One last piece to the Home On The Range ride story, blood work

During the winter I had decided that sometime this ride season I wanted to have blood work done after a ride. Why, because I'm curious. I was pretty sure that I was doing a good job with my electrolytes and managing a horse during a ride but this gives you a better pictures.

I'm sure we've all read articles about how they use blood work to help them solve lots of mysteries in the research world. For instance they are finding that the horses pulled from Tevis for metabolic reasons are typically low in Chloride. So I decided to set aside some hat money to have blood work done and see what I could learn.

I talked with another endurance rider who has blood work done on his endurance horses from time to time. He said he thought it was worth wile and pointed me in the direction of Dr. Mike Foss.

So when I vetted Bunny in on Friday I talked to Dr. Foss. He told me he I would get the clearest picture of what was going on if I brought for a blood draw right after I finished, the sooner the better. So I did, I crossed the finish line and took her over to get her blood drawn.

Dr. Foss called me on Tuesday with the results. He said her electrolyte levels were all great. I'd done a good job with that. He told me he was sure I already knew this but just in case... he wanted to make sure that I understood that I'd have to change my electrolyte plan if the conditions of the ride were different. I assured him I understood that. Unfortunately there is no one size fits all plan for anything in endurance. In some ways I kind of like that, the problem solver in me gets a lot of work in this sport.

Next Dr. Foss told me that Bunny's blood work did show that she had been ridden pretty hard. There was starting to be evidence of some muscle cell breakdown and her bilirubin was slightly elevated. We talked about her 12 miles of fit throwing and about how strategies to keep her calmer at the start were going to be very important for her. Lastly, she was a starting to get a little bit dehydrated by the end of the ride (her skin tinting was an A but blood work is my accurate). Dr. Foss did make sure to clarify that she was fine, she didn't tie up, there wasn't anything wrong with her just to know that she was ridden hard.

I have to admit I had a lot of mixed feeling when I got off the phone. First off I was glad that I was on with her electrolytes. The first summer I did endurance with her I didn't electrolyte her enough and at the end of one ride she had an electrolyte imbalance that resulted in a rolling heartbeat for a few hours. A great vet at the ride talked me through it and we decided it was an electrolyte imbalance and with his encouragement I rode her again the next day (it was a two day ride) and electrolyted her a lot more and she did great.

The part about her being ridden hard didn't surprise me either. Thanks to the heart rate monitor I knew that her 12 miles of fit throwing was all most all anaerobic (she was working beyond the point that her body could adequately supply oxygen to her muscles) and that takes it toll. I also could feel at the end of the ride that she was a little tired and I haven't felt that before. So I guess it's good to know that my intuition about my horse was right, she was tired.

But I have to admit that there was part of me that wanted the blood work to come back basically declaring us endurance excellence. Like in in Marry Poppins when the children want to measure her to see how she measures up and the tape measure says “Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way”. But the reality is that we aren't perfect and most sane people don't expect us to be.

The good news is we are learning and having fun. We continue to learn and hopefully we'll get a little better each time.

Besides, being perfect might get boring :)