Weather, Stable, Plans And Motivation
Next, how far do we have to carry those :12.5s to get fracture resistance, but first I wanted to post just where we are with the RR stable, two horses all, since that was the original purpose of the blog to post our training and what we'd hope was a derby prep whereever we might fall. The blog started in October of 2006 with the purchase of our present three year old Amart, and almost from day one the weather has been such a continual problem, with Art and racing we're basically nowhere right at the moment.
To put it into perspective, in the 16 months Art has been here 7 of them have been what I call trainable and even in two of those 7 months we were dodging rain. Some hoof problems along the way hardly helped.
What has happened to the Kansas City climate? In western Missouri/Eastern Kansas rain tends to time itself perfectly and in nearly ideal amounts. About every two-three weeks we get a half inch rain shower that keeps us off the edge of drought. About four years ago the weather changed. After my 2003 racing at Eureka I was never able to get a horse ready at the farm again. Suddenly for many months of the year it was raining constantly, every four or five days it rains, and in those period we can train, just as we get ready comes another weather interruption.
This rainy weather I considered an aberration and waited for things to change back to normal. Now, after four years of this stuff, I'm convinced the weather has changed and that we're in a pattern of alternating wet/dry that's likely to continue. Suddenly Kansas City, instead of seeing rain clouds come through from one direction, is getting hit from all four corners with everything coming into continental USA.
And then there's the present winter. Around here they're saying it was the worst in memory even forgetting our Alberta like winters of '88 and '89. But for sustained misery for the whole three months, it's been pretty horrible. I realized we were in trouble early December when I saw this:
a gigantic frigid air mass covering all of Siberia and extending over the pole into Canada. It's still there as I copied the above map last week. At one time they were getting 70 below over much of their continent, and with this stuff still dissipating you even worry about this coming spring.
The bottom line for us, it's difficult to impossible to train horses at the farm in this weather and ground conditions. We're today in our 92d straight day of no dry ground. I've been able to use our normal running paddock exactly one time since November.
Please notice I used "difficult" instead of impossible. I'll confide, in those winters of '88-'89 when we had weeks at minus ten degrees RR was out there training horses every day. When I first got into the horse business my motivation and determination were such that literally nothing stopped me from doing my training. Some way I'd see the horses exercised regardless of conditions, and I developed various ways from shipping them to arenas, using a double lunge line with myself running full speed on the radius in a muddy winter field with cut corn stalks, to running them in driving rain.
These days I'd have to report that RR has lost that edge, at least for the time being. My attitude these days seems to be that it's tough enough to go out there and do the training every day, and that I'm lacking the will to additionally fight through ridiculous weather. I rationalize this lack of will power by questioning in those days when I did go out every day regardless, what it ever got us. Very little, would be the truth, and I do visualize that even this winter, we might have spent the winter trotting under tack, and the horses would be marginally farther ahead for all the effort, but would the gigantic effort this would have taken been worth what we would have had?
Probably not, though that hardly makes me feel any better about failing to put in the effort. But, things change, and one has to adapt. I've come up with some stuff to beat the weather and get the training back on track, and we'll be posting hopefully as we go.
Training:
2/25/08 was a normal off day. Declined to go out there yesterday with 30 mph howling winds and 28 degrees on frozen ground.
To put it into perspective, in the 16 months Art has been here 7 of them have been what I call trainable and even in two of those 7 months we were dodging rain. Some hoof problems along the way hardly helped.
What has happened to the Kansas City climate? In western Missouri/Eastern Kansas rain tends to time itself perfectly and in nearly ideal amounts. About every two-three weeks we get a half inch rain shower that keeps us off the edge of drought. About four years ago the weather changed. After my 2003 racing at Eureka I was never able to get a horse ready at the farm again. Suddenly for many months of the year it was raining constantly, every four or five days it rains, and in those period we can train, just as we get ready comes another weather interruption.
This rainy weather I considered an aberration and waited for things to change back to normal. Now, after four years of this stuff, I'm convinced the weather has changed and that we're in a pattern of alternating wet/dry that's likely to continue. Suddenly Kansas City, instead of seeing rain clouds come through from one direction, is getting hit from all four corners with everything coming into continental USA.
And then there's the present winter. Around here they're saying it was the worst in memory even forgetting our Alberta like winters of '88 and '89. But for sustained misery for the whole three months, it's been pretty horrible. I realized we were in trouble early December when I saw this:
a gigantic frigid air mass covering all of Siberia and extending over the pole into Canada. It's still there as I copied the above map last week. At one time they were getting 70 below over much of their continent, and with this stuff still dissipating you even worry about this coming spring.The bottom line for us, it's difficult to impossible to train horses at the farm in this weather and ground conditions. We're today in our 92d straight day of no dry ground. I've been able to use our normal running paddock exactly one time since November.
Please notice I used "difficult" instead of impossible. I'll confide, in those winters of '88-'89 when we had weeks at minus ten degrees RR was out there training horses every day. When I first got into the horse business my motivation and determination were such that literally nothing stopped me from doing my training. Some way I'd see the horses exercised regardless of conditions, and I developed various ways from shipping them to arenas, using a double lunge line with myself running full speed on the radius in a muddy winter field with cut corn stalks, to running them in driving rain.
These days I'd have to report that RR has lost that edge, at least for the time being. My attitude these days seems to be that it's tough enough to go out there and do the training every day, and that I'm lacking the will to additionally fight through ridiculous weather. I rationalize this lack of will power by questioning in those days when I did go out every day regardless, what it ever got us. Very little, would be the truth, and I do visualize that even this winter, we might have spent the winter trotting under tack, and the horses would be marginally farther ahead for all the effort, but would the gigantic effort this would have taken been worth what we would have had?
Probably not, though that hardly makes me feel any better about failing to put in the effort. But, things change, and one has to adapt. I've come up with some stuff to beat the weather and get the training back on track, and we'll be posting hopefully as we go.
Training:
2/25/08 was a normal off day. Declined to go out there yesterday with 30 mph howling winds and 28 degrees on frozen ground.
posted by rather rapid at
9:51 AM
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