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Racehorse Exercise 101

Posted: Monday, June 20, 1994

Exercise science is the core technology of athletic performanceThere is a reason why Carl Lewis worked 6-to-8 hours a day for more than a decade to prepare for a ten-second Olympic sprint. And those tens of thousands of hours of hard work are the principal reason he has won multiple gold medals. In fact, I think it is safe to say that there have been no Olympic gold medal winners who have not worked hard for at least six years prior to their Olympic wins. Why do these athletes bother?
Either they are elite athletes or they are not. Right? They have either got the genes, the heart, and the conformation, or they do not. Right? In six months, they are as fit as they are ever going to be, racing as fast as they are ever going to race. Right? If they want to race at longer distances, they should just go ahead and try longer distances and, if they fall down, or get injured doing so, then, obviously they are not stayers. Right? So, why bother with all this time-consuming, costly exercise?
Whoops, I know what is wrong here. I am comparing apples to oranges, humans to horses. Humans need a lot of training to be any good. They need coaches with Ph.D.'s in exercise science to figure out how they should train. Even human football players need a lot of work, or they would just bust apart the first time they got blocked or tackled in a game.
Horses are different, especially Thoroughbreds, who need a lot less training than Standardbreds, a whole lot less training than eventers and steeplechasers, and a whole world less training than endurance horses that race maybe 50-to-75 miles in a day. In fact, ten minutes a day on-track at a gallop is way too much work for a Thoroughbred. This is because Thoroughbreds are bred to run. No science to it except "breed the best to the best and hope for the best." No need for much in the way of exercise and no need for anybody handling a Thoroughbred to know anything about exercise science, whatever that is.
What is odd about this is that the exercise science that forces Carl Lewis and other Olympians to work so hard for so long was developed, in part, from studies of ponies and horses exercising. Even more was developed from studies, of all things, of rats and mice. And chickens, deer, antelope, elephants, cheetahs, frogs, and fish. That is because you cannot kill humans and examine their parts to see what makes them go fast for a distance.
Roger Bannister was the first human athlete to truly benefit from the short, hard lives of all those experimental animals, and in the 40 years since his sub-4:00 mile, an awful lot more has been learned-forcing Carl Lewis to do 6-to-8 hours of painful exercise a day to run a stupid ten-second race. Astonishing, isn't it?
The fourth International Conference on Equine Exercise Physiology will be held in Brisbane, Australia, this year in July. Four years ago, there was one in Sweden, and, before that, in San Diego. The first was held in Oxford, England, in 1982-the year my first book, The Fit Racehorse, was published. I have attended two of the conferences and have read all the proceedings. In fact, I have read most of the stuff on rats and chickens and humans, too-in June, the American College of Sportsmedicine has its big to-do in Indianapolis, so it is going to be a busy summer.

Learning lessons
I will bet you are wondering why I am wasting my time and money chasing down obscure facts and figures in an area of science that does not apply to Thoroughbreds. Well, I first became fascinated by exercise science way back in the mid-1970s, when I discovered that racehorses were being bought and sold for millions of dollars, and were racing for millions, and there wasn't any exercise science being applied on the racetracks. I figured that if I learned the central technology of building athletes, then I might just be worth a million dollars to somebody who owned a few of these racehorses.
It turns out there was a whole lot to learn, and not a lot of racehorse science out there. The Swedes had dared to suggest there was a better way of training Standardbreds, irritating everybody already train-
ing Standardbreds, but then they came over to this country and started winning every trotting race in the country. Today, a lot of people have their horses going about six seconds faster at a mile because they have learned something about the Swedish technique, which was the first application of interval training in racehorses.
And there was this problem of horsemanship, or lack of it, that I had to overcome personally. Pure ivory tower science does not work very well on the racetrack, principally because horses can't talk. At least, they don't talk to regular human beings. Instead, they talk to guys like Charlie Whittingham, Johnny Tamarro, Max Hirsch, Federico Tesio-horsemen. For a long and miserable five years, they weren't telling me anything. I had to learn the language. That delayed things a bit.
Somewhere in the middle of my language lessons, I learned, the hard way, that horses were a lot different from humans when it came to what you could put them through in training. At least, trying to squeeze a decade of progressively loaded human exercise into 6-to-9 months of allotted preparation time for racehorses was just not possible-like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube is just not possible. Let me give you an example:
If you do a workout with a horse that, in a human would have that person staggering, gasping for breath, and wanting to throw up-which is the normal situation at the end of a workout for a human half-miler or 200-yard swimmer, the horse will not complain like the human would. Instead, he will just go ahead and bow a tendon without asking permission. If you get him muscle sore, he'll stop eating-a revolting development that would never occur to Carl Lewis. The horse won't tell you that his feet hurt-he'll just blow a suspensory or crack an ankle. Pop a splint. Pop a curb. Chip a knee or a hock. The horse goes ahead and does what you tell him, while the human weeps and wails at the first little pinch. Too much too soon with a horse and before you know it, you have crippled him. Discouraging, to say the least.
As my horse racing career approaches the 20-year mark, I am just beginning to realize how much I do not know about racehorse exercise. How much nobody knows. Still, there are some basic bits and pieces of useful knowledge that, glued together, have been worth about $16-million in winnings to people I know. I can't expect you to take what I say about Thoroughbred exercise for gospel, because I don't take it as gospel. But I do know this:
As information concerning the sciences involved in human exercise and performance began to circulate, coaches and athletes tried new ways of training. While some of these techniques failed, others prospered and were adopted by larger numbers of athletes-world records in virtually all human athletic events have been tumbling regularly for 40 years. Equine exercise science, especially that science which applies to pari-mutuel horse racing, is not being used at all, yet. The basic science is done-there is plenty to set coaches and athletes off in the right direction. But it has not reached the racetrack.
In the next few months, I will try to give you a feel for the basics of applied Thoroughbred exercise science as I understand it. Perhaps my thoughts will inspire some of you to do more for your animals by way of conditioning, building more long-lasting national heroes like Secretariat and John Henry. Ask Carl Lewis or any Olympian: Exercise science is the core technology of athletic performance.