Controlling The Variables, Part II

Last post I gave my thoughts of that day in '92 where the idea of never making a mistake hit me. Which brings up the next question. How do you never make a mistake? And, in particular, on a racetrack with it's conglomeration of uneducated, frequently unskilled humans.

Considering this I broke down the idea of the mistake. Errors come in many ways, but, they all happen over a generally short space of time. What if with extraordinary diligence you watch everything and stop the error right when it first starts?

There's lots of subtle examples of such a process of mistake intervention on the race track, but there are also obvious ones. Think of the troubling situation where the horse fails to change leads into the stretch. What if the rider on this occurrence stops the workout or race right there? Not just sometimes, but every time it happens.

Or, another e.g. where the instructions are 6f in :14s, and lo and behold your horse takes off in :12s. What if you radioed your jock through the receiver in their helmet(see Bob Baffert) to slow down or abort, or maybe you've already instructed what to do if the horse goes too fast? This particular example led to one of the RR Rules that I'll get into later, "better too slow than too fast".

In considering this it all came together for me very quickly that day, really before JB had crossed the finish line I understood that if I wanted to stay in racing with my meager resources it was necessary to control everything that happened on the race track.

I soon gave this concept of "control" a name, and called it "Controlling the Variables". I'll discuss this a little more next post.

Training: summary coming for the weekend. Ground conditions continue to be horrendous.