WHAT HORSE TRAINERS
MIGHT LEARN FROM THE 2013 TOUR DE FRANCE
by Mark Cramer
Let’s connect the dots
between the results of the 2013 Tour de France and getting the maximum
performance from a race horse. One secret might be uncovered if we explore the
seemingly amazing second place finish in the Tour de France of the 23-year-old
Colombian rider, Nairo Quintana.
Though beaten for the
yellow jersey by the experienced favorite, Christopher Froome, Quintana won stage
20 in the Alps, won the King of the Mountain award for the best climber, won
the white jersey for the best young rider and won his place on the podium, all
this in his debut Tour de France.
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| Nairo Quintana movistar.com photo |
Quintana does not look
physically endowed for cycling. Most Tour riders are tall, with long legs.
Quintana is 5 ft 5 in. To compensate, he bypassed the European prep races and
stayed in his native Colombia, working out in his home region, where the
altitude varies between 9,000 and 10,000 feet above sea level.
“Training at such high altitudes encourages the body
to create more oxygen-carrying red blood cells — and that gives him a natural
“advantage” over other riders,” according to an AP article that was picked up
in newspapers around the world. The Colombian said he was “very thankful” to
all those in cycling who have fought doping. His high altitude training
produces the same effect as the banned EPOs, but it’s entirely natural.
Research on high
altitude training for race horses has mixed messages, but an experiment in 2004
with a training track in the Alps produced several over-achieving winners when
horses descended and raced at low altitude. If they remained long enough at the
lower altitude, their performance reverted back to the usual, so the idea is to
keep a horse in training at the high attitude and only ship to sea level just
before race day. Most humans and horses would need time to adjust to the thin
air, so high altitude training should, at first, be lighter than what it would
be at sea level.
Going to these new
training heights could be complicated. The track at Ruidoso seems like a good
candidate, at nearly 7,000 feet above sea level. Ruidoso is a 750 mile ship to
Sam Houston Race Park at sea level, and 550 miles to either Lone Star Park or
Remington Park.
The idea first came to
me by chance in the early 2000s when I came down from my home at 12,000 feet
above sea level in Bolivia to attend the Claiming Crown at Canterbury Park.
I changed planes in
Miami. Once off the plane, I began behaving strangely. I volunteered to lift
people’s heavy suitcases off the carrousel. I climbed stairs instead of taking
the escalator. I looked like the OJ Simpson Hertz airport commercial.
Other behavior changes
crept into my life. At Canterbury Park I said “no thanks” to a ride into
Shakopee and walked instead. Anything
within my range of sight was redefined as “within walking distance”.
I was writing the
“barn notes” for the track website, watching workouts and interviewing
trainers, jockeys and grooms. One particular horse on the program looked
intriguing. In the past performances he was outclassed. He was shipping in from
Arapahoe Park, at above 5,000 feet.
Two days earlier, I’d
seen a longshot make it to the Canterbury winners circle after having shipped
from Arapahoe.
I reached the trainer
on his cell phone. He told me he was rolling through Iowa.
“You timed your trip
at the last minute,” I said. “Are you trying to make the most of the high
altitude training?”
“Damn right I am,” he
said.
His horse finished
fourth in the superfecta at huge odds, and all you had to do was box him with
the three favorites in order to collect.
Back to La Paz, Bolivia,
I began my own training, first walking, then jogging, and finally, months later,
running on a track with a view of luminous glaciers. My biology had adapted to
the altitude. I would run up to 10 kilometers in La Paz and hike in the
mountains at 17,000 feet.
With no racing in
Bolivia, I took a flight to neighboring Chile, on the Pacific coast, to play
the horses. I squeezed my running shoes in my backpack. Once checked into a
hotel, I went for what I thought would be a brief jog along the beach. I ran, I
ran some more, and I continued running. My endurance seemed as infinite as the
Chilean desert, where it hasn’t rained in 200 years.
I lack the expertise
to comment on attempts to simulate high altitude horse training, such as
Simulated Altitude Training (SAT) or Intermittant Hypoxic Training (IHT). Nor
can I derive any firm conclusions from reading research abstracts, such as “Hematological
changes and athletic performance in horses in response to high altitude (3,800
meters),” American Journal of Physiology
–Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology (Wickler & Anderson, 2000), which examined
the performance of four Arabian horses, one quarter horse and one Shetland
pony.
Thinking without
nuance, I can see some logic. The higher the altitude, the less oxygen you
inhale per breath. EPO (erythropoietin) is supposed to boost the number of
oxygen-carrying red blood cells, thereby increasing aerobic capacity (VO2 Max) and
endurance. The natural EPO is the body’s gradual compensation for the lack of
oxygen intake at high altitude.
Mountain training
certainly worked for Nairo Quintana, who used to bicycle 10 miles to a rural
school as a teenager. My old samples of Arapahoe shippers were far too small to
be empirically valid. More recently, though, a skillful horseplayer friend
provided me with some new evidence. “The Arapahoe
Arabian shippers to the Northern California fairs has been a great angle for
the past couple of years,” he said. It’s a 1,200-mile trip from Arapahoe to the
California fairs.
