Warm Up Continued.

The photo shows Jerry Bailey at Saratoga in 2002, but here's Woody Stephens about 1950 on warming up:

"The times are changing sure enough. . . The ponies are used today to take a horse and its rider to the post because by the time they've galloped there, the jock is too tired to handle him. In my day, if a horse got tough, we turned his head toward the outside fence and galloped him. He might have had half a gram of heroin on his tongue, too, and he'd get so sharp he'd run through a wall if he was pressed."That's from page 76 of Woody's tale of horse racing woe, entitled "Guess I'm Lucky".

Woody was proto-typical hardboot, uneducated, high school drop out, grew up in Lexington, became a jock, and then as his weight ballooned transitioned to groom, assistant trainer, trainer, with enough native smarts and drive to fight his way to the top. He was married, and gives his wife a lot of the credit for his success. I'll give a full report after I've finished the book.

I propose here however to dig a little deeper than the hardboot explanation for warm ups, for after all it's 2007 and chapters have been written in the texts about warming up, testing it for duration and intensity in terms of resulting performance, and breaking it down into all of its components. Let's acknowledge that in human athletics warm ups are specific to the athlete and can range from the merely intuitive all the way to down and dirty scientific of the sort of warm up you see at the Olympic training labs. Human exercise physiologists can prescribe ideal warmups to maximize performance for a particular event . Can we in any way relate such precision to our horses? I'll try to be specific in the coming posts.

Today's Training:
two days of rain and my love of training in the mud provided enough excuse to cancel training for a second day in a row. Hopefully we'll be back at it tomorrow.