Understanding Timed Workouts - Stock Breeds

Original article written by Regina Moore posted 9 years 1 week ago

Stock breeds are those that run 870yds and under – Appaloosas, Paints, and Quarter Horses. Like Thoroughbreds, these breeds have three distance categories – sprints (350yds and under), mids (400yds, plus 440yd, 550yd, 650yd for Quarter Horses) and routes (870yds).

The good news about timed workouts and stock breeds is they can tell you who the speediest sprinters are. The bad news is that I’ve found them to be rather pointless for mids and routers, unless you’re really familiar with how fast a mid or router can be expected to go at a particular workout distance. The reason for this is, unlike Thoroughbreds, the sprinters run the fastest at all the workout distances. So, if you have a top quality mid or route horse, he’s still going to work slower than the sprinters, no matter the workout distance.


SOME HISTORY
Though the stock breeds have always had three distance categories, the available workout distances have had a bizarre development.

Appys and Paints have facing fewer distances than Quarter Horses – 300yd and 350yd for sprints, 400yd for mid, and 870yd for route. Initially, they only had two available workout distances – 300yd and 350yd. If one assumes that a 300yd workout was for sprinters, and a 350yd workout was for routers, then what distance were mids supposed to work at? Some got worked at 300yd and some got worked at 350yd. Some players worked all their horses at 300yds, regardless of racing distance category, and some worked all their horses at 350yds.

Finally, in Year 35, Appys and Paints got 400yd as a workout distance. So, now there were three workout distances to match there being three racing distance categories. But that didn’t help much. Sprinters still have the fastest times at all three workout distances, and some players are apparently so accustomed to using 300yd and 350yd, that it’s taken a while for the 400yd category to catch on.

Still, I assume that the intent is that 300yd works are for sprinters, 350yd works are for mids, and 400yd works are for routers.

Quarter Horses are more complex than Appys and Paints. They’ve always had more individual race distances within each distance category. What’s more, the 550yd and 650yd races were originally intended to be part of the route category, but we players bred those horses from 400yd stock, so The Steward eventually relented to player complaints and made 550yd and 650yd races part of the mid category. Much later, 440yd races – the true quarter mile distance – were added.

At the beginning, Quarter Horses had four workout distances – 100yds, 220yds, 300yds, and 400yds. I assumed that 100yds were for sprinters, 220yds for mids, 300yds for the unique 550yd/650yd horses, and 400yd for routers. But, as with Appys and Paints, sprinters always ran the fastest times. In Year 35, 350yd was added as a workout distance. The next year, we got 440yd as a workout distance. So, now there’s six different workout distances.

(NOTE: Because 440yds is exactly the same distance as 2 furlongs, the programming can get confused. Therefore, when looking at workout rankings, one has to have the breed set to Quarter Horse, in order for the 440yd category to show up.)

So, I see the intention of the Quarter Horse workout distances breaking down to something like this:

100yd timed works for short sprinters
220yd timed works for long sprinters
300yd timed works for 400 and 440yd mids
350yd timed works for 550yd mids
400yd timed works for 650yd mids
440yd timed works for 870yd routers

Again, I’m just guessing at the intent. In all cases, sprinters work the fastest times, so the rankings and percent brackets (as provided by Abe Froman) are rather skewed for the mid and route horses.

However, because the 440yd distance is newer, it’s taken a while to catch on. Because I used that workout distance as soon as it was available, I’ve had a lot of my routers rank high in past years, if only because there were so few works at that distance. Those top working horses all turned out to be ordinary racehorses, at best.

In any case, I wish stock breed workout distances were modeled after the Thoroughbred distances, in that a horse can only work well at the distance that relates to its ideal racing category. A sprint horse with the fastest 440yd time is going to get clobbered in an 870yd route race. So, what’s the point of having it being able to work faster than routers in a 440yd workout?


For those who like looking for diamonds in the rough, when horse shopping, I suspect that a whole lot of decent mid and route stock breed horses get dumped into greener pastures for having subpar works; when, in fact, they might have good works for their particular distance category.

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