slow up" which may go well or be a struggle to get the horse pulled up depending on the enthusiasm and conditioning of the animal. The major bit of instruction here is what is the proper method after the horse has stopped.

In this mode consider what is happening to the horse physiologically--and this is less for the 2m gallop than at full speed. Unknown to me exactly how quickly the heart rate comes down in the gallop out and stop, but would suspect at the point the horse is stopped heart rate is still very high and powerful. Consider this in terms of the jock that--the minute he stops his horse he just starts walking.

I have an opinion on this--nobody else has ever expressed the concern--that if, when the horse stops, the jock merely walks the horse that the quickly powerfully beating heart will create very high blood pressure in the tiny lung capillaries--ie. lung blood is no longer being dissipated quickly by the exercise but the heart is still beat fast and strong--and that as a result of this some capillaries may burst.

Unknown that this actually occurs but this makes good logical sense to me. The correct procedure after the slow down in a fast work is trotting instead of walking until the heart rate comes down!!!

Some final thoughts on getting the horse around the race track, next post.