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Carl Meyer wrote:
I want to beat(or have a chance) to beat those whatever. I can't
> do that if I am spotting them 25-40 lbs... ..IF you don't
> believe weight is important in winning then you must live is Mickey
> Mouse land!!! If you recall, that's what beat CIGAR and finally retired
> him. WEIGHT!!!
Hi Bob, Carl and everyone else,
I am not a "competitor", so my comments are based only as an equine
exercise physiology researcher. My MS thesis is based on how rider
weight and other factor affected completion and PLACINGS among over 500
horses over the Tevis trail in '95 and '96. We, too, fully expected
rider weight to make a big difference in "success", whatever your
definition of a successful ride happens to be. Without going into long
explanations, let me just say that the statistics and methodology have
stood up to the toughest scrutiny, so I'm pretty confident that the
conclusions drawn are sound ones. What we found was that if a horse is
conditoned to carry a specific weight AND most importantly, a horse is
carrying sufficient body condition (meaning he's not a hatrack) to
supply the metabolic demands of having to carry weight over 100 miles of
terrain, then weight carried made NO statistical difference of either
successful completion or where that horse and rider placed at the
finish. In fact, some of the heaviest loads carried (a ratio of
rider/tack weight divided by the horse's body weight) were done so by
the top ten and top twenty horses. There was no correlation whatsoever
found between the load carried and how well the horse finished, or even
IF the horse finished, AS LONG AS THE BODY CONDITION SCORE WAS BETWEEN 4
AND 5.5. If the body condition score was below a 4, then the horses
carrying heavier loads ran into trouble faster. In other words, they
were having to expend more energy and ran out of the gas they needed and
didn't have to do the work.
I'm not trying to flame anyone, just politely disagreeing that weight is
necessarily as big a factor in endurance as it is in flat-track racing.
I wonder if given the inherent metabolic and biomechanical differences
between flat-track and endurance racing, trying to closely compare the
two is sorta comparing apples and oranges? And, of course, this study
didn't observe any effects of heavier weight on tendon, bones, feet,
etc. which would certainly take a heavier toll than it would in a horse
carrying a FW.
It seems to me that if statistics indicate that there is no difference
between FW and HW riders when riding horse that have been conditioned to
carry FW and HW loads, respectively, then there WOULD be a clear
advantage given to the horse that had been CONDITIONED to carry HW, but
RACED carrying FW. Which of course would be an option and advantage
available to the FW rider that can adjust her weights upward during
conditioning and downward during a race, but NOT to the HW rider that
cannot adjust his weight downward to any significant degree. In this
scenario, then I wholeheartedly agree that the HW rider is at a clear
disadvantage, and your only recourse is to rely on craftiness and deceit
<g>.
Just my .02 of course.
Susan Evans Garlinghouse
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