Ivers

I want to do a one more post on Tom Ivers. Who is Tom Ivers? He's the author of the book on the last post. Ivers wrote "The Fit Race Horse" way back in '84 or '85, both introducing interval training to horses, and spewing scathing, hillarious criticism at the conventional training establishment. Ivers was smart, funny, could write a little bit and was completely dedicated to bringing exercise science to the racetrack.

Over the years I read everything Ivers wrote and watched all the tapes, and I communicated with him on occasion about this or that question. I discovered the original "Fit Race Horse" just after buying my first horse back in '87 named Jeckimba Bay. I put JB through Iver's program twice. I'll avoid the details because the JB experiment ended so prematurely and abruptly when the morning of one of his races JB fell over in the washrack and fractured his pelvis. I'll simply relate--go through the trouble of the Ivers training program and you will have one super fit and strong racehorse.

Unsurprisingly, with Ivers constantly exposing methods (and results) of the mainstream trainers, he hardly received a welcome reception at the race track. When I was doing Ivers I was known as "that interval trainer" which was considered other than a compliment.

It's a shame. If you read Iver's work you see the man brought a lot to the table. He died recently just a little older than me of leukemia. So much energy spent,such really great work, and still so little actual attention to science in our sport. Iver's work will be resurrected one day. There will be exercise science on the race track, and it will be winning all the races. May he rest in peace.

Wed. 12/6/06: Catching up on my report. Its been a busy week at the office and weather has been horrendous. We now have extreme cold on top of 2 inches precip on the ground. just trying to hold the fort conditioning wise through this stuff. It was lower 20s, but ok. put on the 20lbs Astride, no extra weight, and Y and his buddy pasture galloped for about 10 minutes. they were into it, and so we got several half furlong spurts--less fast than saturday, but fast enough to qualify as fast twitch(muscle) work. Last fast day was last Saturday. So, 4 days between fast works here. Preston Burch wants a fast work every three days. but, in this weather we'll take it.

Thursday 12/7/06 15 degrees + court all day long = rest day.

Friday 12/8/06: given 15 mph winds and 30 degrees as today's high, RR decides to do 5m pasture trot, go to work, and get serious again in the 50 degree weather coming in tomorrow.
We'll go fast saturday and we'll be ok without losing ground.