Thurs. Misc.

Will wrap up injury prevention shortly to the extent I'm able. I've been away from the race track for over 3 years now and so need to give some thought to the overall picture that includes a lot more than fractures and fracture resistance. Thereafter I hope to get to the subject of performance, which is more natural to me as I've been involved with that as coach and athlete most of my life.

Training this week has been pretty much a disaster involving a combo of circumstances of the type we constantly run into with our horses and a personal lacking of the initiative and motivation that it takes to get a TB to the race track. I flat out missed a day over the weekend, and, thereafter as sure as the sun comes up, we miss another day due to weather, are unable to gallop the next day due to the wet, and last night, finally, in perfect galloping conditions I arrive to "what's this" watching the horse limping up to his feed tub.

This is followed by some relief on noticing loss of front shoe and consternation since that shoe was tacked on there about 36 hours ago, the thought being the new skinny #5 race horse nails had failed to hold in the speed work in the mud. But then, again, "what's this" in tacking it back on there's heat all over the place including on the sole of the hoof. Just at the end I noticed an inch long healing laceration about two days old of the type of getting caught in a fence. This is good because-well--he lost the shoe in a fence instead of bad shoeing--and bad because we literally lost a horse that way a year ago. Undoubtedly the two horses were chasing each other again, and Rodney ended in a fence somewhere.

In any event there was too much heat in the hoof to get on the horse and gallop. I've done that once before and the horse stumbled and almost fell from the pain and myself on the ground. Avoid repeat, so for the second day in a row we pass on galloping. Wasted week. Hoping to get it together this evening.