The Case For Eliminating the Two Mile Gallop

Exercise equipment of choice at the moment for the blogger above.

Ideally in the race I want my horse to do :11s down the final straightaway after maintaining a straight :12s steady state type gallop the remainder of the race.  I want my horse fit enough to do :12s for the race distance and have enough left physiologically to accelerate out of that in the stretch.

This is world record stuff, and so realistically maybe we're talking :12.2s or :12.3s as the steady state gallop followed by 1.5f of :11.8s down the stretch. You see the point.  We want the pre-stretch drive gallop to be "steady state" galloping that the horse is able to maintain without too much lactic acid build up or O2 debt accumulating so something in terms of aerobic/anaerobic energy expenditure is left for the stretch run.

Now the point here is that this type of conditioning is going to be accomplished by other than 2 mile gallops done at 2:05 or 2:10/mile rate.  My guess is that this sort of conditioning will require both constant training of the horse galloping along in :12s as well as short bursts in :11s.  Th horse needs to be able to maintain the :12s and do the :11s.

And, again, my opinion is that we can do unlimited slower 2 mile gallops and we'll never get there with the horse.

Put another way, assuming we get some unknown quantity of aerobic fitness with our horse in a program of 2 mile galloping in 2:05s or 2:10/mile, how many of those do we need do per month to really get the benefit?  I think you'd have to feature them.  10-15 such gallops per month. Put another way--doing 5 of these gallops per month in between the other work is going to accomplish nothing.

I.e. we have a choice--do we feature the 2 mile gallop, OR do we feature speed work.?  Why choice? Because there are insufficient number of days in the month to do both--and, I think this was the root of my long dilemma with the 2 mile gallop.  You are unable to do enough of them to make them matter in terms of racing, and, moreover, every two mile gallop the horse does is done in lieu of speed work from which there is so much more to be gained..

Now, if you're Todd Plecher breezing 5f  in 1:02 every 7 days and give the horse two weeks off after a race, then, sure,  by all means, the rest of the week do the 2 mile gallops galore.  I'd say two mile gallops would be excellent if the horse's only speed work is once a week. If our training of choice is more speed work than that, and effective speed work to boot, possibly we drop the 2 mile gallops altogether.   have learned some lessons on that treadmill on this of late, next post.