The Racehorse Trainer Who’s Rewriting the Rules - Jessica Howell

I typically just kick the episodes off by having the guests tell us who they are and what it is they do. My name is Jessica Howell, I am a licensed thoroughbred trainer, but I come from a three day eventing and classical dressage background. It was eventing down in Aiken, SC, living and working at full Gallup Farm and galloping young horses and babies there at the training center to pay entry fees. My life got redirected by the infusion of speed and excitement that the racetrack offers. I jumped on the wagon and have been following the circuit in some way shape or form with the thoroughbreds for about 20 years now, so I’m a full.

Blown racetrack? That’s awesome. I moved to Aiken five years ago and got a job working at Full Gallup. We didn’t even know we had that in Gallup. That’s awesome.

So how did you get into the training of thoroughbreds on the truck side? Sure. So Laura, the owner of Full Gallop, is also a former race tracker. She galloped race horses at a few different tracks throughout that. Growing up I got a job really just thinking it was a way to fund my eventing career and got a job there with an outfit that travelled from Winters and Aiken, SC up to Arlington Park, the now defunct race track in Chicago.

They tried to get me to come with them to the track and I couldn’t. I was neck deep and eventing and getting on quite a few horses there for Laura and just really committed to the eventing side of things at that point. But then the next winter they came down. I went through the entire breaking and leg up season with them. Then that summer was all she wrote.

They took me to Chicago and just showed me the ropes at Arlington. I got my Gallup license and it just pretty much snowballed. I knew I wanted to be a trainer in those days and I was, like I said, focused on inventing the purity of the sport, if you will, and that literally the only goal is to go fast in racing. Was almost an allure to me, was a struggling inventor. I didn’t come from a whole lot of means and so I was just trying to find a way to make a living training horses race, to be very honest, and fell into it that way.

But the trainer that I worked for and his wife were excellent horsemen and showed me an open door that maybe a lot of people in other disciplines they’ll never get to see. The racing world is a closed fireman. I just found a little Segway there with that training center in Aiken, and yeah, just snowballed. I ended up on the circuit and following the circuit and making connections that eventually led me to the heartbeat of it all. I’m here currently in Lexington, KY, so I’m kind of what American racing would consider the pinnacle of the sport here in the blue blood of Kentucky.

That’s so awesome. So how did you find the transition from producing event horses to producing race horses? Like you said, I mean, my main gig at that point was with Laura Anderson there at full Gallup. And she had and still has a very active program transitioning race horses off the track. And so all of my adventures, save one, we’re all thoroughbreds.

And so honestly you just reverse the flow. I’d made the name for myself and a living up to that point, bringing them from the track into other disciplines. And so it was really natural to be honest, sitting on so many horses straight out of that environment, even though it’s a different world once you’re engaging with racing as or that, the transition was really pretty easy and that’s something that I draw from now. Coming from an event background, you have a little bit more of an eye for well-rounded conditioning, if you will. A really well-rounded sport asks a lot of the horses in different directions, the carriage of dressage to the full gallop of cross country and everything in between.

I think that is something, especially in the early stages, that I carried with me forward and trying to transition into a trainer of horses that have one goal but still, in my opinion, require a very well-rounded form of training and conditioning. A lot of the training methods for race horses are very singular minded and I don’t know that contributes, that doesn’t contribute to. So the injuries and issues that we see even behaviorally in resources. Even if you have one goal, the body is still very multifaceted and there are a lot of considerations to take into account. When you’re, you know, going to put your stamp of approval and say that this horse is fully prepared doesn’t just mean that they can go fast.

They have to be able to withstand the pressures of doing that both physically and mentally. And so I think that’s something the eventing world, my basis there. And then like I say, my key obsession with French classical dressage, which is just completely different sidestep from this conversation helped to fully prepare a horse as an athlete and also as an individual. And I feel like that’s perhaps something that is lacking in a lot of the conditioning programs for race horses today. They only ever see essentially one thing and have one goal when they head out, and they do it pretty much every day.

And so that’s something I try to do, is balance their training with input from exercise science and a lot of the conditioning methods that would be used for inventors and dressage horses alike. Interesting. And So what would a sort of normal racehorse program look and how does that differ from maybe what you do? Yeah. So your standard, obviously the horses get an extraordinary amount of individual attention in their management, but their training programs are pretty standard.

They typically gallop anywhere from a mile to a mile and 1/2 every day at a speed that would be considered an upper level gallop for an event horse. About 30 miles an hour would be your give or take for your daily gallops, and they will typically do that four to five days per week, with one day per week being reserved for what would be considered a workout, a breeze day. On that breeze day, they’re going to work anywhere from a half a mile to 5/8 of a mile usually, sometimes as much as 3/4, but that’s not very typical. Sometimes as little as 3/8 of a mile. Usually it’s a half a mile or a 5/8 and they’re going to be accelerating to 38 to 40 mph during that work.

So racing speeds are given in terms of seconds per furlong, but I know that doesn’t really translate. Smile do them. Mph for the general populace here, but they gallop four or five days a week and usually breathe one day per week, with one day all for hand walking, usually in the barn the day after they breathe. A lot of trainers will jog them on the day that they come back from work, but it’s a pretty standard rhythm of one major workout per week. 4 to 5 days of still pretty upper echelon work but not as intense as like the racing speeds or racing gal would be.

Interesting. And so the inventor, yeah, that’s different. Like how I train my horses like I say, I mean, I still have a pretty strong interest in exercise science. I like to operate on what would be considered a periodized training program where not only does each week have a rhythm that you build in intensity and focus either aerobic or anaerobic focus for the training that day, but also balance and flexibility and sometimes purely mental health days. Horses can have days where you show up to do one thing and they’re just not here for it that event.

So I like to arrange to keep a bit of flexibility in the program. And then obviously you’re program will be not just building throughout the week, but building on what is considered a mesocycle where you’re, you’re building towards a weekly goal, a monthly goal and then also a yearly goal. And inside of that, it’s pretty, it sounds pretty involved, but it’s really quite simple. It’s just a series of waves weekly, a series of waves monthly, and then building to a crescendo throughout the year for whatever your big goal is. It would be your Rolex of the year, your your year end championships or whatnot when you’re speaking in event terms.

Interesting. And so when I decided to reach out to you, the first thing on your little Facebook bio is that you’re an ethical trainer of thoroughbreds. What does that mean to you? I think if you could go encompassing with the concept of ethics is that you aren’t asking anything of the horse that is innately going to tear him down. I know racing is a very high impact sport and so that sometimes seems counterintuitive coming from someone who aims for such a high impact endeavour with a horse.

But like I say, exercise science is a big part of what I try to glean from and developing the training programs for my horses. I like to respect the horse as an individual. You have to read the room when you’re involved, understand stress signals and understand bodily compensation. There are things that go into determining whether a horse is progressing in their program that you can’t quantify. There’s horsemanship.

They’re involved, but by and large for me, ethics involves keeping the health and welfare of the horse as the central focus at all costs. And sometimes that means a slower aggressing formula for horses and at Racing is a high speed endeavour and its goal, but it’s also a high progression level horses. They’re broke and breezing inside of 90 days as a standard. They just progressed very quickly because it’s viewed as a shooting star career. It’s not something that even truly is often approached with longevity as a concept and that’s something that I really seek to mind frame that I I seek to shift.

Honestly. My husband is from Newmarket England, so I have a unique perspective on European racing. We spent a fair bit of time over there and I’ve gotten to exercise ride for William Haggis is a big name over there and he just the methodology that they use in Europe is inspiring to me. I was an assistant to Jonathan Shepherd here, who is a well known year. He’s English himself but or was English himself but he produces stable chasers and he’s a Hall of Fame trainer in the US.

But he uses a lot of more horse centric mentality and methodology. So the idea is filled without breaking. That is overarching theme. I think when you ask about ethics is that at no point am I willing to sacrifice the greater good for the shorter goal. Yeah, it’s interesting because I know recently I was having some conversations with some clients about the difference in horse racing overseas and US.

And I know one of the points that was brought up was that over in Europe the horses seem to just have much longer careers where in the US sometimes they’re retired at three years old, which sometimes it’s for breeding or whatever. But I know one of the thoughts is that we’re breeding a lot of horses in the US to these young stallions that aren’t necessarily proven for a longer careers. Why do you think that is in terms of like the difference in longevity and retiring early for breeding? There’s obviously that’s going to be a really multi faceted answer, especially when you try to compare and contrast America with Europe. But specifically, even just speaking about American racing, you have two very distinct sectors of the racing industry, if you will.

In America you have racing and you have sales, and so the sales and breeding side of things and in my experience and in my opinion, any more of those two distinctly separate factors, they struggle to support and uplift each other, if you will. With the sales being such a big money game, it’s difficult to convince players in the racing side of things who depend on the sales for their next round of horses to keep horses training longer when there’s next year’s crop ready and waiting in the wings. And very much the American racing industry is set up to depend on flow in and flow out of horses. You can go all the way back to how our condition books are written. And your condition book is basically like your omnibus.

It’s a list of races at any given meet and those races are even written to encourage that. Aren’t races written for specifically older horses, for example? Whereas in Europe there are and we have a system of claiming races where we have conditions basically that are have to be met for a horse to be eligible for any particular race inside of any particular level of claiming ranks to protect if you will, the interest of horses who have won more than three races. So you have but entry level race for maidens who have never won a race and then you have caliber races for horses who have never won one other than a maiden race, two or three races. But beyond that, there is just no incentive for your working class forces to continue in the game.

There are a few tweaks to the system that would go a long way in encouraging or providing a platform for horses to have extended careers, namely writing races for them that specifically include four and up or five and up as as a written condition of entry. And that that would be a heck of a starting point. Like I said right now they’re almost it’s almost written in such a way so as to encourage that 123 and you’re done of goal posts for horses entered in races here. It’s interesting like the structure of races in Europe are also very different. They don’t have claiming races and for me that’s a sore spot in racing is in that I struggle to risk my horses.

This is my horse just like your horse is your horse. This race horse is my horse. Imagine if the talent level or the level of training at which you were currently operating necessarily require that your horse be available for sale when you go to compete. It’s a really difficult thing to coincide with for me because my my mentality is a lot different. This is my horse, like literally.

And he is not pale. And even if he can’t win in the Super deep water, if he’s not a Rolex horse in Kentucky, he’s for sale. Yeah, that’s how that works. And so it’s been a difficult thing for me to wrap my head around and rationalize. You can ship out to other venues out of state in Kentucky’s where I live.

So that’s been a bit of a limiting factor and something that I’ve had to come to terms with. And still, to be very honest, coming to terms with in terms of how do you progress when you know you don’t have every horse in the barn’s not a Rolex, but every horse in the barn’s not going to Rolex. But that doesn’t mean that they’re for sale. Listen. And it’s a toughie.

And there’s a lot of owners who also feel the way that I do and that we’re not trying to spend the kids college fun to play, but we don’t want to risk our horse at the same time. I remember like several years ago, I was based at a barn and a woman got a horse for the Mustang makeover. And it’s not exactly the same thing, but you basically spend X amount of time training this horse and then you go and showcase what they’ve learned and then there’s like an auction. And then it’s time to come. And so unless you have the money to pay for this horse that you’ve basically been paying for, you just lose the horse.

And I remember she did it a couple of times and it just emotionally for her really tough. But yeah, so it’s interesting to hear that side of racing because I don’t know that people know. No, it’s a toughie. My first winner as a trainer, that was my first winner under my license. He broke his maiden as a claimer at Arlington Park and I was just so tear, even though I really didn’t have, I thought I didn’t have a reason to fear.

I stepped him up in class, perhaps a bit above his talent level just to keep him safe from that. And I owned him in partnership and we ultimately decided to basically what we try to run him where he belongs, run him. Also the point if you’re constantly sending a horse out to a level of competition position that it’s beyond their talent level. You hurt their feelings, break their hearts that way. You want to send your horse out where you’re not asking so much of them that you’ve hurt their body or soul.

Ultimately my first winter was claimed away and I followed him to a very sad end. I contacted every trainer that claimed him after that and said if he ever needs a spot, but I wasn’t in a financial, but I wasn’t in a position financially to claim him back as like I said, I owned him in partnership with his owner breed with his breeders. But I followed him until the very, very bitter end. And that has been something that stuck with me. And so the couple of horses that I’ve got right now, nobody’s actually actively racing, but that’s another part of this conversation right now.

But I haven’t risked them in any sort of claiming races and have really struggled to balance the concept of running them where they can win. And also keeping them safe from harm, not that claiming is always a harmful concept, but also it’s out of your hands at that point. So it it becomes just a balance of I put in a whole lot of effort and my horses expect a whole lot of care and generation. That may be your run-of-the-mill course in a standard program. Doesn’t get it.

Just freaks me out to think of losing losing my horse when he’s absolutely not for sale. Yeah, I know. I struggle with the same sort of thing in terms of sometimes I’ll buy a horse as a resale project failure and they just do not. They never leave my barn because they were. Either.

And it’s so hard to write. My fiance’s not horsey. And so when I’m spending a lot of money every month, because I every month, my horses, you just don’t get it. Like this horse is a little quirky and I don’t know that the next home is going to accept this. And I’ve worked really hard to get it manageable and so much beyond the time in the saddle, so much on the ground and emotionally like just goes into the just making them rideable, making them who we like to work with and we’re.

Making them comfortable with what we’re asking them to do. Like a horses are naturally pretty complacent creatures. But I totally get it man. Like the wanting it to be thoroughly produced and something you can put your name on and something that you feel right about and good about and safe about. And it it takes the time that it takes, especially when you start talking about a drop in class like that sells derogatory.

It isn’t necessarily. It just means, for example, if your horse can’t compete at Prelam, let’s find them a a nice training level to get confidence built. Drop in class isn’t necessarily derogatory, but as the hands change and as the levels drop, so too can the level of care. This occult. Especially when a horse gets taken out of state, it’s difficult to be able to follow that first hand if you don’t have connections at the new ratio.

It’s a difficult spot, no doubt. So Speaking of finding where a horse fits and all of that, how do you know, like maybe in terms of feeling when a horse is good at where they’re at, ready to move up, needing to drop down, like that sort of thing? Yeah. My obviously there’s an intangible concept that goes into that, the feel idea. The basics of that answer in that department would be how is the horse handling their workload but a unique slant that I take on.

Developing a horse relates to that. I train all of my guys in a heart rate monitor, an equine heart rate monitor that I have found to be an indispensable addition, not replacement, for the horsemanship that it takes to guide a horse through the levels of prepping for racing. But it’s interesting. I’ve spoken to a few other people that are nerdy in that department, and you can almost to a degree quantify a horse’s talent level with their heart rate at a given velocity. So you have a horse’s Max heart rate range and each horse has their own.

And interestingly, with horses that typically doesn’t change with fitness, whereas people’s Max heart rate can change with fitness. Horses typically have their biologic Max pretty set for that individual anyway. When you get a horse up to the level of being fit enough to maintain about an 85% Max heart rate, basically when you can look at the speed at which they hit that percentage of their Max, it goes a long way. Interestingly, and quantifying the talent level of that individual. Like simpler way to say it is how much of what you’ve got does it take to go this particular speed?

And then when you got a horse at the 200 beats per minute range and they’re clocking at a particular speed or other, it tells you without taking them to full Max, which is risky, especially in the earlier stages of training. It can help you gear yourself for the the talent level of that individual. And then also you look at some things like locomotor profiles, that is basically their stride rate as compared to their speed. If this horse takes a lot of strides to go a particular speed, you’re, you’re more than likely looking at a horse that might favour a Sprint type, whereas the horse with a longer stride, it’s going to obviously spend less energy to go further and might look more towards A2 turn type horse. Like the sciency stuff comes in really specifically and in that department, that’s probably the first usage of the heart rate data in that department is to help you really quantify in addition to how they feel because you’ve got horses that will throw you a complete curveball.

I know I look back on a few horses that I’ve ridden in the past and you would have absolutely called them a sprinter or a stayer and they were the complete opposite. So there’s no set in stone the horse is going to decide, but their focus, agility, their ability to stay on task. I know that seems like not a horse related concept, but it very much is. A horse, a staying type, has to not only have an efficient movement pattern, but also has to have an efficient mind. If it’s a horse that can’t relax or won’t relax or is super competitive, engaging the horses around them, then they’re going to waste energy.

Even considering those factors. That is going to be a necessary component of being able to stay around of ground. And then likewise the sprinters, If you’ve got a horse who cannot accelerate, even if they’re fast at Max speed, you’ve got to be able to engage with a race that’s playing out quickly in real time. It’s there’s a lot of factors that go into it, but I really enjoy the science aspect of adding the heart rate data and the locomotion data to the picture when you’re trying to quantify what kind of horse you’re sitting on. Interesting.

And so when you’re like looking at horses to buy, what are you looking for in terms of like body type, maybe their demeanor like? Interestingly enough, me too, my eye, just because of my inventor background, is a lot of times drawn to horses that are really slow because they’re built to move pretty and not go fast. I still definitely have that bone and I find it interestingly, maybe the first thing I look at is it obviously confirmation catches your eye. And I also noticed when I was going over some of the episodes you’ve done in the past, you’ve had Carrie Thomas on here talk before. And I’m a huge fan of his work and follower of his ideals.

And so honestly, the first things that I’m going to notice about a horse aren’t necessarily something that you could draw on the paper or replicate. It’s a lot about how they engage with their environment, how they respond to stressors. If you’re buying a horse that’s already running versus a horse that’s never fun, that’s two different things. Watch them in their past performance is, but a lot of it is intention and will to perform as much or if not sometimes more than the actual confirmation. Like when you get a real good horse, you’ve got both, you’re going to have the operating system and the chassis to do the job, but so many resources overcome so many physical barriers in their confirmation or their structures with the sheer and intention.

Carrie tells it. Carrie calls it the language of intent, like a horse who can maintain his focus on what he intends to do without, I mean, distracted or negatively impacted by his surroundings. And there’s a lot of surroundings and race, you know, honestly, that’s the first thing I look at. And then I get real dirty. When you’re looking at confirmation, too, it isn’t.

I mean, you have textbook confirmation, but so few race horses have that, that it’s almost something you can throw out If you look at horses from a bio mechanics perspective, right? They’re they’re really a system of levers and pulleys. And of course there’s more that goes into the actual training. But when you look at the proportions of your long bones and the balance of the body, there are a few different characteristics that just by a large lend themselves to a a particular type of horse. IEA sprinter is going to have a shorter neck with a longer body.

The neck is what governs the stride rate. So that’s how a horse initiates a stride in the gout, but actually begins with the neck. And so when you have a shorter neck naturally and necessarily that stride initiation is going to be a shorter wave, like just things that lend a horse to power over the ground as opposed to speed over the ground. Like a horse who interacts with the ground in a forceful way is going to be able to produce acceleration and speed more easily than a horse who lifts himself over the ground and has a longer neck to produce a longer initiation way for that stride. For those that are going to be the horses who don’t interact with the surface, your turf horses are a good example of that.

They’re light over the ground. They don’t dig into and go through the surface the way, you know a dirt horse would. So it comes down to intention first, but then when that intention begins to be directed via confirmation, there are some really just scientific and almost physics based structural components to each type of horse. And then there’s horses that completely prove it all wrong. You can go down a list of the top printers and whatever, maybe 2 out of three look like sprinters and one of them is a complete not.

But again, that comes down to your intention and your focus. Agility your focus factor of the individual because they are individuals. So it’s interesting, I don’t even know how many people know that there’s like different types of racing. Like I think they know that they’re steeplechase, but then I think they just think there’s track and track. So when I hear you talk about a horse that’s maybe lighter in the way it’s interacting with the ground versus a horse that kind of digs in, are there different soundness concerns with each of those?

Because I know as an inventor, like I like my horses really light on the ground and but they still need to have the power to gallop. So what? And I don’t know if you specialize or have less experience with one over the other, but maybe just from your point of view of the lightness versus the digging types. Yeah. With regards to soundness, I have a kind of a stick on where like the origin of soundness issues.

You’ve got 2 forces and my understanding that act on a horse to create movement and soundness. You’ve got the force of compression, which is the literal stacking of bones on bones and pushing into the ground to create the traction necessary to propel. And then you’ve got sheer forces, which are your side to side camber and also the front to back balance related issues. And so when you’ve got a sprinter, all right, so let’s take the typical confirmation of a sprinter. This is what you think of as your almost your quarter horse because they are stylized sprinters, your quarter horse type confirmation.

So you’ve got a horse with a typically a croup high confirmation who’s a little bit downhill. The reason that translates into speed is because it concentrates compression on the front end, which is the propulsion. You think about your hind quarters propel, and the idea of a sprinter is to get over the four legs as quickly as you can and propel again. The idea is to continuously produce very powerful strides as quickly as you can. And so that confirmation, that front end down croup, high confirmation.

Look in the animal Kingdom and you can see it very well developed in a cheetah. A cheetah has a short neck, a long body. They’re also typically built fairly downhill. They have exceedingly long from stifle to hawk with a very low set Hawks. All of these things have been specialized in nature to create the fastest animal on land, but they’re not fast for very long.

Like their entire MO relies upon an ambush and a Sprint that gets the job done. And in a force with that type of confirmation, you do find yourself more prone to bone related unsoundness issues, IE chips and fractures often in the front legs because that’s where all of that is hinged and focused is basically of wheelbarrow style of mode that basically skips over the front legs and the point is to get back to the high legs to push again as quickly as possible. In your staying types you run into sometimes issues with more exhaustion or fatigue related injuries which a lot of times show up in your soft tissue as your muscle fuel becomes depleted. And two turns is a long time to create, even if it’s not 42 miles an hour like a sprinter, it’s a long time to create maximum effort. And if your conditioning programs are not sufficient to cultivate your mitochondrial density and the ability to produce Max effort for that sustained a period of time, you end up with, like I say, fatigue related injuries.

And so like the Physiology of a bow tendon for example, it’s not necessarily originating with the tendon problem, it’s actually a muscle fuel problem. When your muscles are no longer, when they’ve run out of fuel, you’ve exhausted the muscles, they’re not holding themselves anymore and they’re relaxed and then they transfer what used to be a muscular engagement task to attendant or ligament extension is the extensibility of the muscles. So when the muscles are fatigue, but they let go and then the brunt of carrying and propelling the horses done by tendons and litmus. And so that’s where you run into some of your soft tissue issues fatigue related. Those are conditioning injuries and not they’re not necessarily impact related injuries like a lot of times you’re going to see in the sprinters.

But the silver lining for both of these is a conditioning program that takes enough time to condition and prepare these structures and the horses way of going to be able to combat those forces. Because it I, if I didn’t believe this, I wouldn’t be doing it. I firmly believe that you can appropriately and fully prepare a horse to race safely. It’s actually pretty easy, but it takes a long time because what you’re asking for from them is every. So you’ve got sport that necessarily every time you compete, you’re asking for everything.

It’s written into the bylaws of racing. You’ll get fined if the jockey is not asking the horse for everything at the wire in inventing, like you’re going out for an educational round or you’re going to go out and work on one facet of your training. This time you’re going to ask them to be more balanced to the ditch. This time you’re going to ask for that coughing cancer to improve or you’re going to ask for it. Or this time you’re going to go for broke on your leg yield.

Or this time you’re going to leave. Like in the show world, you have the opportunity to compete without necessarily asking for everything. And racing our training programs, and my training program is so much more encompassing is because you don’t get to go do practice rounds, you don’t get to have sling rounds. There are no schooling shows. Like you’re always at Rolex.

You know, I find it so much more imperative to be well balanced and to be more thoughtful in the development stages at home. But you’ve got to get to racing level training before I can feel safe to go to racing level competition takes me a little longer, but it’s because I feel like I got an extra step or two beyond what’s going to be asked in order to be sure that I’m crossing my TS and dotting my eyes with regards to safety and preparation. Interesting. And so like, how long from Ground Zero to first race does it take you? How long is a piece of string?

I know that you probably expected that answer. If you want a huge, loosely defined ballpark, a horse. OK so I’ve got a Philly that I just got in a month ago. She is unbroke, literally unstarted. She’s two years old so she’s coming 3 as of next racing season.

I’m breaking her now and I would expect with no hiccups and that never happens, but with no hiccups she will be ready to race in six to eight months. That is a purely fitness based projection and that’s why I say that never happens. Fitness is never the only thing steering the boat. As an individual. She may physically be handling the work but not mentally and that’s a whole nother consideration.

It’s a heart rate guided. Again, this is another place where the heart rate monitor comes in and helps me understand how the actual physical side of things are progressing. I will start my horses like a classical dressage horse. They’re going to learn about balance and straightness. They’re going to learn about what the bit means and how it works.

They’re going to learn about leg aids and leg yields. And I start with a really classical equitation foundation that takes as long as that takes. Then we progress into basically a long, slow distance phase that serves multiple purposes, cardiovascular fitness and bone regeneration or bone conditioning as a foundational part of that. I like to build my horses to a A at first a Cantor base, but a slow Gallup base of three to four miles before they even start thinking about going faster for a shorter period. And that’s just unheard of in the racing industry.

Nobody does that. But for me, it’s a way to teach relaxation to be sure that I have put enough low impact mileage. I’m talking really slow Cantor. And this is like novice two 2250 meters a minute. So slow Cantor work because then you have a horse who can carry them self around.

And part of the the shortfall I feel in racing is that you’ve got horses who can throw themselves, they can fly like a bullet, but they can’t carry themselves, especially at speed. And so when you’ve got, you’ve got a horse who can’t physically hold itself up off the ground and self carriage, but they can go fast, then you’ve got, like we said, those hard tissue, the bones and the soft tissue structures filling in that gap. And so I really focused on the in the early phases on self carriage, straightness and balance. Those are your first primary considerations and then everything moves forward based on the individual and based on heart rate response. After that you build to a long slow distance base and then you start.

As you add speed, you take away distance and basically counter counter. As you develop speed, you take away distance and you razor sharp point to whatever racing distance you’re actually aiming for. And that, again, is a very individual thing. Trusting and OK, so that’s the build up to racing. Do you have a recovery protocol for the race horses?

So you mean like after an actual workout or race? Or after their career is over, maybe. Both what does after a workout? Or. Race look like and then.

Post career recovery is hugely important and you can do more in terms of recovery, a designed recovery exercise program. Then you can just give them a day off. I’m a runner myself. You can get stiff even when you’re well conditioned because creating that amount of force and effort, it can tear muscle fibers and it’s a lot of work. My horses days off are usually actually dressage days, like it’s a low impact but still productive and progressive.

That it’s very individual though, because if even if your horse’s body could use it, if their mind could use a day out in the field and that’s what they get big old turn out. That’s not something that’s very common concept in the racing world. But gosh, wouldn’t that go a long way and in alleviating a lot of the mental and physical struggles, just the ability to move freely without, without someone on your face. Yeah. Low impact, long, long distance.

I like 5 miles a day of walking. That’s an hour, a little over an hour of, of hiking is a magical exercise for so many different reasons, mentally and physically. And then when you get into terms of after a horse’s racing career, my horses are probably, they’re definitely, they’re really easy to restart because there’s no restarting to quit all that speed work and keep doing all this other fun stuff. And this is our life now. But for anybody who’s taking a horse off the track, I couldn’t recommend to you enough to delve into dressage as your first starting point.

And if I could be even more specific into the French classical side of things, because when you’ve got horses who as their job have been taught to drop down between their shoulder blades and grab the ground, all costs that go fast, they abandoned themselves to it. And they’re good at it and it’s easy for them. But it’s the literal opposite of self carriage. You know what racing is at its pinnacle is the absolute opposite of self carriage and collection like they are polar ends, a spectrum do the opposite. They drop between it to get to the ground.

So as a decompression and a deprogramming if you will from racing as the goal, a focus on its polar opposite. And I do that in my resources because it helps to counterbalance the physical strain of that as their jobs and create just a more well-rounded athlete. But when you take a horse off the track, I really don’t think there is anything that could be any more indispensable in their transition than. Slow walk work, the opposite of what they do, literally the polar opposite of what they do. That will change their game, it will change their mind, it will change their body and just allows them to reprogram and refocus.

All of what they’ve been taught, which is not wrong for what they’ve been doing per SE it’s not an easy thing sometimes to surmount because it is such a of horses that I refer to them as the apex prey animal if there’s apex predators. These are your apex prey animals, like they’re they’d be the hardest prey on the planet to hunt because they’re just blindingly fast and fast twitch. And once you’ve programmed them to use their innate gifts, not an easy ask to ask them to unprogram from that. And so I feel like how better to do that than focusing on the polar opposite of what they’ve been taught. And that’s going to agitate a lot of horses, no doubt.

But the bar can be so low, literally so low, starting over with and then some horses jump right in. Like I said, mine all of my to go out and do a second level dressage test in the middle of their racing career. But by and large, that’s not that’s not typical. Starting over from that point on programming by reprogramming a whole new set of parameters with a very low bar, just like a freshly broke horse. What will go along?

Interesting. So we’ve talked a lot about what you’ve brought from other sports into racing. If you had to tell event riders or maybe even dressage or show jump riders something that you think they could learn from racing, what would that thing be? What hit me when I first came into this world was forward. I know that that’s such a, it’s a real low step on the training scale, but forward solves a lot of problems and it it really actually does.

And so you hear me talk about French classical and reprogramming and then by slowing down, but redeveloping in your horse the joy of going forward, inclination to go forward, however you do that, whatever your horse naturally inclines to doing, retraining horses that have problem issues or whatever. And we’ve taken a lot of quirky animals and just put the joy back in it, finding whatever naturally sends them forward. And I think from that place is where you can begin a conversation if you will. Like I had my first real eventer, my dressage warm up. I remember we had tried this and tried that and he was an old campaigner.

He’d come through. I think he’d got done a couple of intermediates before I got in. Like my actual dressage warm up was a gallop because he knew all this stuff. And we do all these things and sometimes horses can just get overloaded over him just like people can. But go out and establish forward first, go get forward on the mind, and then the rest of everything becomes so much easy.

And like, obviously we do a lot of forward in the racing industry. Horses like that too. Horses when it’s not so nitpick and whatever made to be such a task and a chore with every detail managed, I feel like that is a wonderful starting point for horses of all discipline, even Western pleasure. You guys can go forward too. Especially that.

Yes, especially now. This has been such a refreshing conversation. I think the race world needs more people like you thinking about the way they’re producing horses and maybe even just more sports in general. So I thank you for joining me. How do people find you?

Follow along with what you’re doing, All of that good stuff. I have a business page. I’m not posting there a lot right now, but I’m trying to get back to that. It’s called the Zen Racehorse on Facebook and I’m actually in the middle of kind of literally putting together a grassroots group of people that are interested in this methodology and mindset towards racing. It’s a big goal of mine to build a bridge for people from the other disciplines to get involved because racing, like I said at the beginning of this chat, it’s a closed off industry, not something that anybody really even knows how to get into.

If you don’t know somebody that I kind of want to change that because I feel like there’s a lot of good that could be brought in by intermingling and mixing folks from other disciplines. There’s people who want to be involved but don’t know how. So anyway, start on the Zen Racehorse. That’s my page and feel free. Obviously you can reach out to me through there.

And like I said, I’ll be including updates on the project that I’m working on to build the bridge from there. And as that progresses, folks can reach out through me to me through there. Awesome. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me.

Lovely, thanks.