Into The Clubhouse Turn

Pristine surface here and decent job by the rider, I guess, on a horse named Animal Kingdom. Get a better sense of it by enlarging and watching in Real Player. What's my criticism? Maybe this rider is just a little too disconnected from the horse for my taste. Unknown precisely, though this fellow appears as though he's more just along for the ride than directing each stride of the workout, and yet, fairly decent job for what looks like about a 16 second gallop.
Our own horse has entered the track at the gap for his 2 min. gallop that I prefer to do wire to wire, and this would require a back track to about the 3.5f pole. For illustrative purposes of getting the horse around the track we'll avoid the backtrack, start at the 3/16th pole and plan a 5f to 5f 2 min. gallop. Let's take note also that a lot of times a rider is more prone to take off at the 5f than the finish line, and this pattern of work is more likely thus to get us eight :15 sec. furlongs instead of a couple of :17s while the rider gets into it, and then speed up later in the work. For reasons of our own we're looking for steady :15s here, and the rider should have that idea preconceived by our instructions!

Getting an appropriate warm up for what we want done is the ever present problem on a busy race track with skittish animals. Let's confide that most riders solve the warm up problem by ignoring it. A recent illustration was that video on Paulick Report of Blind Luck doing her one mile breeze straight off the pony, "hall of fame trainer no less, my post criticising this, and Paulick with post calling me "rathersluggish". Unsurprising, if you have any understanding, that Blind Luck likely failed to survive that work absent some sort of injury. Warm ups done appropriately are critical for injury prevention.

Warms ups are also critical in terms of performance and the horse getting the max out of the work. Observing horses innumerable times doing multiple heats riderless I am maybe the world's leading authority on the point that these horses never ever perform their best in the first couple of heats, and it's always heat #3 and 4 when they let it all hang out. Avoid the obvious physiological explanations except to say--how are we going to get the physical processes of the horse engaged on the race track when we start at the 3/16 pole?

On the blog way back I worked out with an actual horse an ideal warm up, and used that warm up in a couple of breezes at Eureka Downs. It worked well and I though I got max performance from the horse. However, on a one mile busy track with a guest rider on our horse a lot of times the warm up is subject to the particular rider. They do what they do, and since we might be stuck with this, we dam well better get one that at least provides a minimum warm up.

What warm up for this 2 min. gallop, next post.

Training:
Fri. 10/7 Off