Lukas Training: The Conventional Model

Interestingly, it was one year ago exactly, December 28, 2006 that I posted what Lukas does in his training of Steinlen, based on Ross Staaden's book. That post I identified what Lukas does, and now I'm ready to start criticizing it. Took me a year to get there on the blog, and I'll confide I've been chomping at the bit.

But first, to review from last year's post:

Lukas's horses, including Steinlen in those days, see the track 17-22 days a month, there are breezes or races generally every 8 or 9 days. I've said, in terms of frequency on the track, this is quite ambitious. It's what they do once they get there where I have my issues.

Slow gallop days consist of a mile to a 1.5 mile gallop generally in :18s. :18 sec per furlong is about the slowest open gallop you can get a horse to do. Any slower than that you start to get into cantering and loping, though even at :20/f rate guess you could still call it an excruciatingly slow gallop. Lukas emphasizes that his breezes will be slower than :12/f. Exactly how fast Lukas tends to breeze is omitted from Staaden's book, but from my handicapping days a :49 or :50 or a 1:02 probably represent typical Lukas works.

So, in evaluating "how far and how fast" and injury prevention, I propose to look at Lukas training as a model. Will what Lukas does provide enough fitness and structure to our animal to keep the horse healthy during racing would be the question. If you've read my other posts on Lukas's injury rate, you already know the answer.

Training: Our weather forecasters are at it again. Sometimes I wonder why they even bother. Three weeks ago, according to Accuweather we'd now have been into a week of 50s temps and dry. What do we have in fact? For overnight they predicted 4 inches of surprise snow, which had turned into about an inch this morning (they're driving me and the road crews nuts). Around here our last "dry" day for the race track was now more than a month ago. We've had precipitation event after event. Its supposed to warm up soon, but, that huge, huge very cold air mass over Siberia has me worried, and I see the possibility that our bad weather to date may be merely a warm up. I sincerely hope I'm wrong. This morning Art breezed riderless in the Astride paddock with Groovin' Wind. I'd have liked more speed and effort as both horses kept fighting with each other instead of running. There was little I could do about it in the deep snow. Y then ran lightly with Aylward. About what I wanted there. Planning on resuming tack work tomorrow, snow be damned.