How Fast, How Far, How Often

Sadly, what it boils down to for our race horses is that the vast majority see the track so infrequently, and, when they do, so inappropriately, that injury will occur sooner or later regardless of the other peripheral injury causing factors such as shoeing, riding, warming up, track surface, etc.

The basics of what injures race horses in conventional training involves our conventional trainers, ignorant, stupid, lazy, greed in pocketing rider money, and probably twenty other things I'm failing to consider at the moment, screwing up the primary training factors of how far, fast, and often the horse gallops on the track.

Training running athletes, human or equine, in terms of performance involves some combo of:

frequency
distance
speed

With the horses, of course, in addition to deciphering the training for performance, we also consider, additionally, the extreme fragility of the athlete. An example of this latter is that trainer I met at the last Woodland's meet and asked him whether he thought the long pasterns on his two year old would remain sound through training. (Those pasterns) "is why I've been going slow with him" which is something we'd never have to think about with our homo sapien sprinters.

So, we may send our human track athletes through twice a day speed play-fartlek training without big concerns, while with our horses the same conception requires that we consider whether the cannon bones will hold together through what we do.

What I propose next on the blog is to examine specifically the manner in which e.g. D.W. Lukas in his training injures horses due to "errors" in putting together the formula of how fast, far, and often he sends his horses to the track. We know it happens, but how?

Training: This is the best I could do before the battery shot craps on a 32 degree day. Y doing his lunging-long rein thing:

here's a better shot of the young fellow:
Friday: Art 4 x 2f near all out riderless + 10 min trot-walk in the pasture under tack. Y continues his gentle riderless gallop and long line work. Today we're off as even before I rose from the bed I could hear the weather with 25 mph winds and steady light rain. Here's KC on Saturday morning 12/1/07: