How Fast And How Far?

Got this as my Xmas gift, and I'm already enough along to note horses racing 30-40 times per year, both Seabiscuit and War Admiral working race distance in the mornings (hello Todd Pletcher), and a whole gamut of training, tougher by multiples than anything seen since (surely) 1980.

I always ask the question, what the heck happened? How'd we get from breezing race distance and racing every 3-5 days in that time to the once per month breezing or racing we've seen in the recent past. How do we get from Seabiscuit and Trainer Tom Smith to Wayne ("I don't work horses) Lukas? Somewere on the way they blew a fuse, and I've guessed (though it's unknown) that it began toward the present with Woody Stephens.

But, this assumes that these old time trainers headed by such as Sunny Jim Fitzimmons, Max Hirsch, Preston Burch, and in Sea Biscuit, Tom Smith, kept their horses healthy. Instead, I suspect they hurt just as many horses as the trainers do today. Just took 'em longer due to the solid training foundation. You may guess that our venerable old time trainers were just as inconsistent, illogical and generally lazy as the typical erratic American, and that thus there would have been just as many injury causing training errors in that day as now.

Still, in terms of what the old time trainers did on the racing track, it's an interesting study, particularly in regard the whys and wherefores as to how training changed, and apparently changed fairly abruptly.

I'm now in the part of my blogging where we'll get to the heart of the matter. When we get to the track, in terms of injury prevention, does it matter whether we gallop 1 mile or two(per K. McGlaughlin why gallop 2 when one will do), do the gallop in :15s or :18s. Will our horse stay sounder if we breeze them 5f in 1:00 or a mile and a quarter in 2:05? I'll try to look at this in the coming posts.

Training: All excited getting out of bed today. I was out of town last two days and expecting a suitable surface after two days of good weather. But, completely otherwise, total mess. This morning we had standing water over frozen choppy ground, and then more rain and snow throughout the day. Can we beat mother nature is a question I'm cogitating on at the moment. Third straight off day, and hopefully I'll have it together regardless of weather by tomorrow. We'll see.