The List As A Long Discussion

3-5 min. post race trotting according to Pressey comment last post.  Seems like a good idea, thinking about this.  That period of time is hardly excessive, easily within the capabilities of our fit race horse and gives the horse a nice and very appropriate period of post race decompression.  Real world ur unable to perform this exercise post race although you could post breeze provided u have a patient very hard working individual on the horse's back.

Some practical problems, however, would cause hesitation on my part.  Post breeze we know neither the condition of the horse in general or such things as the lungs in particular. Do we want to continue to exercise a horse with a mouth and throat and eyes full of sand. My mantra has always been to anticipate injury to the point of presuming injury, and then to stop at the first sign of it.  Think I might be reluctant to worsen lung bleeding by  continuing movement or to aggravate slight pulls, developing inflammation, micro fractures in their infancy.  Given the risks, am unsure the good outweighs the harm here. Given RR Injury Prevention Rule #1--never do anything unless u're 100% sure to do it without injury, on first thought I might prefer to stop, let the horse do it's post race blowing, cool it down asap to prevent gut flora death, etc.  My own post race routine of immediate cool down + 20 on the walker under observation for lameness followed by the injury checks, assessment of cannon bone heat and 20 min in the ice tub asap.

Make one further comment on the above analysis.  With regard to "The List"--and it's nice tangentially to have awareness of various factors--obviously each needs full discussion.  I noticed in my comments on warm up and going back to the year 2007 on this blog when in anticipation of racing that fall I'd developed my ideal pre-race warm up while on back of a horse actually carrying the thing out, that my comments were much more nuanced, detailed, and basically real as opposed to what I am doing now, which is sitting at a keyboard posting on memory and without any horses too train.

This I include as a significant caveat.  Most trainers will take ur opinions with a grain of salt.  They have their own methods likely for multiple reasons that differ from my own thought processes.  It all becomes "truer" if we're talking about training an actual horse and see how the horse reacts.  And, interject--this is the biggest problem with most of the anti-lasix arguments manufactured on the key board.  I guarantee many of those ladies would have a different view the first time they're at the end of the shank of a coughing horse.

With the many variables on The List, what I'd like to feature first is a rational exercise schematic.  I struggled with this all during my training, particularly the slow day work, and, as earlier noted I've had suddenly after all these years a little epiphany and believe I've got it right.  In this one instant at least, the being on the keyboard instead of the racetrack outs.