How Lukas Does It

In 1988 when Ross Staaden asked to see Lukas's training logs, Lukas replied, "I'm uncomfortable with letting you see those." And well he might for what other trainer has his logs out their for criticism and dissection? I'd congratulate Lukas. He did absolutely the right thing to allow Staaden for all time to memorialize what was going on in the shedrow of the top trainer of the 1980s and most of the '90s.

I'd suspect Lukas's discomfort more had to do with divulging his training to potential copy cats as you sense from the Staaden interviews. I'd doubt Lukas was arrogant about his training, but believe he was protective.

So, we know what the man does, or did, and the question then becomes, how does he injure all those horses? (And, in fairness note that Staaden uncovers that Lukas's injury rate is in line with the other conventional trainers, no worse, but still horrific.)

I look at training in terms of the RR rules published a few posts ago. But, before applying The Rules to the Lukas shedrow, let's take some things about Lukas training that pop right out at you. Again, for a 30 day period it goes something like this:

g g g g w g g g w b w w w g g g g w g r w w w g g g g g w b w (31 days).

Let's start "exposing" this conventional training program by asking THE question: will this training schematic prevent injuries?

How do we evaluate this? Begin by doing a bit of number crunching. What are the horses really doing here? What pops out at me first of all is that in a 31 days period the horse has done exactly 3 fast works. One of them, of course was a race, BUT, in 31 days, three fast works. In the same time frame Preston Burch's horses have done 9 or 10 fast works.

But, the differences between Lukas conventional and Burch hardly end there. Note that two of Lukas's fast works were 4 or 5F at moderate fractions, and, though this is a wild guess, the times probably were achieved by doing sub-12s down the lane making the first two or three furlongs excruciatingly slow. Burch tended to breeze his horses race distance at near race speed.

So, for this post we have:
Lukas
3 fast works a month, total distance maybe 16 furlongs.

Burch
10 fast works a month, total distance maybe 80 furlongs.

There's enough difference here in terms of "fast works" between Burch and Lukas to upset your stomach. Continue next post.

Our training:
My word. Tonight Y, the two year old is still tender on that left front. He's off. I walk Art to the Astride paddock intending to do sprints and notice he'd lost a front shoe, likely galloping in the deep mud two days ago. Should have check yesterday and forgot. So, instead of working it's a Mr. Nob shoeing job. Luckily it was just warm enough that shoeing was something slightly better than total misery. The weather is starting to wear on everybody around here. Big snow storm headed this way tomorrow.