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PostPosted: Sun May 31, 2015 1:47 pm 
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Joined: Wed May 27, 2015 10:20 am
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As a youngster, I was seduced into the mysticism of the “juiced” race horse. I mean, the stereotype that race horses can be drugged into winning races has permeated every aspect of our dear sport since long ago. It can almost be considered mandatory for every plot in horse racing fiction, be it a novel, a TV melodrama, or cinema, to involve a drugged horse. I am here in this letter to proclaim, it is all a myth! Fiction does not make it so! Race horses cannot be drugged into winning races and, perhaps, more controversially, I doubt that their performances can be enhanced beyond their natural limits! DNA has finite limits. At least, I have never seen any signs of it in my long history of being a licensed trainer. As a young trainer, I did as many inexperienced horsemen are apt to do. I heard the whispers of the “drug of the month” and I used them on my horses. I am not proud to say that I have used about all there is to use in search of an edge, and I was very lucky in never coming up with a positive. After about ten years of this nonsensical search for speed and stamina in a vial, I soon realized that the only ones that were benefiting were the vets, drug companies, and some black market renegades. Such drugs simply do not create good race horses. The myth that drugs are a potent force, finds fertile soil only in those inexperienced minds that have never actually experienced first hand use of such chemicals on horses they have hands-on control over

I have been reading a very interesting book that asks questions about improving physical performance on the cellular level. The book is “The Energy of Life” by Guy Brown. Dr. Brown makes some very important observations on how much performance enhancing drugs really help. Until I read his book, I just knew that drugs were over-rated from my own training experiences. After his book, I had a pretty good scientific reason why my instincts were correct.

What is the very base component of getting a race horse across the line first? Energy! To produce this vital race winning energy involves a very complex group of cellular chemical processes. Usually, it is the machinery of the cell that transforms this energy into ATP (adenosine triphosphate) or the machinery that uses that ATP to do work such as muscle contraction or nerve impulses. This machinery has a maximal rate and no matter how much fuel or chemicals you give the machine, it will not go any faster. However, the rate at which this cellular machinery works is regulated by hormones and nerves and the amount of machinery in the cell is regulated by the DNA. For example, if our horses regularly train, their cell machinery for energy production in the form of mitochondria and energy use, muscle fibers, slowly increases in amount within their muscles, because messages are sent to the DNA, causing it to up-regulate the amount of these proteins to the cell. So there are things we can do to increase our horse’s energy level, but they are usually not as obvious as feeding/drenching our horses with various supplements or injecting specific target substances.

A process consisting of a chain of jobs as seen in cellular metabolism is generally as slow as the slowest component job—not the fastest or the average, but the SLOWEST! There are many individual steps and they all have to go at exactly the same rate or otherwise the whole system is going to get out of step very rapidly. It was learned in the 1970s by Kacser & Burns in their metabolic control analysis studies that if you decreased the extent to which one step limited a process then a different process must become more limiting. Thus, say if your horse’s energy level is limited by vitamins, when you feed your horse a massive dose of vitamins, the vitamins will no longer be limiting, but something else will have become limiting. When scientists started using metabolic control analysis to measure the extent to which the different steps limited overall rates, they found to their surprise that most metabolic pathways did not have a single rate-limiting step, but rather several steps were partially rate limiting. And more importantly, the distribution of rate limitation between different steps changed during different conditions. This has important implications for our horse’s energy level and rate at which it can perform. There is no single step within our horse’s body or cells that limit its performance; rather there are a number of different steps or processes that partially limit its race performance and which steps they are depends on specific conditions. There is no single, central, all powerful step or regulator within the horse’s body that limits and controls its performance and energy level in all conditions. And therefore there is no single vitamin, drug, or treatment that can target this central regulator to improve our horse’s performance massively or charge up its energy levels. Rather there are a large number of processes that limit its performance a bit, and if we do something or treat our horses with something to improve one of those processes, then the overall performance will be improved by a small amount, but something else will now limit the performance.

Personally, I find the betting public, news media, race officials, and especially owners who consider the use of drugs as a way to improve performance to be naive in the extreme. The myth that the right chemistry will bring riches on the race track is a farce. Neglect the basic horsemanship, the not so basic race conditioning, and no amount of chemistry will save you. Tweak all you want with various supplements, but I suspect you will find that any gains made by chemistry can easily be offset by other limiting factors. These limiting factors are not only to be found in the basic cell metabolism but in the more obvious conditions seen on a race track, shoeing, general health, conditioning, tack, racing luck, race ride, race company, etc, etc, etc. There is always some unforeseen limiting factor. I am not saying not tweak via chemistry, just don’t delude yourself into thinking it really makes too much of a difference. And I am not saying not test or regulate against drugs, but just know in the end, the winner of any given race was not carried across the line by a “performance enhancing” compound. If only life were so simple!

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