Bruce Jackson Summary

The last RR post looking at trainers regarding injury prevention. A bit dry perhaps except when you consider, speaking for myself, that for 20 years I've watched race track trainers presuming and guessing as to what's going on. Now, with the internet and these websites, there's some support for the opinions, and hopefully some help for our own horses.

I'll try to pull all this together and then on to some physiology regards breezing frequency. But first, to conclude Bruce Jackson racing, the website lists 88 horses on his entries/results page, seemingly quite enough for one trainer, but more than 200 under workouts.

I checked alphabetically all horses, "a" through "e", on the workout page. Only 7 showed works supporting that Jackson deals with a lot of youngsters or he's just sloppy in keeping this up. I suspect he has a lot of youngsters.

But, this makes 10 or 11 Jackson horses that I looked at closely, and I can say that Jackson's program involves a lot of every 7 day breezing in preparation for racing with all sorts of inexplicable gaps. And during racing and especially as the year progresses they back off the breeze work dramatically. I saw Jackson horses during racing do as little as 2 breeze/race/month. 3.5 was about the max. Most of them were around 3/month.

Jackson's pattern is what we've seen from the east coast Zito types--race, then two weeks off, then, maybe/maybe not commencement of 7 to 12 day breezing prior to the next race.

I get general impressions and feelings in looking at this data closely, which may be highly accurate or otherwise. As long as I've been around, little things provide significant clues. My impression of Jackson's training was that it is more hit and miss, and less soundly conceived than several of the other trainers I looked at. This feeling is more general impression than specifics caused partly in there seemed less rhyme and reason or logic in what Jackson does once racing commences. Thus, his advertised tailoring of programs bespeaks more to me of questionable inconsistency to the seeming detriment of several of his horses.

You could suppose, being at Fairhill, that Jackson does lots of beneficial slow galloping and non-recorded work, except that his record and results bely that he does anything of the sort. Rather, my (very unscientific) suspicion here is that Jackson never has been an athlete himself and lacks the feel that I'd prefer to see in a logical program. I hope this is other than unfair. I'd like to get Jackson's reaction to this as I'm convinced that he and his wife do a lot of work, and probably might explain what they do to my satisfication. But, absent that, I'm forced to rely on info that's available.

My real interest in Jackson, as the others, is what his program, so similar to several others looked at, does in terms of injury prevention. I'll try to put this together the next few posts.

Training:

1/14: I almost tested Nob's prior boast that he could gallop in 15 degrees, but, with the temps going down, 0ur 3 year old possibly needing a mental break, we opted for day off #2.