A Study in Horse Tiredness and Recovery - Introduction

Original article written by Regina Moore posted 10 years 0 weeks ago

Experienced players say all kinds of things in SIM. Such as:

“Horses shouldn’t race more than six times a year.”
“Two-year-olds should race less frequently than other horses.”
“Really old horses should race less frequently than younger horses.”
“Routers need more rest between races than sprinters.”
“You shouldn’t combine a long ship with only two weeks’ rest between races.”

Is the above really true? Is some of it true? Is any of it true?

I’ve been suspicious, since my first year in SIM, that most player advice given about how frequently horses should be raced or exercised leans heavily on the side of extreme, unnecessary conservatism.

I’m one of the most aggressive players there is when it comes to racing my horses frequently. I’m not afraid to race a horse on just one week of rest, if there’s some easy purse money available for the taking. I’m not afraid to race a horse 8 times in a season. And yet, in over 20,000 starts since I became a player in Year 23, I’ve only had six horses receive injuries due to trainer error, with the last time being in Year 33. None were serious enough to force retirement.

Nevertheless, it’s obviously possible to injure horses, and injure them severely, due to too much exercise and too little rest. The expensive bowed tendon, which forces retirement, is probably the biggest bane of the new player who gets overly eager in trying out all sorts of different training tools with their horses, to say nothing of shipping their horses to all sorts of different places on a whim.

I confess that, however successful I’ve been at keeping my horses healthy despite hard campaigns, I can’t talk intelligently about the fatigue-rest-recovery cycle in SIM. The reason is because I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention. The SIM’s veterinarian, Dr. Hinede Hacklu, almost always gives my horses glowing reports, so I haven’t used him much. I do use, for my yearlings, all the various training tools – longing, swimming, gate training, etc. – and yet, I’m clueless as to just exactly how much any of those activities take out of a horse. I just know that I haven’t had any problems with fatigue when I work with my yearlings once a week. Though, last year, I started galloping twice a week, Weeks 1 through 4, in the hope of finding more quickly the second piece of equipment for my two-piece yearlings. Again, I had no problems with tiredness.

I’ve decided that I no longer want to be ignorant on this subject. So, in Year 38, I’m going to proactively study the fatigue-rest-recovery cycle in fake SIM horses. A study like this requires a lot of vetting, which can get very expensive, and a study group of a wide variety of horses. Thankfully, I have both plenty of money and a lot of horses to play with, since I play all breeds and types.


SOME HISTORY
When I first joined SIM in Week 11 of Year 23, Dr. Hacklu was part of the SIM staff. But there weren’t any FAQs, and the only way one could exercise or train a horse or yearling was to give it a timed workout.

Information, therefore, could only come from other players, with an occasional Forum or chat comment from The Steward. The gospel of the time was that horses shouldn’t race more often than every three weeks, and two-year-olds should have four weeks between races. There was a player or two who said that sprinters could race more frequently.

After Year 23 was a loooong three-week break. And then Year 24 arrived with the brand new, incredibly improved – major facelift and all – SIM 4.0. With this new SIM, we had all sorts of fun training tools, including gallops that had comments (only three back then) from new staff member, assistant trainer Mary Weather. Farm owners could now buy amenities (hot walker, swimming pool, etc.)

We got FAQs, and the one on Farm Rest said, in part, “Resting a horse at a farm in between races is the best way to help the horse recover. A horse recovers from a race at a standard rate when stabled at the track, but when visiting a farm, the horse recovers much more quickly.” The FAQ also said, “With the addition of farm amenities, most horses are able to successfully race 7 times a year without being injured.”

And yet, advice doled out from more experienced players to less experience players continue to suggest that horses shouldn’t be raced more than six times a year, that you had to be extra super careful about how frequently one raced a 2yo, that horses shouldn’t be given timed workouts more often than every 3 weeks. And so on and so on. Even with SIM 4.0, all that ultra conservative “if you dare breathe on a horse, he’ll collapse from exhaustion” advice continued to be freely bandied about. In fact, a player that joined close to the same time I did, who became a good friend, was so terrified about all the warnings about injuring one’s horses, she would ship a horse in increments. In other words, if going from one place to another was 600 miles, she’d ship it 200 miles one day (via making its incremental destination a farm in the vicinity), and then 200 miles a few days later, and then the final 200 miles a few days later still. From what little I know, I’m sure having three short ships was more exhausting to the horse than one slightly longer ship in just one day. Thankfully, it didn’t take long for my fellow newbie to abandon her incremental shipping strategy.

In the meantime, and as the years went by, I was having fun racing my horses, and wondered what I was missing, in terms of all the gloom and doom about injuries, as I raced my horses every 2 to 3 weeks, most 7 times a year, and didn’t have any kind of problem with injuries or winning my share of races. I even won a couple of stakes races with horses racing on one-week turnarounds. I won a stakes race in Saudi Arabia with a horse that shipped from South Dakota, and it was his fourth consecutive start on a two-week turnaround. Not only was he was a dirt router (horses that should supposedly race less often than sprinters), but he ran the highest speed figure of his life.

Jump to Year 30 and a major change in how equipment was determined. Before then, the gospel from experienced players was that one uses the running lines (comments on how the horse ran in each race) to determine its equipment needs. Nothing was the least bit black-or-white about this. Fading in the stretch might mean that the horse needed a tongue tie to help him breath, or needed Lasix medication… or it might simply mean that the competition was over his head, and his fading had nothing to do with equipment. Some players were of the firm belief that blinkers prompted horses to race closer to the pace (as in real life), and similar types of speculations. In a Year 29 SimCast, The Steward said that a horse’s running style was its running style, and couldn’t be changed. She also said that some equipment pieces, such as bandages, couldn’t be determined by running lines.

Once again, I was amazed at all the veteran advice that got bandied about, that had little to do with how to factually play SIM.

In any case, Year 30 brought the ability to equipment check a horse (for a fee of 500 game points) and to give horses timed works with equipment, with the fastest work time pointing to the equipment pieces needed. With the commonly held belief that horses shouldn’t be given timed workouts any more frequently than running races, this brought a dilemma for many players. There were nine equipment pieces. If they, say, worked a horse out every 2 to 3 weeks, using a different equipment piece, that would take far longer than a horse’s yearling year, since a game year was only 16 weeks long.

Some brave souls started giving their horses timed workouts every week, starting with Week 5 (The SIM has always warned of yearlings being injured if given a timed work prior to Week 5.) With weekly equipment training starting Week 5, nothing bad happened. Nobody broke down. The SIM didn’t implode. Was it possible that we were always able to workout our horses with them needing only a week of rest? Turns out, the FAQ on Training Your Horse says, in part, “Horses can be given a timed workout once per race day (so it can work Week 1 Monday, then Week 1 Wednesday, if you desire).” And “A timed workout will increase a horse's fitness and experience level, so if used in conjunction with a race, you will be able to give the horse a big boost going into the race.”

Why is it that so many players believed one thing, while the FAQs said another?

Jump to Year 37. I owned the favorite for the Steward’s Cup Turf Mile. A couple of players, both longer veterans than I, did a SIMcast preview of the Steward’s Cup races. When they discussed my entrant, they said that his one weakness might be that he was “making his seventh start of the year.” Huh??? What’s wrong with seven starts in a year? Most of my horses make seven starts a year, unless they’re so bad that I get sick of seeing them lose. A few even make eight starts a year, and some win that eighth start. My entrant was coming into the Steward’s Cup off a three-week break, six Year 37 starts behind him, having won the last five of those races by a total of 18 lengths. These veteran players really thought his chances might be compromised, because he was doing the normal thing of making a seventh start the final week of the game year?

For me, that was the last straw. Never mind that my horse went wire-to-wire in a blowout performance in the Steward’s Cup, and was pulling away in the stretch to win by 5.5 lengths with his lifetime best speed figure of 91. I was tired of feeling that one had to be a contrarian in order to enjoy running their horses as frequently as the FAQs allowed.

I wanted to pin this stuff down on just exactly how tired horses get from various activities, and how long it takes them to recover from any particular activity. Year 38 was going to be the year that Dr. Hinede Hacklu was going to be visiting my barn so frequently that we left a cot for him in any empty stall.

By the end of the year, I want to be the smartest player in SIM about how tired horses get from certain activities, how tired from accumulated activities, and how long it takes them to be completely rested after specific activities.

If you, too, want to be an educated player about SIM horse fatigue, rest, and recovery, then keep an eye out for this series of articles throughout Year 38.

---

Back to Racing articles