Feature Race | Auction | Breeding | General | Hall of Fame | Harness | Interviews | Mixed Breed | New Players | Racing | Site Updates | Steeplechasing | Steward's Cup | Triple Crown
A Study in Horse Tiredness and Recovery - WK 3 Observations
Original article written by Regina Moore posted 10 years 1 week agoI had mentioned last week that my next article would focus on shipping, but I’m still experimenting, so that will wait at least another week.
YEARLINGS – FARM VS TRACK
I’m not doing much with the yearlings right now, but instead waiting until they start doing workouts. However, I did ship one yearling to a track. After all, if farm rest makes racehorses recover faster, would that also be true of yearlings? While I assume most foals are born at farms, and therefore train at farms, there’s surely some mares that aren’t moved away from the site of their last race, upon retirement. So, their foals are going to be born at that track, and then likely trained at that track. Therefore, I’ll be experimenting with this one yearling at the track, to see if it takes him longer to recover from his training activities.
SCHOOLING OVER FENCES
This is one exercise I hadn’t mentioned before. So, I trained a couple of horses over fences, and both followed the exact same recovery pattern as for gallops – they immediately dropped to Level 2, were at Level 3 the next day, and then were a fully rested Level 4 the following day. So, schooling over fences is an equivalent exercise to galloping and ponying, in that most horses should be fully recovered in two days.
Also, don’t forget that schooling over fences has the added benefit of sometimes giving you the second equipment piece.
RACING CONSECUTIVE WEEKS
I had a 5yo borderline stakes level Paint route mare that raced Week 1. I noticed that there weren’t any horses entered in an allowance race for Week 2, so I entered her, and she “won” in a walkover, and ran a 73 speed figure, which isn’t uncommon for her, though she’s also capable of running a 77. She was fully rested by race day, as she, of course, had been sent to a farm after the Week 1 race.
What I wanted to see was how long it took her to recover after this second race with only a week of rest. I was quite surprised that while she was at Level 2 for three days, she had only been at Level 1 for two days (most horses are the opposite). Then, the sixth day after the race, she was Level 3, and then fully rested the seventh day. So, all in all, she recovered per usual, in that she was fully rested within a week's time. I wanted to race her a third consecutive week – something I’ve never done before – but there was only one race she was eligible for Week 4, and it was a tough stakes, and she really didn’t fit in with the competition. I couldn’t bring myself to do that to her.
Instead, I’m hoping to get a chance to play with the concept of racing consecutive weeks with 2yo Thoroughbreds bred for steeplechasing. Since they can’t accomplish much on the flat, anyway, I’m not worried about messing them up.
My assumption is that, if farm rested horses are able to race consecutive weeks without causing immediate additional tiredness, beyond the norm, then surely there’s some long-range consequences down the line. In other words, if the FAQs say that most horses can race 7 times a year without risk of injury, then if one starts racing horses 9 or 10 times a year, surely that’ll show up somewhere later in the year, in the form of the horse being unusually tired after its races, even with farm rest. Or, maybe it’ll show up in the horse being unable to perform well (perhaps track sour?), even though it vets rested.
DR. HACKLU VS MARY WEATHER
In light of the above, and a horse being tired or rested not necessarily being the whole story on its condition, I want to revisit something I mentioned last week in my article on preventing injuries. Sometimes Mary Weather will warn you not to exercise your horse too much, if (presumably) your horse is on the verge of injury.
I had noticed that just because a horse was at Level 1 tired didn’t necessarily mean that one got a warning, so I wondered where the cut-off was, so to speak. For a horse than ran last week, I went into the training page each day after its race, to see how long Mary Weather gave me a warning. The horse was Level 1 tired for four days (rather than the more common three days) after its race. The first two of those days, when I went into the horse’s training page (though, of course, I really didn’t train it), Mary Weather warned me about exercising too often. But the third and fourth day, though the horse was still getting Level 1 vet comments, Mary Weather gave her usual spiel about doing whatever I wanted her to do, to train it.
So, I would assume that those first two days, had I done anything with the horse, it would have been injured. But the next two days, perhaps it was enough out of the woods that, while further exercise would surely have tired it more, it probably wouldn’t have been injured?
THE INCONSISTENCIES OF HORSE RECOVERY
I mentioned the above horse, a turf sprint filly, that was Level 1 for four days after her race last week, which is a day longer than most horses. That would suggest she takes a little longer to recover from exercise. However, eight days before her race, I had galloped her, and while she made the usual drop to Level 2, she was completely recovered from it the very next day. So, it took her only one day to recover from the gallop, rather than the usual two.
I’ve seen other hints of this inconsistency with recovering from exercise with some of the other study horses. It seems the minute I start thinking a horse is faster or slower than most in recovering from an activity, it can turn the tables down the line. So, it seems more a matter of there being individual recovery for specific exercises, rather than a horse generally being fast or slow to recover from activity. Or, perhaps there’s more factors involved than simply the exercise itself.