Written over Saturday, Sunday, and Monday…..
Wow, I’ve been up since 3 yesterday (Sat.), the track did not open for training, and now I’m up again at 5 this morning (Sun.) and it’s taken me this long to get to this entry. I definitely have too many things to do.
Now it’s Monday, at 4 a.m. ….
As an update to the Catty Shack horse (that the owner calls Hogan), What his present owner and I have found out is that McGreevy only had him for his first win. After that he injured himself in the trailer; he kicked or something and cracked a hind sesamoid bone. McGreevy sold him to Eli Betancourt, who I’m guessing gave him the needed recovery time before finishing out the horse’s career.
The woman sent me links to photos of him and he looks like a five-year-old. He’s a very beautiful horse and has kept his youthful figure, bound as it is to a well-put-together frame.
I saw Jerry Norwood a few days ago and knew he wasn’t kidding when he said that the horse was cut out to be a pretty nice horse. It was McGreevy’s loss that the horse suffered an injury. Jerry had expected Catty Shack would never race again after that.
He informed me of how to get hold of McGreevy and Betancourt, and so far, Catty’s owner has made an initial inquiry. We’re waiting to hear back.
On the home front, it looks like I’ll have to go to work today after all. The bad weather is not supposed to hit until later this morning. Come ON, bad weather! I may be broke but nobody likes to work outside when it’s only 20o all day long. Yesterday I had to change my clothes at break time because the windbreaker layer was wet with sweat and I was starting to get chilled.
In my opinion, you have to keep your eye on the weather and choose your gallop days in advance. While that’s just common sense, few trainers seem to be keen on planning more than a day ahead, at most. In this game where everything matters, you lose when you don’t pay attention. Granted, it’s difficult to plan during the winter around here. It’s bad enough that you never know if your race will go (which is a year-round problem); add to that the chance that once you’re slated to run your date might be cancelled on account of the weather, and the futility of worrying oneself about whether anything matters is enough reason to ignore the local Storm Tracker report.
The downside to all the missed days is the relative rambunctious-ness of the horses when they finally do get to exercise. I’m galloping three for an outfit at the top of the hill that a person my size and age has no business sitting on. They’re all bigger and taller than average and don’t get enough training to begin with; much less in the bad weather.
Yesterday two of them went out; the first one cooled out bad and the second one returned with a bloody mouth. In hindsight, I can count on myself to be more cautious about handling them. But to be realistic; to spoil the crap out of it, feed it buckets of grain that it’s dying to burn off in three or less miles a week and then throw a pint-sized rider on the 16+h. -sized animule is to invite trouble. Finally, commanding us to backtrack (jogging only- no running or galloping) is the icing on that cake.
So this is how things went for me Friday:
The first one, a strapping bay mare (1500 lb) wants to begin her gallop on the road before we reach the track, and my attempts to restrain her translate to priming the engine from sixty yards out. At least we were permitted to gallop yesterday, but with the caution that we hold her down till she passed the chute. What the trainer missed (as we disappeared behind the maintenance shack) was a duel for open space between myself and she.
She scrambled to break my “cross” which is a way of holding the reins so that they are crossed over each other where the rubber grips lie, creating a frictional lock that places pressure on the bit (the more they pull, the more they pull against themselves). I turned her toward the fence; she rears up in defiance of the barrier and leaped sideways; I loosed the reins, pulling the left in a line through my knee, forcing her to circle; She reacted with a sky-leap to the right to escape me, I fail to be loosed by her and circle her again to the left; she tries me one more time; I circle again, and she lets me have control until I straighten her and get her just past the chute. Then off she goes! The rest of the gallop is not so bad, after the initial .22 for the first Quarter.
The second one, another tall though not as sturdy-boned chestnut, was to backtrack (jog only – in the opposite direction of traffic, along the outer perimeter of the oval. The footing on the outside rail was littered with chunks of frozen track surface. Somehow I had to stay off of it, and still on her.
It’s common practice that when a horse is difficult to control when backtracking to cock their head toward the outside rail. At varying degrees, this blocks their relative opportunity to take off. You really have to be there to understand the difficulty in straightening the beast out in that situation, because as much as we would all like to permit them to travel in a straight line with their bodies properly aligned, all they care about is making tracks into the great wide open.
From there, it’s only a matter of who’s the strongest. Believe me if you saw a photo of teensy me on this Goliath, you wouldn’t need to worry about losing your last fifty if you bet it on the horse. So angling toward the only potential barrier this morning was essential for me.
I did a pretty good job; most fo the time I was able to stay reasonably off the fence and out where the surface was smoother, with the mare’s head still cocked in case she tried anything. Till we got to the 6-furlong chute, where my plans always threaten to unravel.
The six-furlong chute is where the starting gate generally sits, between 8 – 9:30 (7:30-9 in the summer months). This chute requires a break in that all-important rail (you know, the one I happened to be using to block attempts at flight.
It’s important to me to relax a moment when a horse picks up speed crossing that 70-100 yard expanse; avoiding resistance keeps the neck muscles supple. If I don’t do that, it’s harder to get their head cocked again, and in fact I find it easiest to sit down and loose the reins a bit while the horse guides itself. Can you tell this is the voice of Experience? I don’t know what anyone else does, but I can tell you that horses hit their teeth on the Clubhouse Turn (just after crossing the chute) more than anywhere else, so we must be doing something similar.
And that brings me back to the present, wherein I am pulling my charge back into a slow hobby-horse from an open gallop. I failed in my control to prevent her from contacting the fence with her cocked head. Often it’s the teeth, but more often the front gums or the upper lip that hits one of the support brackets and gets cut. Today was one of those days when I actually heard the little thwap and thought “that must be a lip; sounded like a lot of flesh in there.” Sure enough I could see that the front of her muzzle was bleeding as we came off the track and made our way back to the barn.
I don’t blame the trainer for being put out, but I reminded him that he has me way over- mounted. I’m 116, and she’s 1600 for crying out loud. When it’s between the safety of the horse and the safety of me, I can’t be counted on to save both of us every time. I mean this happens every time the horse goes out- not the bloody lip, but the wrestling match; it’s to my credit that we manage to avoid the same accident as often as we do.
I won’t defend myself any more on paper here than to say I will always do the best I can to keep us both safe. If I return with a C- or D+ for performance, just chalk it up to A+ effort and get someone who can do it better than me.
The jocks you see on TV in the breeders’ cup don’t have to put up with this kind of behavior, because nobody wants to be responsible for putting Edgar Prado in an embarrassing position, much less the hospital. Compared to the average rider, high-profile jockeys are spared these circumstances, and my point here is you won’t see this on TV.
To the non-horseman it may look as though I don’t know what I’m doing out there, so I’ll say it not for the first or last time in my life: I’m a feather trying to fly the bird! If the bird must be tethered, I’m not a good prospect, and I‘ll be the first to acknowledge that. There are lots of big, strong, heavy-handed people who can wrestle the beast into submission. But the reason I’m still alive and in with love this game is that I love being a feather who can fly the bird, untethered.
Wow, I’ve been up since 3 yesterday (Sat.), the track did not open for training, and now I’m up again at 5 this morning (Sun.) and it’s taken me this long to get to this entry. I definitely have too many things to do.
Now it’s Monday, at 4 a.m. ….
As an update to the Catty Shack horse (that the owner calls Hogan), What his present owner and I have found out is that McGreevy only had him for his first win. After that he injured himself in the trailer; he kicked or something and cracked a hind sesamoid bone. McGreevy sold him to Eli Betancourt, who I’m guessing gave him the needed recovery time before finishing out the horse’s career.
The woman sent me links to photos of him and he looks like a five-year-old. He’s a very beautiful horse and has kept his youthful figure, bound as it is to a well-put-together frame.
I saw Jerry Norwood a few days ago and knew he wasn’t kidding when he said that the horse was cut out to be a pretty nice horse. It was McGreevy’s loss that the horse suffered an injury. Jerry had expected Catty Shack would never race again after that.
He informed me of how to get hold of McGreevy and Betancourt, and so far, Catty’s owner has made an initial inquiry. We’re waiting to hear back.
On the home front, it looks like I’ll have to go to work today after all. The bad weather is not supposed to hit until later this morning. Come ON, bad weather! I may be broke but nobody likes to work outside when it’s only 20o all day long. Yesterday I had to change my clothes at break time because the windbreaker layer was wet with sweat and I was starting to get chilled.
In my opinion, you have to keep your eye on the weather and choose your gallop days in advance. While that’s just common sense, few trainers seem to be keen on planning more than a day ahead, at most. In this game where everything matters, you lose when you don’t pay attention. Granted, it’s difficult to plan during the winter around here. It’s bad enough that you never know if your race will go (which is a year-round problem); add to that the chance that once you’re slated to run your date might be cancelled on account of the weather, and the futility of worrying oneself about whether anything matters is enough reason to ignore the local Storm Tracker report.
The downside to all the missed days is the relative rambunctious-ness of the horses when they finally do get to exercise. I’m galloping three for an outfit at the top of the hill that a person my size and age has no business sitting on. They’re all bigger and taller than average and don’t get enough training to begin with; much less in the bad weather.
Yesterday two of them went out; the first one cooled out bad and the second one returned with a bloody mouth. In hindsight, I can count on myself to be more cautious about handling them. But to be realistic; to spoil the crap out of it, feed it buckets of grain that it’s dying to burn off in three or less miles a week and then throw a pint-sized rider on the 16+h. -sized animule is to invite trouble. Finally, commanding us to backtrack (jogging only- no running or galloping) is the icing on that cake.
So this is how things went for me Friday:
The first one, a strapping bay mare (1500 lb) wants to begin her gallop on the road before we reach the track, and my attempts to restrain her translate to priming the engine from sixty yards out. At least we were permitted to gallop yesterday, but with the caution that we hold her down till she passed the chute. What the trainer missed (as we disappeared behind the maintenance shack) was a duel for open space between myself and she.
She scrambled to break my “cross” which is a way of holding the reins so that they are crossed over each other where the rubber grips lie, creating a frictional lock that places pressure on the bit (the more they pull, the more they pull against themselves). I turned her toward the fence; she rears up in defiance of the barrier and leaped sideways; I loosed the reins, pulling the left in a line through my knee, forcing her to circle; She reacted with a sky-leap to the right to escape me, I fail to be loosed by her and circle her again to the left; she tries me one more time; I circle again, and she lets me have control until I straighten her and get her just past the chute. Then off she goes! The rest of the gallop is not so bad, after the initial .22 for the first Quarter.
The second one, another tall though not as sturdy-boned chestnut, was to backtrack (jog only – in the opposite direction of traffic, along the outer perimeter of the oval. The footing on the outside rail was littered with chunks of frozen track surface. Somehow I had to stay off of it, and still on her.
It’s common practice that when a horse is difficult to control when backtracking to cock their head toward the outside rail. At varying degrees, this blocks their relative opportunity to take off. You really have to be there to understand the difficulty in straightening the beast out in that situation, because as much as we would all like to permit them to travel in a straight line with their bodies properly aligned, all they care about is making tracks into the great wide open.
From there, it’s only a matter of who’s the strongest. Believe me if you saw a photo of teensy me on this Goliath, you wouldn’t need to worry about losing your last fifty if you bet it on the horse. So angling toward the only potential barrier this morning was essential for me.
I did a pretty good job; most fo the time I was able to stay reasonably off the fence and out where the surface was smoother, with the mare’s head still cocked in case she tried anything. Till we got to the 6-furlong chute, where my plans always threaten to unravel.
The six-furlong chute is where the starting gate generally sits, between 8 – 9:30 (7:30-9 in the summer months). This chute requires a break in that all-important rail (you know, the one I happened to be using to block attempts at flight.
It’s important to me to relax a moment when a horse picks up speed crossing that 70-100 yard expanse; avoiding resistance keeps the neck muscles supple. If I don’t do that, it’s harder to get their head cocked again, and in fact I find it easiest to sit down and loose the reins a bit while the horse guides itself. Can you tell this is the voice of Experience? I don’t know what anyone else does, but I can tell you that horses hit their teeth on the Clubhouse Turn (just after crossing the chute) more than anywhere else, so we must be doing something similar.
And that brings me back to the present, wherein I am pulling my charge back into a slow hobby-horse from an open gallop. I failed in my control to prevent her from contacting the fence with her cocked head. Often it’s the teeth, but more often the front gums or the upper lip that hits one of the support brackets and gets cut. Today was one of those days when I actually heard the little thwap and thought “that must be a lip; sounded like a lot of flesh in there.” Sure enough I could see that the front of her muzzle was bleeding as we came off the track and made our way back to the barn.
I don’t blame the trainer for being put out, but I reminded him that he has me way over- mounted. I’m 116, and she’s 1600 for crying out loud. When it’s between the safety of the horse and the safety of me, I can’t be counted on to save both of us every time. I mean this happens every time the horse goes out- not the bloody lip, but the wrestling match; it’s to my credit that we manage to avoid the same accident as often as we do.
I won’t defend myself any more on paper here than to say I will always do the best I can to keep us both safe. If I return with a C- or D+ for performance, just chalk it up to A+ effort and get someone who can do it better than me.
The jocks you see on TV in the breeders’ cup don’t have to put up with this kind of behavior, because nobody wants to be responsible for putting Edgar Prado in an embarrassing position, much less the hospital. Compared to the average rider, high-profile jockeys are spared these circumstances, and my point here is you won’t see this on TV.
To the non-horseman it may look as though I don’t know what I’m doing out there, so I’ll say it not for the first or last time in my life: I’m a feather trying to fly the bird! If the bird must be tethered, I’m not a good prospect, and I‘ll be the first to acknowledge that. There are lots of big, strong, heavy-handed people who can wrestle the beast into submission. But the reason I’m still alive and in with love this game is that I love being a feather who can fly the bird, untethered.
posted by hoofstep at
2:24 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home