Where and How do you board...?

[Cate Lynn]

Getting more into AW racing, I feel it's a slightly different animal when it comes to finding races and then boarding at farms inbetween. With my dirt sprinters and all other divisions, I pick a locale (EU or US or AUS, etc.) and then stable the horse somewhere central to most tracks I use frequently. With AW though, there are only 4 tracks, and they're very spread out. So far, I've set the home location for all AW runners in Florida, US, as central as I can between every location - CAN, EU, etc. but even then the shipping is 6+ hours in any direction.

I'm worried over injury due to lengthy shipping.

I'd like to know what the more experienced AW folks do for this? Do you pick a primary track or region? Do you run into issues sometimes not finding the races you want if you nix a specific track to run at?

All feedback appreciated!

[Nena Olson]

I board at Gateway Farms most of the time so I can run at Artificial Arena

[Louise Bayou]

I have a farm in Florida and the ship is fine to all the AW tracks.

[Michael Looker]

I treat the track in England as its own circuit and completely ignore it. I might miss out on some weaker races, but that's fine with me.

Most of my AW horses have Whitetail Ranch (WY) set as their home location; it's less than three hours from all three NA tracks. With my better (stakes-level) ones, if they have just raced in IL and their next start is planned to be there too, I'll go to the small effort of manually shipping them to the nearest farm before shipping everyone else using the "Ship All Horses Home" button on my results page.

[Madelene Gilbert]

I break it up into 3 groups:

My claimers all stay in Alaska, and I set "In the Shadow of Denali" as their home location.
My second string stays in Britain, and I set "Dare to Dream" as their home location.
The rest of my non-claimers in America all float; no home location is set, and I just ship them to the nearest farm from the track after they race.

The only preemptive shipping I do is if I plan on moving horses across seas (US to GBR, vice versa). I'd rather make the big ship 3 weeks out from their race rather than send them to the nearest farm and autoship 1000s of miles 3 days out.

[Glenn Escobar]

With AW, as with pretty much all my other racing horses, they are categorized by "strings" for me (similar to what Madelene indicated for her things), and their string/group/ability dictates where they go and whether they are auto-shipped.

I actually have 4 custom barns dedicated to different levels of claiming, and those horses all auto ship to and from Alaska (The Igloo, I think).

I have barns for the Mixers at their different running abilities (one for claiming race entrants, one for others, one for Stakes-race-caliber runners) and they all auto-ship to and from the Midwest USA.

And then I have a similar set-up for upper-echelon TB racers............but those horses float without a home location, AND they mostly have pre-planned schedules in their notes, so I know where they are going next. And also like Madelene, I ship them ahead to a farm near their next race as soon as they finish the race prior so that they can start resting early. Those horses have their itineraries listed in their notes.

[Cate Lynn]

Ahhh, this is very helpful guys! Im seeing a whole new way to categorize horses which outlines shipping policies too. I'll have to start working on this shortly once I'm back